By Eamon Dyas
In the aftermath of the killing of three children in Southport on 29 July the liberal media has been working overtime to ensure that the narrative around the resulting rioting is understood in terms that do not go beyond the involvement of “extreme right-wing elements”. The left has been more than willing to go along with this simplistic narrative with the caveat that the reason why many are hostile to immigration is that the right-wing media has been pumping out anti-immigrant sentiment over many years. This has had the effect of stirring up resentment against immigrants among those who have had to endure years of privation and difficulty as a result of austerity. The purpose behind all of this is to divert the anger of those impacted by years of austerity from the real cause of their predicament, which is capitalism.
While this may be an attractive explanation it is based on two premises: firstly, that there is no level of immigration that can impact or threaten the culture or mode of existence of the host community; and, following on from that, there is no basis for the fears among swathes of the electorate that immigration on the level experienced since the start of the century is posing such a threat. In other words, those who profess any kind of opposition to the recent levels of immigration are either dupes or deplorables. There is also the third consideration which is off limits when it comes to the liberal/left perspective. That is the role of the liberal/left media in the creation and sustaining of what has become the cultural shibboleths of globalism – the idea of diversity and multiculturalism.
But to start with the riots and whether they can be fully understood as mere expressions of extreme right wing and racist thuggery. There were undoubtedly leading elements behind the rioting who professed a racist ideology and there were also those that possessed the mindset of the football hooligan with nothing better to do in the off-season that to indulge in a bit of rioting. Nonetheless, what was notable in the reporting was the absence of any acknowledgement that what was taking place was the albeit violent expression of a perception among a significant section of British society that viewed the current levels of immigration as excessive and out of control. It is not good enough to describe such people as incorrigible racists and dismiss their expressions of resentment as expressions of fascism. Unfortunately, such means of dismissing both the issue and the people involved have become all too common not only in Britain but in the liberal world generally (we see that most clearly in Germany where a huge effort has been invested by both the German establishment and the Left/Liberals in delegitimising the support for the AfD party among the ordinary electorate).
Such dismissive behaviour which utilises a political vocabulary that has more to do with the Europe of the 1930s than the current state of European politics represents a refusal to acknowledge the impact of the forces that have been shaping European politics since the start of the century. In particular it fails to provide any explanation that is capable of setting the events in Southport in the context of post-Soviet western globalism and it further shows how the internationalism of left-wing ideology has found itself enmeshed with the international nature of globalism. In this manner, any expression of national sentiment or culture becomes an obstacle to the development and growth of the alternative globalist culture that is based on
identity politics, inclusivity and the fetishisation of a concept of political rights that is based on an incoherent and shifting concept of the individual. The question of immigration is thereby reduced to a moral one where those opposed to excessive immigration are defined as inhuman racists and those who support an open-door immigration policy, diversity and tolerance, viewed as the righteous defenders of a global humankind.
However, the world is a much more complicated place and has become even more complicated since the fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of globalist capitalism. Any attempt to explain current politics that fails to take this into consideration only serves the cause of globalism.
The changing nature of immigration
One needs to understand that the way in which Britain, and indeed western Europe, has experienced immigration in recent times is different from what went before and this difference cannot be separated from the advent of globalism. In the case of Britain, prior to the arrival of Blair’s New Labour in government, those who resented immigration often gave expression to that resentment through violence and intolerance. But pre-globalist immigration was generally viewed as something that remained within the remit of the government to control. Resentment against immigration was justifiably seen as an expression of racism and intolerance before Blair but the Labour Party was generally capable of assimilating such expressions in ways that could neutralise its political impact. It succeeded in this regard by having immigration policies that were generally seen as effective and sympathetic to the impact on communities. Similarly, at the time the trade union movement in Britain was still strong enough to influence the means by which such immigrants could be integrated into the workplace without becoming the means by which existing wages levels could be undercut. The people of the Windrush generation for instance were invited to Britain as a means of filling the labour shortages after the war and took up unionised jobs in transport and health care. Consequently, the capacity of these immigrants to be used as the means of reducing the general level of wages was minimised. In the case of the Ugandan Asians a somewhat different dynamic operated. These people were mostly educated and possessed some financial resources when they arrived. A neighbour of mine who lived in the flat above me in Finchley was one of them and although he worked as a post office clerk he also had an income from his share dividends that pre-dated his forced move from Uganda.
