Latest news with #RiversofBlood
Daily Mirror
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Key move stopped social media liars from endangering peoples' safety last week
When I watched tv as a kid and a crime was reported on the news I'd tense - praying the suspect was not Black. Why? Because the negative stereotyping of Black people back then was the done thing. Anything reinforcing those labels crystallised the false fears that the xenophobes were hell-bent to pushing. We are back there now because of Reform and the Far Right who are determined to do the very same thing. We are there because a Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer's repurposing of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech has helped to fuel it. We are back there now because of the systematic attempts of the extremists in plain sight, determined to frame everyone non-white as a danger to you and this country. The racists and xenophobes want to dress us all up as threats to be feared and fought against. So the speed with which the police revealed the details of a 53-year-old white man, charged after a car was driven through crowds at last week's Liverpool parade, is significant. They did it to get ahead of the liars and troublemakers on social media who would have poured the poison into the breach if, as in the past, the particulars of the suspect had been withheld. The police did it because they knew that without those important facts, the misinformation specialists would have sparked the kind of violence which saw Black and Brown people indiscriminately beaten in the streets after Southport last summer. It was falsely claimed last July that the three young girls killed had been attacked by an illegal immigrant. The lie was amplified millions of times on social media before it could be proven untrue. By then the damage had been done. It is a damning indictment on our society that releasing a person's ethnicity immediately will now have to remain a strategy for UK law enforcement going forward. But when high profile commentators and politicians remain determined to lie and misrepresent the truth as so many are doing on a day to day basis, police have no choice. Starmer revealed in January that the government would look to plug the information vacuum that allowed the blitz-stirrers to wind people up last summer. But it beggars belief too that there is only calm on our streets because the person held after last week's Liverpool horror - the facts of which have traumatised us all - is not Black. We've gone back to the future. We are back to the days when extremists in the seventies put out leaflets warning: 'if you desire a coloured for your neighbour vote Labour'. You wouldn't now suddenly think negatively of every 53-year-old white man but the racist agitators on social media want you to judge every Black or Brown person on the basis of what any single person is suspected of.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Enoch Powell display investigated as hate incident
A shop display showing an image of Enoch Powell next to a copy of his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech is being investigated by police. The framed picture of the former Conservative MP was displayed in the window of ironmongers Mumfords in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire. Shop owner Elizabeth Griffiths has defended her actions, saying it was one small part of a larger collection of images, including Sir Winston Churchill, depicting "a need for strong leadership". "I have had it in there for three and a half months, and the response has been always positive - no negativity at all until this week," said the Reform campaigner, who has now removed it. Powell's anti-immigration speech, delivered by the then Wolverhampton South West MP, caused a national controversy, prompting his sacking from Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. West Mercia Police said enquiries were ongoing after they had received a report of "offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street". The complaint had "obviously" come from "political enemies" after she had financed a campaign for two successful Reform candidates at the recent local elections, Ms Griffiths claimed. "Rest assured, since then, I've had knives in my back from left right and centre," she said. Earlier in the week she added an image of Sir Keir Starmer next to Powell's picture linking the prime minister's recent language around immigration to the Powell speech. The text of the 1968 speech, delivered at a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, he said, included observations on immigrants taken from his Wolverhampton constituents. "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country," the MP claimed he had been told. "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." Powell added: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding: like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." The then Conservative Party leader Heath sacked him from the front bench, and he was widely denounced. Ms Griffiths said she had received support from her community, saying many thought it applied to the "present day". A spokesman for West Mercia Police said: "On 16 May, we received a report of offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street in Cleobury Mortimer. "This is being treated as a hate incident, and inquiries are ongoing." Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. Enoch Powell: a drama out of a crisis After Enoch Numbers are down - but Starmer will still struggle to win on immigration Cooper backs PM over 'island of strangers' remark West Mercia Police
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Immigration is the albatross around UK politics. Starmer will struggle to break free
