Who is Keir Starmer? I’m not sure even he knows.

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Gabriel Levine, Political Commentator

How appreciative we must be that Starmer has woken up to a sobering reality that most of us have known for too long. How grateful we are that the social anxieties so many have will now be digested by a multi-year tussle between Reform and Labour for the keys to Downing Street.


His policy announcement was needed and should have come earlier. It should have come as soon as he got into office. Ironically, while he was making the speech, more than 400 young men crossed the English Channel on small boats, with one of them drowning, and many were injured in one case.

The issue is that Starmer has actively advocated for both the ‘citizens of nowhere’ (the refugees, the ‘war fleeing women and children’) and yet is reconciled, perhaps, that this country is fast becoming an island of strangers, tainted by the ‘Yookay’ aesthetic; a fraying social contract. Under his own housing policy, we will soon have a country – if the targets are met – where 5/7 new homes will go to immigrants. Fact. What is his policy? What is his mind on this? If only we knew. He talks, perhaps, rightly about different emergencies. The climate emergency. The housing emergency is a state of our health emergency. Will he concede that we are in a demographic emergency too, where fertility rates continue to decline?

The word choice was reassuring to those who have wanted – needed – Labour to do more, to go ‘further and faster’. Starmer is to be commended for acting, in some small ways, on this. Through his commitment to integration through a required fluency in English, tightening rules on visas etc, maybe some are awake to the issues at hand. But now, we desperately need solutions and not semantics of a well-versed McSweeney-drafted policy statement.

Starmer said, not too long ago, the damage caused by (illegal) immigration was ‘incalculable’. I want to add another: irrevocable. Our political class is now on the cusp of understanding that this goes deeper than the small boats and those who have the misfortune of landing next to our pearly white Cliffs of Dover. It is about those who are already here, those we don’t know about, and those we never will. The anger that people feel for the state of the country, for a feeling that their towns and cities have changed in front of them – is real and is constantly made to feel invalid by the indistinguishable legacy parties. With regards to the national mood on this, I feel we are crossing the Rubicon at long last.

Check out Gabriel's Linkedin 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriel-levine-398a9619a/


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