In recent weeks, Reform leader Nigel Farage has learned for sure what he must have already assumed: that nothing he says about the treatment of refugees, however far beyond the bounds of acceptability it may go, will get challenged by Keir Starmer.
For Farage has now said out loud what it’s long been obvious he believes: that we should have no qualms about sending desperate people back to their home countries after they have come to us for protection, and that whatever fate awaits them there is not our concern. Since that fate will often be state execution, let there be no doubt what he means. He means ‘let them die’.
Failing to confront evil
What Farage is saying is evil. And yet the Prime Minister of the UK cannot find the courage to tell him so; or more importantly to tell the British people so.
It’s worth contrasting Starmer’s silence on that topic with his furious (and justified) reaction to Farage’s recent appearance before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, where he appeared to be urging Washington to impose sanctions on the UK. “You cannot get more unpatriotic than that”, Starmer told Parliament.
So the problem is not that Starmer is unwilling to criticise Farage under any circumstances. Starmer and his team like a game of patriotism oneupmanship as much as anyone, and Farage’s behaviour in Washington was an open goal for them.
The problem is that he’s unwilling to challenge Farage – even at his most disgusting and inhumane – on what the latter says about refugees, because he fears that, on that issue, it’s Farage who is seen as the patriot by those voters that Labour most covet.
When Farage demonises refugees, tells voters it’s fine to send them to their deaths, and gives celebrity treatment to a woman who called for them to be murdered, he wraps it all up in a figurative Union Jack. And when Starmer fails to utter a word of criticism, he tacitly endorses that. The utterly perverted message emerges from both Reform and the Labour Party that displays of humanity are somehow incompatible with British values and interests.
An alternative message
The tragedy is that there is another message Starmer could be sending – one which combines a message of compassion with an appeal to people’s national pride – if he only had the courage to do so. If he wants inspiration, he could try listening to the words earlier this month of Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney: “I’m ringing the alarm bell for our values; for our common humanity; for our commitment to the oppressed and those seeking sanctuary… refugees are welcome here in Scotland”.
Swinney is not alone. You can hear similar sentiments from the Greens, from Plaid Cymru, from the Liberal Democrats, and from independent-minded Labour MPs. But what a bitter irony it is that a man who can only speak for Scotland is in practice speaking so eloquently for so many across the UK, and yet in the current climate there is not the remotest chance of hearing similar words from a British prime minister.
“Don’t talk about morality”
There were strong hints of this uneasy relationship with morality from Starmer’s team when they were in opposition. In 2023, Wes Streeting – then Shadow Health Secretary – told the News Agents podcast: “We’ve recognised finally that if elections were simply won by making moral arguments and showing our hearts in the right place, Labour would have been in government since 1945”.
Another way of saying this is ‘we shouldn’t talk about morality’. And if that’s a message that’s been absorbed by the Labour leadership, it’s no wonder we are in such a dark place. If you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear a Labour minister use the word “unethical”. But it’s usually buried amid a string of other adjectives, leaving you with the sense that their main objection to evil deeds isn’t their immorality but their inefficiency. If slavery were invented today, would they call it ‘impractical’? If torture were invented today, would they call it ‘ineffective’? If child labour were invented today, would they call it ‘poor value for money’?
In fairness, there are a number of Labour MPs and members who refuse to walk this path. Ben Goldsborough, MP for South Norfolk, recently wrote a fine article which condemned Farage in the strongest terms and didn’t shy away from questions of right and wrong.
Not long ago Ben Goldsborough’s message would have been standard fare for any mainstream politician of any political hue. Yet it stands out for how at odds it is with the tone set by his party leadership. I keep returning in my mind to Wes Streeting’s injunction to stop talking about morality. The trouble is, if you stop speaking about morality, or hearing about morality, it may not be long before you stop understanding what morality is. You risk becoming the sort of people whom the Farages of this world, with their talk of “remoralising” the young, surely see as the templates for the politicians and electorate of the future.
Mainstreaming the unthinkable
There is a heavy price to pay when political leaders adopt the language of the far right, or stay silent when they should be condemning it. Ideas once considered beyond the pale are aired, then repeated, then amplified through discussion on talk shows and news programmes. The illegitimate becomes legitimate, and this is presented as a good thing. On her first day in the job, we were told that the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, intended to “start with the unthinkable and work backwards”.
The unthinkable, of course, is already being mainstreamed. In a recent interview which demands to be widely read, Professor Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at Glasgow University, told Neil Mackay of The Herald that British political rhetoric is taking the UK into “the foothills of genocide”– by which she means that we are already seeing some of the steps you would expect to see in a society heading in that direction, as defined by the NGO Genocide Watch.
The events of the last few weeks are the inevitable product of a political culture in which it’s no longer seen as legitimate to speak about matters of right and wrong; in which you will be dismissed as a hypocrite if you try to do so; in which religious and community leaders whose very job is to speak about virtue can be dismissed without a trace of irony as “virtue-signallers”.
Fanning the flames
What do we have filling the space vacated by morality and humanity? The baying for blood of much of the broadcast and print media. Vicious dog-whistling by elected politicians. Incitement to murder dismissed as harmless intemperance. Flags used as instruments of xenophobia and intimidation, while ministers titter about how many they like to fly in their own homes. Former foreign secretaries from ‘normal’ times such as Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw, solemnly opining that we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights, as if reaching that conclusion were the result of their maverick thinking rather than their sniffing of the foul, polluted wind.
It may be the Tory governments of recent memory who set us so firmly on this path to losing our humanity. But it’s Starmer’s government which, given the opportunity to take a different route, has now elected to shove us on down that path by fanning the flames of the fire lit by Farage. We are all – Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland – better than this. And if Starmer is unable or unwilling to stand up to the voices of hate, then the Labour Party needs for all our sakes to find somebody who is. Quickly.
More on politics.
