17-05-2025
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.
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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]
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