The relative electoral failure of the British National Party in the 1980s is a testimony to both the nature of immigration at the time and the efficacy of government policies in dealing with the fallout from that immigration.
Then along came the New Labour government in 1997 and its ambition to create what Alastair Campbell described as the “New Labour, New Britain”, with modernisation “operating on every level, including the cultural one.” In an interview in March 2021 he looked back on the pressures operating on the new government as it sought to implement its “modernisation” programme.
“I think it [immigration] has always been an issue. At the first election in 1997, we actually did do stuff on immigration. But I can remember Margaret McDonagh, who was a pretty big fish in the Labour Party then, raising it often. She is one of those people who does not just do politics in theory, in an office, but who lives policy. She is out on the ground every weekend, she is knocking on doors, she is talking to people.
“I remember her taking me aside once and saying, ‘Listen, this immigration thing is getting bigger and bigger. It is a real problem’. That would have been somewhere between election one (1997) and election two (2001), I would say. Politics and government are often about very difficult competing pressures. So, on the one hand, we were trying to show business that we were serious about business and that we could be trusted on the economy.
“One of the messages that business was giving us the whole time was that there were labour shortages, skill shortages, and we were going to need more immigrants to come in and do the job. Particularly those jobs that British people did not want to do, or that they were not necessarily skilled in doing. So, that was one pressure.
“I know you have got the Labour Party at the moment doing this whole thing with the flag, because the Tories are wrapping themselves in it. It was not as unsubtle as that, but part of our messaging was that we understand that absolute, patriotic love of country. For some people, that is just a fact of life, down the centuries, through civilisation. That is often for a lot of people dressed up in – however you might want to phrase it – a sense of tribalism. Feeling British means something. So, that was another pressure.” (Alastair Campbell, 5 March 2021, Brexit Witness Archive, UK in a Changing Europe, Online: https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-witness-archive/alastair-campbell/).
When Blair’s New Labour first took office after 1997 it initially continued to operate in a way that was consistent with a sensitivity to the domestic impact of the immigration issue. His response to the expansion of asylum applications resulting from NATO and western wars in the Balkans, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan was one that had the effect of dampening the level of resentment that might otherwise have emerged as a result of that expansion. As a result of these NATO and western military adventures the number of people seeking asylum in Britain jumped to around 70,000 a year. Compared to the figures that eventually came to pass this may seem an insignificant number but because asylum applications had been taking years to process the accumulating number had a growing impact on several aspects of the health and social services which in turn began to create a political problem for the government.
The response of the New Labour government, in the face of opposition from the left of the party, was to adopt a robust approach to the issue. Those applying for asylum were distributed around the country and, in April 2000, in an effort to dispel the idea that asylum seekers were being too generously treated the government adopted a policy of providing them with food vouchers that could only be used in pre-defined shops and for which they were not entitled to be given cash in change. On top of that the appeals procedures against failed asylum claims were tightened. The back-log was eventually reduced and the number of those claiming asylum in Britain began to fall as a result of the curtailment of access to Britain via Eurostar and the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp in France in 2002.
In the meantime, however, New Labour had already begun to change its policy in a way that was inconsistent with its actions on the immigration issue up to that point but consistent with the desire to prove its business-friendly credentials.
In 1999 Blair established a new government post, that of Minister of State for Asylum and Immigration and appointed Barbara Roche as the relevant minister. This represented the emergence of a more expansive approach towards immigration. Roche had begun her ministerial career as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry from 1997 to 1998 at which time she became Minister of State for Asylum and Immigration – a post that was newly created by Blair at the time – and was then Minister of State for Women in 2001 before becoming Minister for Social Exclusion in 2002 – another newly established post created by Blair. Although she is no longer seen in the context of what New Labour went on to represent in terms of immigration policy, at the time she was the public face of that policy. On 11 September 2000 in a speech outlining New Labour’s attitude towards immigration she asserted the government’s desire to liberalise its policies in this area by pursuing what was termed “managed migration”. And in an interview in the New Statesman on 23 October 2000 she said:
“I want to be the first immigration minister to say immigration is a good thing . . . We have a multiracial, multicultural society; we are a stronger country for it.”
She was later to explain her rigorous advocacy of policies based on the ideas of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism as something that emanated from her Jewishness and the fact that her parents (her father was a Polish-Russian Ashkenazi and her mother a Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese) were immigrants.
