Latest news with #culturalchange
ABC News
17-05-2025
- ABC News
Pacific women share stories of abuse to spark cultural change
Survivors and advocates are sharing stories of abuse to spark cultural change in the Pacific region where gender-based violence is rampant.
Times
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
To see off Reform, Keir Starmer must speak for the Somewheres
'Nigel Farage is right, please don't vote for him,' is how one dispirited Labour supporting academic summed up Monday's white paper on immigration. My own reaction was 'two cheers for Keir'. As a former Labour member who left a decade ago partly thanks to the party's enthusiasm for mass immigration, I was happy to see him embracing most of the arguments that we sceptics have been making for 20 years: the pace of cultural change is too fast, the economic benefit is overestimated, the pressure on public services and housing underestimated, too many visa routes are abused, many of the benefits of immigration have been privatised while the costs are nationalised. Credit where it is due: Labour's white paper is challenging two of its core
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Starmer delivers some home truths in Labour's great immigration reset
You know how it is. You get on the 87 at the Vauxhall depot and you suddenly realise you know no one on the bus. Time was when everyone in the queue would have been best mates. Off for pie, mash and jellied eels together before a knees up down the Old Bull and Bush. Worse still, some people may not even be talking English. We didn't beat the Hun in two world wars to hear German spoken on public transport. Then there are all those Polish supermarkets. Who asked them to come over here, pay their taxes and business rates and set up on the high street? They don't even have the grace to relabel their produce in English. And why can't they sell something quintessentially British? Like Lurpak. What do you mean, that's Danish? Butter was invented by the Brits. Truly we have become an 'island of strangers'. There are days when I walk out of my front door and have no idea where I am. Everything has become foreign. Must be the palm trees I planted in my front garden. It can only be days before the thought police come round to have them removed. The same people that were happy to let Keir Starmer echo Enoch Powell's 'strangers in their own country' line from his 'rivers of blood' speech at his Monday press conference. Or maybe No 10 is just a bit clueless and hadn't made the link. This was the great immigration reset. Labour's chance to channel the national mood that we are all fed up with foreigners. Hell, even foreigners have got fed up with foreigners these days. Here in the UK there are definitely hierarchies of foreigners. There are good foreigners and bad foreigners. But if in doubt, just assume the foreigners are bad. It saves time. Keir wanted you to know that Keir has also had his fill of foreigners. Enough is enough. His patience has been tested to the limit. Time to call a halt to the 'squalid experiment in open borders'. A charming way of referring to people who had come to this country to work in the NHS and the care sector. But hey. It was time for Keir to deliver some home truths. He could be silent no more. Some might have thought it quite the coincidence that Labour was choosing this moment to target immigration. Little more than a week after Reform had cleaned up at the local elections. But Keir wanted you to know that Keir had always had it in for foreigners. He wasn't the sort of prime minister who would play politics with other people's lives. No. He had always believed this stuff. At least he had believed it for the past three years or so. There was nothing more Labour than targeting immigrants. 'It's time to take back control,' he began. Something he went on to frequently repeat. A phrase that had also been borrowed from the Conservatives and Reform. The difference was that Keir insisted he meant it. The Tories had lied through their teeth. Promising to reduce immigration while letting it quadruple in the four years between 2019 and 2023. Keir was going to cut immigration by … a lot. He couldn't say how much exactly. Setting targets was to fall into the foreigners' hands. By the end of the parliament you would notice the difference. More white faces everywhere. Even if they were strangers. Not that this was about prejudice. Heaven forbid. It was about fairness. Keir liked diversity, he stressed. It was just that you could have too much of a good thing. Thing was with foreigners, if you did them a favour then sooner or later they would start taking the piss. It's about time migrants started talking English. That way anyone hearing a foreigner moaning about life in Britain could be reported to the authorities. Then to the details. The great Treasury experiment in using mass immigration to fuel economic growth had been disproved, Starmer insisted. The Tories had tried that and the economy had flatlined. It didn't seem to have occurred to Keir that the economy might have been in an even worse state without the immigrants. But there is no place for those kind of awkward counterfactuals in Labour's brave new world. That was one of the benefits of having fewer foreigners. We could go back to having good old British truths. Truths that Brits liked to tell themselves. Truths that weren't contaminated by awkward foreigner facts. Time also for a major shake-up of the care sector. Keir had also had enough of foreigners come over here to do the jobs looking after our elderly men and women that no Brits were prepared to do. Far better to close the care homes and let the old people die in the street. Because that's what the aged and those with dementia would have wanted. Pure Brits to the very last. Same with our hospitals. Better understaffed than fully staffed with the wrong people. And if all this didn't have the desired effect? 'If we need to do more, then mark my words, we will,' Starmer said. That was more like it. Here was an immigration policy to get behind. A prime minister who really meant business. None of this was enough to satisfy Kemi Badenoch. She immediately tweeted that she would have been a lot nastier to immigrants. Conveniently forgetting that she never got round to it while she had the chance in government. But give her another chance and just watch her go. No foreigner would be able to sleep easy in their sleep. Give her a chance and she might even deport herself. As for Nigel Farage, he was just a bit blasé. This was all the stuff he had been saying for years. Finally the Tories and Labour were coming round to his thinking. But, ever the opportunist, he used the occasion to muddy the waters. Most Reform voters think illegal immigration makes up half the national figures. Nige wasn't about to disabuse them. The small boats were full of Iranian terrorists, he said. The race to the bottom is on.