Figures released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics are expected to reveal a fall in net migration to the UK. Politicians have long struggled to assuage public concerns over immigration and even with Thursday's expected fall, the issue is still likely to dog the Labour government. In retrospect, 1968 looks like the decisive year. Until then, social class had been what determined the political allegiance of most voters: Labour drew its support from the still strong industrialised working class, while the Conservatives enjoyed the support of middle class and rural constituencies. But in 1968, two events launched a realignment, after which point Britons increasingly started to vote based on another, previously obscure, factor: attitudes to immigration and race. The first was the 1968 Race Relations Act, steered through Parliament by the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. It strengthened legal protections for Britain's immigrant communities, banning racial discrimination, and sought to ensure that second generation immigrants "who have been born here" and were "going through our schools" would have access to quality education to ensure that they would get "the jobs for which they are qualified and the houses they can afford". Discrimination against anyone on the basis of racial identity - in housing, in hospitality, in the workplace - was now illegal. The second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country". Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war. The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way". But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them," he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political discourse. Powell had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the country. It became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever before. It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment. And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory. Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the annual net migration figures are very likely to show a fall in the number of people moving to the UK - something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for Labour's attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited). Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration? Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated picture. The number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of thousands. Stephen Webb, a former Home Officer civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities. "The public have been ahead of the political, media class on this," he says, "particularly poorer, working-class people. It was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That's where the migrants went. That's where the sudden competition for labour [emerged]. You talk to cabbies in the early 2000s and they were already fuming about this." That fear of migrants "taking jobs" became particularly pressing in 2004, when the European Union (of which Britain was a member) took in ten new members, most of them former the communist states of Eastern Europe. Because of the EU's free movement rules, it gave any citizen of those countries the right to move here - and the UK was one of just three member nations to open its doors to unrestricted and immediate freedom of movement. The government, led by Tony Blair, estimated that perhaps 13,000 people per year would come seeking work. In fact, more than a million arrived, and stayed, by the end of the decade - one of the biggest influxes of people in British history. Most were people of working age. They paid taxes. They were net contributors to the public purse. Indeed, the totemic figure in this period was the hard-working "Polish plumber" who, in the popular imagination, was willing to work for lower wages than his British counterpart. Gordon Brown famously called for "British jobs for British workers", without explaining how that could be achieved in a Europe of free movement. The perception that Britain had lost control of its own borders gained popular traction. The imperative to "take back control" would be the mainstay of the campaign to leave the European Union. A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening," says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration". Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people." Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968? The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections. "At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala says. The country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral success. And fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in taxes. He adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost." So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it? Legislation to reduce immigration has, historically, been strikingly unsuccessful. The first sustained attempt to reduce immigration was the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1948, the former troopship Empire Windrush had docked at Essex carrying 492 migrants from the West Indies, attracted by the jobs boom created by postwar reconstruction. Almost a million more followed in the years ahead, from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. They all arrived as citizens of the UK and Commonwealth (CUKC) with an automatic and legal entitlement to enter and stay. The 1971 Act removed this right for new arrivals. The Act was sold to the public as the means by which immigration would be reduced to zero. But from 1964 to 1994, immigrants continued to arrive legally in their thousands. In 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then in opposition, told a television interviewer that "people are rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", and she promised "to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration." Not a reduction; an end. Yet today, almost 17% of the population of the UK was born abroad, up from 13% in 2014. Sir Keir's plan does not promise to end immigration. It is much less radical. It promises to reduce legal immigration by toughening visa rules. As part of the changes, more arrivals - as well as their dependents - will have to pass an English test in order to get a visa. Migrants will also have to wait 10 years to apply for the right to stay in the UK indefinitely, up from five years. "It will bring down [net immigration] for sure," says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "If you restrict eligibility for visas, you will have lower migration. The Home Office calculation is that it will issue 98,000 fewer visas. That's in the order of 10%. It's not radical but it is a change." The White Paper also proposes to end visas for care workers. "This has been a visa that has been incredibly difficult for the government to manage," says Sumption. "It's been riddled with problems. There has been widespread fraud and abuse and so it's not surprising that they want to close it. The