“My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics. I understand the otherness of ethnic groups. The Americans are ahead of us on things like multiple identity. I’m Jewish but I’m also a Londoner; I’m English but also British.” (Roche urges Labour to promote the benefits of legal migration. The Independent, 23 June 2003).
As she herself admitted, this was something new at the time. Her reference to the United States as the leading example of this multi-identity model is indicative of where she took her lead from. However, it failed to acknowledge the different basis on which the United States evolved its identity as a nation – an evolution that had at its basis the idea of immigration – and the way in which England/Britain evolved. By framing immigration as Blair and Roche did, they in effect threw down a challenge to the English/British sense of identity. Instead of something that had been defined in cultural terms it was now to become variegated according to what one made of it as an immigrant. But in throwing down that challenge they established a momentum that would inevitably lead to a dissolution of any coherence that previously attached to the idea of English/Britishness and with the loss of that coherence there was nothing to which immigrants could attach themselves by way of a host culture. In place of assimilation around a coherent and defined centre it reinforced a tendency towards ghettoisation both in terms of culture and physical location. This in itself created the conditions where conflict became inevitable not only between immigrants and the host communities but within the immigrant communities themselves (for instance there were several incidents of conflict between Muslims and Hindus in some northern towns). In terms of what is now understood as a racial incident the most serious was the riots between Asian and white youths in Oldham in May 2001.
But the Blair/Roche agenda towards immigration was something that went beyond the idea of encouraging diversity and multiculturalism. Primarily, it was seen as serving the interests of British business. Barbara Roche knew at the time that trying to sell the idea of more immigration as a righteous cause would not be enough to convince the electorate and so she constructed the associated argument that Britain was in a global “competition for the brightest and best talents”. To Roche, higher immigration would represent a win-win situation for all. Aside from it benefiting those who came to Britain it would also benefit employers as it would help fill skills shortages. It would also benefit consumers because higher immigration would keep prices down and it would be an effective response to the country’s ageing demographic situation all of which was viewed as a guarantee of economic growth.
By 2004 (the year of the Morecambe Bay tragedy in which at least 21 undocumented Chinese migrant workers were drowned while harvesting cockles) Blair had adopted a policy of championing the entry of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia into the European Union. His object in doing this was twofold. Politically, it ensured that the influence of Germany and France on the future trajectory of the EU was weakened and economically it provided a route by which British businesses could tap into the significant labour resources of these ex-Soviet bloc countries. This latter object was made apparent when Blair arbitrarily waived the UK’s right to impose transitional border control on workers from these new EU member states.
“In New Labour’s ‘Napoleonic’ system of government, there was no detailed discussion about immigration strategy in the Cabinet. The decision to waive transitional border controls was instead taken by Blair prior to a European Council meeting in Copenhagen, in December 2002, in which he was keen to rebuild some diplomatic bridges in the run-up to the Iraq War.” (Haywire: a political history of Britain since 2000, by Andrew Hindmoor. Published by Allen Lane, London, 2024, p.85).
It has been claimed that Blair’s arbitrary decision to waive transitional border controls resulted in an outcome which he didn’t envisage. The original estimates provided to the public of the level of immigration that would result from taking that decision was between 5,000 to 13,000 additional workers arriving in Britain each year. It turned out that between 2004 and 2008 something like 750,000 East European workers arrived in the country with nearly 75% of them coming from Poland. This enormous discrepancy between the official estimation and what actually happened has been explained by the claim that Blair had believed that more EU countries would also agree to waive their transitional border controls than actually did (in fact only the Republic of Ireland and Sweden did so) and in so doing these immigrants would be dispersed over a larger number of EU countries. In other words, Blair had been somehow fooled into thinking that many other EU countries would waive their right to maintain transitional border controls as part of the admission of the ex-Soviet bloc states. However, it is hardly credible that Blair and the rest of the British establishment were taken by surprise in this instance. Britain operates one of the most sophisticated intelligence machines in the world and possesses a highly sophisticated diplomatic network in Europe. With such resources at his disposal, it beggars belief that Blair was taken by surprise. A more credible explanation is that Blair was eager to avoid any admission of the true implications of his decision in terms of the anticipated impact on immigration numbers and used this excuse to distance himself from it after the event.
