Does Britain’s Keir Starmer want to recruit more voters – for the far right?

There was a time when the British Labour Party was actually a distinctly left, social-democratic party. The current Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer does not take that approach.

And he’s currently following the policy that the Labour Party has followed before, which is to try to out-xenophobe the far-right in their hostility to immigrants and refugees. As Thomas Biebricher pointed out in a detailed study of recent years in the politics of France, Italy, and Britain itself, in all three cases that approach – particularly by center-right parties - resulted in a strengthening of the far right. (1)

Only when the left and center-left parties directly refute the racism and scare talk of the xenophobes can they defuse it as a political issue. At the moment, we’re seeing that in the United States, where the Democratic Party nationally spent most of the last two decades trying to show they were ”tough” on immigration, with the result that Donald Trump won the Presidency for a second time in 2024 with the a majority of the public preferring the Republicans’ (racist and xenophobic) position to that of the Democrats.

This year, when some Democrats prominently pushed back against the Trump 2.0 regime’s criminal practice of having masked ICE goons snatch people off the street and sending a couple of hundred of them to a notorious concentration/campa prison in El Salvador, with no trial and in direct defiance of a federal court order, the majority opinion on immigration has shifted to favor the Democrats.

Katherine Hearst reports:

Rights groups have warned that the inflammatory comments risk sparking a resurgence of last summer’s anti-immigration and anti-Muslim riots.

“It's not even a year since the racist riots,” Ravishaan Rahel Muthiah, director of communications at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), told Middle East Eye.

“A lot of people, including ourselves, are saying it’s echoing the far right, but it’s further than that, because the far right don’t have the platform.”

“When the prime minister is saying things that maybe street fascists, or people who comment on our Instagram and social media accounts say, it has a massive effect,” he said. (2)

The distance between actual fact-based, pragmatic courses that follow the framework of international law and common decency and the programs often actually proposed by parties and government can be huge. Europe has been dealing with large refugee crises since before the Second World War and very dramatically so immediately afterward. And there are other experiences like the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis and even the current refugees from Ukraine that provide lots of practical experience. But for those experiences to produce realistic and sensible policies, the center parties and especially those on the left side of the spectrum have to push back hard against the hate talk and scare-mongering that are the specialties of the far right.

Starmer’s current approach is a new round of floundering around and failing to combat the far-right pitches. This week, “he repeatedly attacked the previous Conservative government's immigration approach as an #open borders experiment’, which was now over.” (3)

Enforcement will be tougher than ever and migration numbers will fall."

The government will scrap a visa scheme, set up by Boris Johnson's government, that allows firms to hire health and social care workers from overseas.

Instead, firms will be required to hire British nationals or extend the visas of overseas workers already in the country.

Home Office figures estimate this change will cut the number of workers coming to the UK by between 7,000 and 8,000 a year.

However, care companies warned some services will struggle to survive without international recruits. (3)

There are ways to talk about migration in a reality-based way. (4) But their influence on real policy are too often very limited.

As Owen Jones describes, there are substantive left criticisms of Starmer’s policy:

In his big speech on immigration, Starmer declared that “we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.” saying that accordingly immigration must be much lower.

As has been widely noted, this bears striking resemblance to [far-right] Enoch Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 [which] … led to Powell being sacked by the then-Tory leader Ted Heath. …

Furthermore, in his foreword to the new immigration white paper being published by the government, Starmer says that the damage immigration “has done to our country is incalculable”, saying “public services and housing access have been place under too much pressure”.

As Nadia Whittome, one of the few decent Labour MPs left, notes, Starmer’s rhetoric “mimics the scaremongering of the far right.” (5)

Britain’s Channel 4 News reports on Starmer’s ugly right turn on immigration: (5)

Notes:

(1) Biebricher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts. Die Internationale Krise des Konservatismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

(2) Hearst, Katerine (2025): Rights groups say Starmer's migration comments risk reigniting far-right riots. Middle East Eye 05/13/2025. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/rights-groups-say-starmers-migration-comments-risk-reigniting-far-right-riots> (Accessed: 2025-14-05).

(3) PM promises migration drop as he unveils plans for 'tightened' visa rules. BBC News 05/12/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wgrv7pwrzo> (Accessed: 2025-14-05).

(4) Savur, Sachin (2025): Keir Starmer needs to change Whitehall’s approach to immigration policy. Institute for Government 05/14/2025. <https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/keir-starmer-change-whitehall-approach-immigration-policy> (Accessed: 2025-14-05).

(5) Jones, Owen (2025): Starmer's Enoch Powell impression shows he's the most dishonest politician in our history. Owen Jones Battlelines 05/13/2025. <https://www.owenjones.news/p/starmers-enoch-powell-impression> (Accessed: 2025-14-05).

(6) Starmer vows to ‘significantly’ reduce migration figures. Channel 4 YouTube channel 05/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/hCSkO-FYfuk?si=HT0J8z_G0fgwfamJ> (Accessed: 2025-14-05).