care sector will face challenges continuing to recruit. But I think closing the care route may be helpful for reducing exploitation of people in the country." Just a week after publishing the White Paper, the government was accused of undermining its own immigration strategy by agreeing in principle to a "youth experience scheme" with the EU - which may allow thousands of young Europeans to move to Britain for a time-limited period. Champions of the policy say it will boost economic growth by filling gaps in the labour market. But ministers will be cautious about any potential inflation to migration figures. It's another example of the narrow tightrope prime ministers have historically been forced to walk on this issue. There's another sense in which the Powell speech reaches into our own day. It created a conviction among many on the left that to raise concerns about immigration - often even to mention it - was, by definition, racist. Labour prime ministers have felt the sting of this criticism from their own supporters. Tony Blair, who opened the doors in 2004, recognised this in his autobiography A Journey. The "tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions… and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future… Across Europe, right wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don't get it." Sir Keir has felt some of that heat from his own side since launching the White Paper. In response to his warning about Britain becoming an "island of strangers", the left-wing Labour MP Nadia Whittome accused the prime minister of "mimic[king] the scaremongering of the far-right". Labour to unveil big immigration plans next week - but will they win back votes? Is Britain really inching back towards the EU? The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered The Economist, too, declared that Britain's decades of liberal immigration had been an economic success - but a political failure. There is a world of difference between Keir Starmer and Enoch Powell. Powell believed Britain was "literally mad, piling up its own funeral pyre" and that the country was bound to descend into civil war. Sir Keir says he celebrates the diversity of modern Britain. But even if his plan to cut migration works, net migration will continue to flow at the rate of around 300,000 a year. Sir Keir's plan runs the risk of being neither fish nor fowl: too unambitious to win back Reform voters; but illiberal enough to alienate some on the left. Additional reporting: Florence Freeman, Luke Mintz. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
New Statesman
20-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Starmer moves right on immigration
This week saw potentially the boldest moment of Keir Starmer's leadership, as the Government announced its white paper – Restoring Control over the Immigration System. According to the Prime Minister, it marks a a significant overhaul of UK immigration policy. The headlines, however, have been less kind – focussing on the wording of his speech announcing the plans, specifically on the phrase 'island of strangers'… Some were quick to compare this to Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech in which Powell talks of white British people becoming 'strangers in their own country'. Subscribers to the New Statesman can listen ad-free in our app. Download it on iOS or Android. Not a regular podcast listener? Read our guide on how to listen to New Statesman Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
17-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers'
Photo by Stefan Rousseau/AFP In 2016, when he was a Shadow Home Office Minister, I posted Keir Starmer a copy of my book about immigration, Strangers in Our Midst. Starmer has made it very clear that he's not a great reader – of fiction anyway – and I didn't receive an acknowledgement, so I claim neither credit nor discredit for his claim that uncontrolled immigration risks turning Britain into an 'island of strangers'. The phrase has become the locus for a vitriolic exchange of views in recent days, read not as an echo of a work of academic philosophy, but of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, in which Powell championed those who 'found themselves made strangers in their own country'. Starmer's meaning was clearly different from Powell's. And it would be a shame if that deflected attention away from the main purpose of his speech, which as I see it was to set the context for the accompanying White Paper on immigration policy, one of the most significant policy shifts in recent decades. The White Paper is packed with specific proposals on how immigrants should be selected, and what they should be required to do once they arrive. But, in a speech of (relative to his usual standards) high-flown rhetoric, Starmer was trying to explain the underlying philosophy behind these proposals. So, beyond specific adjustments to salary thresholds and skilled visas, what was Starmer really saying about immigration, and how should the left respond? In elite circles there is a tendency to think about immigration primarily in economic terms. Economists have long argued about who is likely to gain and who is likely to lose from large-scale immigration, and whether the beneficiaries could (in theory) compensate the losers through taxation. But when people say they are worried about how the government is dealing with immigration, this isn't usually because they expect to be among its economic casualties. Consider how symbolic small boats have become in this debate. Critics point out that people who enter the UK in this way only make up a very small fraction of total arrivals. They also say that the issue is artificially kept alive by the media, providing a ready source of political capital for the right. If we could all stop talking about the small boats, the problem would quietly go away. This seems to me a big mistake. What the Channel crossings signal to people is a government unable to deliver on its promise to keep immigration under control. If a government cannot deal with a few small boats, why should we trust it to regulate all of the other aspects of immigration policy, including restricting the total number allowed to enter? I think Starmer gets this. He talks tough because he wants to regain people's political trust, and the way to do this is by speaking to the concerns they actually express. What Starmer hasn't done so