Blair claimed that he had embarked on this change of tack towards immigration because it was necessary to solve the problem of the shortage of British skilled labour. He was well aware that the problem had much to do with the way in which Thatcher’s policies had earlier targeted the unionised manufacturing sector with its commensurate impact on things like apprenticeships. Instead of formulating policies that would reverse this impact Blair chose to develop short-term policies that were based on an acceptance of the outcome of Thatcher’s actions rather than overcome them. Consequently, New Labour claimed that it was seeking to solve these issues by importing skilled labour through the encouragement of immigration from the new Eastern European members of the EU. But it is not credible that he viewed the movement of these Eastern European workers in terms of them only being skilled workers. Had Britain retained the right to exercise border controls for the transitional period it would have been possible to ensure that those arriving in Britain were indeed skilled workers. By making the conscious decision not to exercise that right Blair ensured that Britain lost the ability to control either the numbers or the level of skill of those who choose to move to Britain. More likely, he was aware of the fact that the nature of the immigrant workforce and their numbers would have a dampening effect on the general levels of wages in an economic environment where trade unions were immeasurably weaker than they had been at the time of the previous Labour government.
As to the reaction to such arrivals the fact that they came from European countries was no doubt seen as a factor that might mitigate the impact on the local communities – they were after all, white rather than Asian or black.
But Blair’s policies on immigration also have to be seen in the context of his determination that a modernised Britain should become a leading part of the globalised economy. From the outset he believed that:
“Globalisation was a twenty-first century fact. It was both inevitable and desirable. Blair changed his mind about a lot of things. He never changed his mind about that: ‘The driving force of economic change today is globalisation . . . travel, communications, and culture are becoming more international’ (1994 – sic. This is referenced in the notes as being part of a speech delivered in 5 January 1996 not 1994 as indicated in the text); ‘We accept the global economy as a reality and reject the isolationism and “go-it-alone” policies of the extremes of right and left’ (1997); ‘The issue is not how to stop globalisation . . . because the alternative to globalisation is isolation’ (2001); ‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer’ (2005); ‘Globalisation is a force of nature, not a policy: it is a fact’ (2019).” (Hindmoor, p,86).
Aside from other considerations (a more accessible market for financial services and products), the price of globalisation for Blair was a more open approach to immigration at home. Such immigration would lower the cost of production and services and ensure that Britain became more competitive on the global markets. The “success” of the policies pursued by New Labour in this regard can be measured in the statistics that reflect this more open approach.
“In the early 1990s net migration was less than +100,000 people a year. Levels of both emigration and immigration then rose and by 2000 net migration was +220,000. Net migration then rose to a peak of +349,000 in 2004 and immigration to a peak of 513,000 in 2006. In 2010 an estimated 498,000 people immigrated to Britain and net migration stood at +294,000. In total, between 2000 and 2010 just over 5 million immigrants arrived in Britain.” (Hindmoor, pp.86-87).
Immigration on this level inevitably created tensions within the host communities. But those tensions emanate from two different perspectives. One is based on the impact of immigration on the nature of traditional English/Britishness and the other on its impact on wages, housing and the capacity of the economy to supply social and welfare services. In many cases these considerations overlap but not all as there is a significant component that view the issue in terms that undeniably impact their lives rather than one that is tied in with any sense of English/Britishness and many immigrants already settled here view the issue in those terms. To castigate that component as far-right or fascist is to create a self-fulfilling outcome by condemning such people to no other political outlet for their resentment than the far right.
Blair’s policies towards immigration were never really popular. Many who voted for his New Labour party did so in the belief that the main emphasis of his approach to government would be based on an alternative to the Thatcherite policies that were largely continued under John Major. That however, would have required someone who was willing to undertake a radical replacement of those policies rather than a tinkering with them or making the best of what was inherited as the outcome of Thatcher’s policies.
As things turned out, the most radical element to Blair’s approach to government was one that emanated from his belief in globalisation. The component of that belief which impacted the electorate was his policy towards immigration. An early indication of the reaction to New Labour’s immigration policy was the manner in which Roche lost her Hornsey and Wood Green seat. She won the seat in 1997 by polling more than 20,500 more votes than her Liberal Democrat opponent. By the time of the general election of 2001 her majority was almost halved to 10,500 and at the 2005 general election she lost her seat with a further 14.6% swing to the Liberal Democratic candidate, Lynne Featherstone, who had unsuccessfully opposed her in the two previous elections. The Brexit vote just over ten years later could also be seen as a verdict on the immigration policies which were introduced by Blair and which were more or less continued by successive Tory administrations since.