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Starmer's ‘thought police' turning off working class voters, says Labour lord
In his speech on Wednesday, he claimed Labour has isolated its core voter base by dismissing ordinary people who are simply 'in pain' by branding them as 'far-Right' or racist. He called for a 'cultural change' targeting the 'thought policing' of 'acceptable discourse' in order to win back the working class. 'It's been the case for the last 20 to 30 years that I would say that Labour culture has been a hostile environment for working-class people, because if you actually say what you think, you get condemned,' Lord Glasman said. 'And the inability to express the grief ... this is a huge part of the story, is that we see people in pain, and we call them far-Right or populists or nativists or racists or sexists, but no, they're just speaking.' He added: 'Obviously, the first part of the argument is that if we're a patriotic party that's pro-industry, pro-Army, pro-police, we will attract working-class support hugely. 'But there's got to be a cultural change where this thought policing of what is acceptable discourse, the power of HR departments, has got to be targeted ... to create a political space once more, in which the people who created our movement are allowed to speak.' He suggested that even Ernest Bevin, the former Labour foreign secretary, would be forbidden from standing for the party today because he would not be considered 'progressive' enough. A 'working-class insurrection' Last year's general election saw Labour win back dozens of 'Red Wall' seats that backed Boris Johnson to 'Get Brexit Done' in 2019. But any hopes of a working-class revival were dashed at the local elections on May 4, where Reform made huge gains in core Labour heartlands such as Durham and pipped Sir Keir to the post in Runcorn and Helsby. Lord Glasman said the 'only way' for Labour to get the better of Reform, which has declared itself as the new 'party of the working class', is to lead an 'insurrection' of his own. 'As Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows. Reform is a working-class insurrection against the progressive ruling class, and the only way to counter it is for the Labour Government to lead the insurrection,' he said. 'To celebrate the collapse of the era of globalisation, to embrace the space of Brexit, the renewal of the Commonwealth, the restoration of vocation, the primacy of Parliament, the integrity of our peace, the effectiveness of our Armed Forces, the protection of our borders, and the resurrection of Labour as the tribute of the working class.' 'Stain' on the political class Lord Glasman's 'Blue Labour' group, which leans Left on the economy but Right on social issues, has previously urged Sir Keir to go further on grooming gangs by launching a national inquiry into the scandal. On Wednesday, the Labour peer suggested perpetrators of historic child sex abuse should face show trials, referring to the purges of political dissidents carried out by the Soviet Union. 'Rape gangs systematically preying on young girls is what they call bang out of order. It is an abomination that must be purged from the body politic,' he said. 'The fact that it has been considered as s--- happens, rather than out of order, is a stain on me and the entire political class. It is time to resurrect more traditions from socialism, the purge and the show trial. 'The difference being that the accused in this case are not, by definition, innocent. It is a festering wound, it is still going on and it has not been stopped. The role of the televised trial is to witness the reason why it had not been stopped.' Dominant, not hegemonic Lord Glasman also compared the current Labour Government to the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Communist Party during part of the Cold War. 'When you win less than 34 per cent of the vote and gain 71 per cent of the seats in Parliament, it is more reminiscent of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev than the renewal of social democracy. 'The party is dominant, but it is not hegemonic.'
