Séamas O'Reilly: 'Downing St finally put down its racist dog-whistle, and unholstered a racist megaphone'

Irish Examiner

17-05-2025

What can I say about this week in British politics that hasn't already been said about getting kicked in the head by a horse?
Downing St finally put down its racist dog-whistle, and unholstered a racist megaphone, with a white paper on immigration that, at times, resembled National Front propaganda from the 1970s.
Under the previous government, it told us, inward migration 'exploded' to over a million people a year.
The fact that these figures will have included the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing war, or visas granted to British citizens of Hong Kong, goes unmentioned and is merely the beginning of its troubles in trading facts for histrionic scaremongering.
'The damage this has done to our country is incalculable,' Starmer continued, perhaps because no such calculation would provide the answers he wanted.
'Public services and housing access have been placed under too much pressure. Our economy has been distorted by perverse incentives to import workers rather than invest in our own skills.'
This is, in a word, nonsense. Failures in public services, housing or crime are not blamed on immigrants by any reputable body, but the inanities of the paper do not stop there.
Proposals to reduce immigrant visas for the care sector leave out any mention of how they're going to fill the 100,000 vacancies the sector already has.
Plans to make migrants wait longer to gain permanent residence elide the likely consequence of driving them into destitution and crime.
A proposed GCSE-standard English proficiency test ignores the fact most migrants already sit an English proficiency exam, and this would only set the bar so high that a third of British GCSE students would not make the grade. (Given that the fail rate for GCSE-equivalent English was closer to 50% in 1975, I'd imagine many of those spouting bile in the Daily Mail comments section would not relish a chance to test whether their own proficiency has improved in the years since).
And everywhere, in this paper and in his public statements, Starmer has spent the week brining himself in the conspiratorial language of invasion, horror and disease; 'experiment', 'distorted', 'perverse', 'a wound', a 'squalid chapter', a threat 'pulling the country apart', and one that risks making the UK 'an island of strangers'.
This doesn't sound like grotesque nativism, it is grotesque nativism. This is the ghoulish language of Le Pen, Orban and, of course, the real policy director of Starmer's Labour government, Nigel Farage.
It's worth saying as loudly as I can that Britain has massively benefited from migrants, by every conceivable metric; from massive infrastructure projects, dug tunnels and raised skyscrapers, to the hundreds of thousands of medical workers who continue to keep the NHS afloat.
In that same period of time, Britain has also been through the ebbs and flows of stagnation and social decay that accompany any capitalist society. Neoliberal policies have made life tighter, meaner and crueller for people at the bottom of the pile.
In response to these effects, scapegoating immigrants has become a time-honoured ritual among a loose cohort of interdependent parties. From avowed white nativists who despise the idea that their culture is being diluted, to comfortable, news-addicted pensioners living miles away from any migrants at all, to cosmopolitan politicians and press barons - with chalets in Switzerland and wives from France - who know that there will always be utility in attacking foreigners for the problems they themselves have created.
A rabidly bigoted movement aimed at protecting the very same money-siphoning plutocrats who've sold off the state for parts, and used their immense wealth and influence to shift the blame on to those who just happen to look and sound different from white Britons.
Thus, begat a spin cycle; politicians and newspapers get easy headlines attacking immigrants; their readers become more xenophobic; which incentivises greater racist scaremongering from press and government; which radicalises more white British voters; and on and on, until a sizeable bloc of the British electorate look around and see shuttered factories and town centres, crumbling schools and hospitals, inadequate housing, high prices everywhere, less money in their pocket, and wonder whether all this misery caused by deregulation, austerity and privatisation, might actually be the fault of all these immigrants we hear so much about from every single corner of their political and media ecosystem.
It isn't. Immigrants contribute more to the British economy than they withdraw; they commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Brits; have been at the centre of every academic, industrial and sporting success this century, and their food, language, music and art enrich the lives of millions.
They are not merely our doctors, our teachers, our carers, builders, artists and community leaders, they are our friends, they are our family, they are us.
All such fact-checking is, obviously, pointless. This was not a week of actual policy proposals, so much as a spittle-flecked howl to the far-right voters Starmer believes he can win by appearing tough on foreigners.
He's wrong.
Firstly, none of this will make any white British person's life better for the next four years. It will break untold bonds of family and friendship while also hobbling the care system and NHS even further, setting fire to public services, and bringing universities to their knees.
If every dreaded foreigner is removed, the most racist man in England will not be seen quicker by his GP, have more shops on his high street, or send his kids to a more adequately funded school.
Blaming immigrants is insipid, and morally repulsive but, crucially, it also solves nothing, while making most problems worse, and that will be your legacy.
Secondly, as we've seen everywhere that it's ever been tried, screaming 'the far right are correct about everything, but vote for me!' tends to drive voters toward the original, not the copy.
It's just that, to be honest, I find myself caring less and less about Labour's electoral prospects.
This week Starmer seemed hell-bent on saying one thing to anyone who'll listen: if Reform do get in four years from now, don't worry - you'll barely feel the difference.