Incidentally, by way of what we may define as “extremism” it is worth mentioning that during her time as a Member of Parliament, on 25 November 2002 Roche voted against a motion that demanded that “Britain require the support of the UN Security Council and the support of a vote of MPs in the House of Commons before the commitment of UK forces to military action in Iraq.” On 26 February 2003 she voted against a motion which stated that “the case for military action against Iraq is as yet unknown.” On 18 March 2003 she voted against a motion which stated “that the case against Iraq has not yet been established” and also for the motion “that the Government should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” that gave the green light to Blair’s decision to commit UK forces to joining the US invasion of Iraq two days later. On 16 July 2003 she voted against a motion to establish “a judicial inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq.” On 22 October 2003 she voted against the establishment of “a comprehensive independent judicial inquiry into the Iraq war. She also made herself absent from Parliament on 9 March 2004 during a debate on the Attorney General’s advice relating to Blair’s justification for the war in Iraq – a rather ironic absence since she was a qualified barrister. Since losing her seat in Parliament she continues to espouse the cause of immigration and the idea of multiculturalism. No doubt she also continues to see no relationship between her involvement in supporting the destruction of Saddam Hussain’s Iraq and the growth of Islamic extremism that this unleashed or indeed the resultant surge of immigration from across the region that continues to reach Britain’s shores.
But it is also important not to dismiss those whose reaction to immigration is based on a perception that it poses a threat to their sense of English/Britishness for that reaction has also been framed and distorted by the globalist agenda.
Immigration and the “clash of civilisations”
To a large extent the impact of the Blair government’s approach to immigration was mitigated by the healthy state of the economy during his terms in government. There were of course the racial riots that occurred in May 2001 in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley. The general consensus was that the cause was the level of social deprivation in those areas. This appeared to be confirmed by the government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation which drew on data related to income, work, health, housing, education, crime, and the physical environment. According to that index Oldham ranked 338th out of 355 districts across England, Bradford ranked 339th and Burnley 335th. In response to these riots the home secretary, David Blunkett, commissioned the former chief executive of Nottingham City Council, David Cantle, to investigate and compile a report on the causes and suggest measures which were needed to prevent a recurrence. The Cantle Report duly confirmed what everyone had already known – that the areas at the centre of the riots were areas that had been suffering from deprivation and long-term decline which accentuated divisions. However, at this time the divisions continued to be viewed as between different peoples who were identifiable according to their national identities and separate cultures within their ethnicities.
“Yet, over time, the ground slowly shifted. Cantle described the communities affected by the riots largely in terms of their ethnicity and geographic origins, as Asians and Pakistani or Indian and so on. After the 11 September attacks the same sets of divisions came, increasingly, to be described in religious terms. Asians, Pakistanis and Indians became increasingly Muslims linked by their Islamic faith. Looking back, the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, whose members were active in Burnley and Oldham during the summer of 2001, had helped establish this frame. Griffin, who was invited to appear on the BBC Today programme on 30 June 2001, used the language of a ‘clash of civilisations’, popularised by the American political scientist Samuel Huntingdon, to argue that Islam posed an existential threat to white working-class communities.” (Ibid. pp.180-181).
So it was that the issue of immigration shifted from being one of race relations to one that became embroiled in the wider “clash of civilisations”. This was to have obvious implications for the populations of those areas that had previously experienced racial tensions. Elements from within the white and Asian communities now saw their predicament as being inseparable from this “clash of civilisations” and its commensurate class of values – something that fed directly into the globalist West’s ongoing assault on Muslim countries and its continuing support for Israel as an island of western values.
Domestically, this perception of a clash of values was also exacerbated by the way in which western liberal feminism positioned itself as the ultimate epitome of women’s rights – rights that apparently could not be invoked by Muslim women who choose to live by the rules of Islam rather than secular western liberalism. The developments around 11 September and the Islamist attacks in London on 7 July 2005—combined with the emerging depiction of Islam as an alien religion incapable of being digested by Britain’s oft-claimed capacity to absorb immigrants—put pressure on the capacity of the liberal agenda to remain consistent with the idea of respect for other cultures.
“In December 2006 Blair gave a speech in which he argued multiculturalism was still to be valued, but that the 7 July attacks had thrown the concept into ‘sharp relief’; that a new and virulent form of Islam posed a problem in a minority of the Muslim community; and that, as a consequence, more emphasis needed to be placed on the promotion of common values.” (Hindmoor, p.182).