well is to connect immigration policy to the wider political concerns of his Labour colleagues, and the centre-left more generally. He hasn't explained why the social justice agenda that a Labour government ought to be pursuing also needs to include effective policies to control immigration, both in terms of the overall numbers admitted and in terms of immigrant selection. But the connection isn't difficult to make, even though it might be hard to get across in the space of a 25-minute speech. The most direct way in which social justice and immigration connect is through simple arithmetic. A government committed to guaranteeing all of its citizens and residents access to basic services such as healthcare and education needs to know how many people it will need to provide for in the decades ahead, and also their demographic profile. Housing, transport infrastructure, schools and hospitals all take a long time to build, and where population increase creates shortages and bottlenecks, this is where resentment against immigrants is most likely to flare up. The fault for this resentment lies not with the immigrants, who are only asking for what they are entitled to, but with the government, which has admitted more immigrants than it has the public funds and material capacity to build facilities for. To some extent this problem can be alleviated by selecting in favour of immigrants who, after factoring in their dependants, are expected to make a net contribution to the state's coffers through taxation. Both Starmer and the White Paper push hard in this direction. But this doesn't entirely answer time lag issue I've just drawn attention to. Building a hospital in the UK, for example, typically takes up to 20 years. There is, however, a deeper link between social justice and immigration policy, and this may have been what Starmer was pointing to with his controversial 'strangers' remark. It's long been known that the societies that have gone furthest in pursuit of social democratic policies – the Scandinavian democracies especially – have also been societies that enjoy a high level of social trust. Trust between citizens is what encourages them to support policies from which they may not benefit directly, not only in the area of social justice but on long-term issues, such as combatting climate change. Trusting others means relying on them not to cheat the system that's been put in place (for example when claiming welfare benefits) and also counting on them to support you should circumstances change and you are the one who needs help. But the question then is how trust is created between people who may indeed at first be strangers to one another. Social psychologists working on this issue tell us, perhaps not surprisingly, that two of the strongest predictors of interpersonal trust are direct social contact and cultural similarity. In experiments where a group of people can increase the resources they hold by investing them in a collective pot which is then divided equally (so self-interest recommends not investing but still claiming a share of the pot), allowing the participants to talk to one another for a while before deciding substantially increases the level of investment. Other experiments use the same device to test for the effect of cultural similarity. People who are told that they share cultural features with other members of the group – even seemingly irrelevant features such as sharing tastes in art – are more likely to invest. And when you invest you are trusting your fellows to do the same, so that everyone benefits and no one free rides. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The concern raised is that these trust-building mechanisms may not operate well in the case of immigrants and citizens. On arrival, most immigrants have an understandable tendency to self-segregate. They are drawn to places where they will find a community of earlier migrants from a similar cultural or national background. The worry is that this becomes their entire social world, forming what in European debates has been called a 'parallel society'. At the same they are likely to be perceived as culturally different, in terms of language, religion, dress, lifestyle and so forth. They may be eager to adapt culturally, but the initial contrast with native-born citizens may be a barrier to trust. Starmer's speech, with its references to the importance of integration, reflects these concerns, as does the accompanying White Paper. There is, however, an underlying tension with another of that document's aims, which is to make it significantly less attractive in general for people to immigrate to the UK. In particular, extending the time that must elapse before immigrants can apply for settled status (and thereby citizenship) and treating citizenship itself as a privilege that has to be earned, rather than a right, seems to run contrary to the idea that immigrants who intend to stay should be encouraged to integrate socially and culturally as quickly as possible. It is reasonable that admission to citizenship should have some conditions attached, such as demonstrating knowledge of the society's institutions and culture, and not having committed serious crimes. But at the same time citizenship should be seen as the natural destination for all immigrants (other than those on temporary visas). Looking ahead to becoming a full citizen is an incentive to get involved in community life beyond your group. Neither Starmer nor the White Paper has much to say about how integration should work at the local level. Some commentators have suggested that Starmer's intervention is merely a cynical attempt to deflate Nigel Farage's Reform by stealing their main source of appeal for voters. At heart, they suggest, he remains a human rights lawyer concerned more with individual immigrants, especially refugees, than with the common good. We will only find out whether the speech is more than rhetorical camouflage when the policies it defends are tested, for example in a confrontation with the European Court of Human Rights. But in general a firmer grip on immigration, with policies that are fair and non-discriminatory at the point of entry, and designed to encourage integration once immigrants arrive, is what Labour needs – not only to regain the voters' trust, but to pursue its founding principles of social justice. [See also: Keir Starmer can rewrite the history of Brexit] Related
