The backlash against Keir Starmer has begun. Some senior figures within the Labour party have criticised the Prime Minister’s warning on Monday that Britain is in danger of becoming an ‘island of strangers’.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Eluned Morgan, the first minister of Wales, are among those who believe the PM is being alarmist. Morgan said one should not use ‘divisive language when it comes to immigration.’ She added that reducing immigration, in the manner Starmer outlined on Monday, would damage Wales’s care sector.
And also presumably the country’s hairdressing industry. Yesterday it was reported that the town of Porth in south Wales (population 5,970) will soon have its 14th barber shop, this one run by a Kurdish businessman.
Among the general public, however, the response to Starmer’s speech is one of weary scepticism. Heard it all before. From Tony Blair to the Tories.
It is almost 20 years to the day since Blair – campaigning in the 2005 election – told the country: ‘Concern over asylum and immigration is not about racism. It is about fairness… We do get it. We are listening.’
To prove it, Blair promised that if re-elected Labour ‘will put in place strict controls that work.’ A failure to do so, he explained, would be a betrayal of the British people and a potential problem further down the line. ‘I never want this to be an issue that divides our country that sets communities against each other,’ he said.
Blair blew it. So did David Cameron, Boris Johnson et al. Will Keir Starmer also blow what could be Britain’s last chance to ‘bring back control’? If he is in any doubt as to what is at stake, he should look across the Channel to France.
Here is a country on the brink. For many years I have chronicled in Coffee House the gradual disintegration of la Belle France: the riots, the rapes, the murders, the segregation and the religious unrest.
Others were doing it well before me. The historian Georges Bensoussan was the first. In 2002, he published The Lost Territories of the Republic, in which he described how a parallel society had taken root in many French inner cities. Bensoussan was ostracised by polite society as a result. Only after a wave of Islamist terrorism swept France in 2015 was he allowed to rejoin the debate.
In an interview Bensoussan said the cultural and political left have ‘locked us into a state of timidity. It has become almost impossible to denounce certain dangers without being accused of belonging to the camp of evil.’
A second warning was sounded by Gérard Collomb, who was the first of Emmanuel Macron’s many interior ministers. The former Socialist MP lasted a year before he resigned in 2018, worn down by the challenges of his job. ‘What I read every morning in the police notes reflects a very pessimistic situation,’ he said in his resignation speech. ‘We have five or six years to avoid the worst.’
If France didn’t act, said Collomb, then while ‘today we live side by side, I fear that tomorrow we may be living face to face.’
A growing number of French believe civil war is inevitable. Britain has not reached that point, yet
Macron didn’t heed the warning. Illegal and legal immigration has reached record levels in the years since, and the rates of violent crimes are also unprecedented. France is now living face to face.
So far this year a rabbi has been beaten up on the street, a Muslim murdered in his mosque and a priest confronted by a mob who threatened to burn down his church.
The emergency services are struggling to cope. They are frequently targeted because they wear the uniform of the Republic, and therefore they are seen in the ‘lost territories’ as the enemy.
In the latest incident at the weekend, a firefighter was seriously injured as he tried to stop a joyrider. According to Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, the driver then ‘did a U-turn, rolled down the window and spat at the victim.’
This incident didn’t happen in a suburb of Paris, or in Grenoble or Marseille. It happened in Evian-les-Bains, the famous spa town frequented the rich and famous. Anarchy is everywhere.
Retailleau visited the scene of the crime and depicted a country split in two. ‘On the one hand, there is the France of courage, the France of commitment: the France of firefighters,’ he said. ‘And then there are the barbarians.’
These ‘barbarians’ hate France. They hate its laws, its institutions and its people, as Georges Bensoussan detailed in 2002. He was accused of being a ‘racist’, as Keir Starmer now is for describing Britain as an ‘island of strangers’.
A growing number of French believe some form of civil war is inevitable. Britain has not yet reached that point, but it is on the same trajectory as its neighbour.
As Keir Starmer issued his warning on Monday, numerous small boats arrived in Dover carrying hundreds of migrants. Most were young men. Is it their intention to become carers in South Wales, or will they become barbers? Do they wish Britain and its people well, or harm? We have no idea.
This is Britain’s last chance to ‘put in place strict controls that work’, as Tony Blair promised in 2005. He broke his promise. If Starmer breaks his, Britain’s future will be as bleak as France’s.
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