It seemed that the impact of the West’s ‘War on Terror’ had outcomes that were placing pressures on the idea of multiculturalism at home. British society was no longer expected to accommodate the values that defined the cultures of the immigrant communities if such values were deemed unacceptable. Diversity in value beliefs was replaced by demands that immigrant communities needed to adopt the “common values” that were a feature of the host community.
A month before Blair’s speech, in October 2006 his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had written a column in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph in which he said he was increasingly concerned about the number of women in his Blackburn constituencies choosing to wear the niqab as a “visible statement of separation and of difference”, and he asks women visiting his surgery to consider removing it. (See: Straw’s veil comments spark anger, BBC, 5 October 2006). Later in October 2006 a woman teaching assistant lost her appeal to an employment tribunal after being sacked for refusing to remove her veil at work. She had agreed to remove the veil in front of children but not if there was a male colleague present. The tribunal came up with the apparently contradictory verdict that she had not been discriminated against by her Church of England employer but had been victimised by Kirklees Council and as a result was awarded £1,100 in damages. In February 2007 the family of a 12 year-old girl took her Buckinghamshire school to court after it banned her wearing the veil despite her two older sisters having earlier attended the same school similarly attired. The challenge was rejected by the judge and the family’s legal representatives was denied a request for a judicial review. On top of that costs were awarded against the family for mounting the challenge in the first place. Following on from that, on 20 March 2007 the government issued guidelines which permitted schools to ban the use of face veils by their pupils. On 28 June 2007 a magistrate sitting at Manchester Magistrates Court refused to deal with a defendant wearing a veil. And so it went on.
Banning women from wearing the veil was an easy target for those who continued to espouse globalism and multiculturalism as it was something that would resonate with the feminist idea of women’s rights, and women’s rights was a central component of both globalism and what had long evolved into western “common values”. But in the new era of immigration it also created a contradictory position where immigrant women living in Britain were not given the right to abide by the customs of their religion if western women decided that certain practices were oppressive to those immigrant women. At the same time, it also established the contradictory position where the idea of multiculturalism was constructed on the basis of a respect and tolerance of other people’s cultures but only if those cultures operated to the values of the host country. All of which resonated and gave credence to the ideas of those who believed that the “common values” of English/Britishness were endangered by values introduced by the immigrant communities.
From the perspective of English/Britishness, globalism and multiculturalism was transformed into something that both gave and took away. It gave by way of endorsing its belief in the primacy of “common values” and at the same time it took away the security of those values by opening the door to immeasurable numbers of immigrants from very different cultures.
But it soon became obvious that “common values” did not represent an attachment to what was commonly understood as those values. In 2006 British Airways imposed a ban on an employee wearing a cross above the size of a five-pence piece. The same year the argument began to circulate that celebrating Christmas in the workplace was an affront to the idea of diversity as
“Not everyone in the office celebrates Christmas and acting as if everyone has the ‘holiday spirit’ squelches the spirit of workplace diversity.” (https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/12/14/christmas-at-the-office-is-bad-for-diversity-2/).
Contradictions such as this ensured that by the first decade of the twenty-first century the political establishment in Britain was incapable of providing any kind of clarity of leadership to the electorate on the issue of immigration. As a result, there was no particular vantage point on the question capable of providing direction. In essence people were expected to accommodate immigrants from alien cultures on the basis of respect for those cultures while at the same time encouraged not to tolerate aspects of those cultures. Likewise, the impact of pressures on work, housing, health and education on the electorate were either denied, ignored or treated as a worthwhile price to pay for the benefits of globalism and multiculturalism. While this unreasonable requirement on the electorate could be sustained in the boom period of the early 2000s the government-imposed austerity in the aftermath of the 2008 crash created a ticking time-bomb. The evidence of the Southport riots shows that time-bomb continues to be present and is something that the incoming Starmer government will need to deal with.
How he deals with it remains to be seen but current evidence would indicate that his commitment to his Chancellor’s “fiscal rules” will make any remedy difficult. What has happened in the weeks after the riots also indicates that rather than investing in the regions where deprivation continues to blight not only the lives of ordinary people but continues to provide a breeding ground for racial conflict, he is relying on a draconian use of the State’s powers to suppress the extreme expressions of the underlying problem rather than the basis of the problem. In this context it should also be added that as far as the corrosive effect of globalism on the immigration issue is concerned Starmer seems as much committed as was his New Labour forebear.
Labour Affairs 