C’mon, gimme the immigrant chat people. You’re not a racist but all your problems boil down to immigrants. Either they don’t integrate or they do and take your jobs. You didn’t used to think this was such a big issue but when in 2008 the UK introduced a points-based immigration system, you realised you were wrong.
By the 2015 EU migrant crisis, you were starting to harden your views further – so you voted for Brexit and that was an end to that. In fact, for the next fix or so years immigration wasn’t even that big a deal for you. That was a time when you thought Tommy Robinson was an awful thugish racist.
But then you saw lots and lots of posts about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ and there were so, so many commentators in the Daily Mail telling you that these people are fundamentally evil because of their religion and so you started to be concerned about Muslims.
So when it all got ramped up further with the 2018 Immigration White Paper, you reversed your previous assumption that creating ‘hostile environments’ for vulnerable people was wrong and started to think that hostility to people fleeing war was a good thing.
At least at that time there was another party in politics who resisted this rush-to-racism – Corbyn’s Labour Party. Back then there were twice as many people who saw immigration as positive or mixed than those who saw it negatively. But now here comes Starmer and he seems to agree with Theresa May. So that’s a consensus then, yes?
Certainly by 2022 the Tories are cracking down again and starting to talk about deportations to Rwanda and the BBC has Farage on every five minutes. Now, and only now, do we start to see outright positive support for immigration fall. In October 2022 there are still as many people with a wholly positive view of immigration as those with a wholly negative view.
Not for long though, because earlier that year Labour started to tighten its immigration policy. It was about ‘earned status’ now – people had to prove their worth to be allowed to be here. And there were going to be Labour crack-downs on reuniting families and stuff like that. But not running live film shows of the Home Secretary going on immigration raids to celebrate people having their door knocked in and being cuffed by armed agents. Not yet anyway.
When Labour hardened its immigration stance, anti-immigrant sentiment was flat, not rising at all
Labour tightens its policy because it argues that if it doesn’t tighten its policy then everyone will vote Farage. At the time, Reform was on five per cent of the vote so driving that vote share lower is presumably Labour’s goal in 2022.
Here’s the important thing; Labour had no choice because anti-immigrant sentiment was rising. Except when Labour hardened its immigration stance, anti-immigrant sentiment was flat, not rising at all. It is only about a year later we start to see clear evidence of rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Labour is not reflecting change, it is leading change.
And lead it certainly does. By the following year when it is hatching its Border Security Command scheme, Labour is emerging as an anti-immigrant party. Which is a bit odd because even by the time of the 2024 General Election wholly or partly positive views of immigration led wholly negative views by 55 per cent to 38 per cent.
So given that those views dominate among Labour voters, there isn’t really any pressure on Labour to become even more anti-migrant. Yet that’s what they did. By the start of this year wholly positive or mixed views about immigration are still winning out by 52 per cent to 43, but that ain’t good enough for Labour.
That’s when the ‘filming immigration raids like Trump’ stuff really ramps up. It is only a short run there from the ‘island of strangers’ speech by which time the party leader is calling immigration ‘squalid’. Last year him and Cooper were pretending to have flags up in their house (like normal people don’t). By this year they are urging you to put those flags ‘everywhere’.
Yet the more and more Labour panders to anti-immigrant sentiment, the more it rises. Until a shock poll for this year had immigration as the top political concern for a majority of people. I mean, even as of last month there are still more people with a mixed or positive view of immigration than those who think it always negative, but it is high up the political priority list.
There is though a caveat to this; it is only high up the political priority list if you ask people what the ‘country’ needs. If you ask them what they personally need, it comes much, much lower. In fact there is no policy in Britain with anything like that much disconnect – the gap between ‘the country needs’ and ‘would improve my life’ is bigger with immigration than any other subject by miles.
And how did Labour’s ‘stop Reform’ strategy go? They’re back down below five per cent support are they? Meanwhile Labour has ‘immigration-proofed’ itself to such an extent that it doesn’t need to start making up utterly mental ideas like confiscating women’s jewellery, correct? Because from there the only escalation would be surgical, a kidney-for-citizenship deal solving immigration and part of the NHS crisis in one go.
There is a phenomenon in political strategy generally known as ‘cues’. These are things that prompt us to say things or think things. This is where we are being nudged towards what we are meant to assume is the ‘correct’ position on things. The weird thing about political cues is that they don’t change our actual outlook that much, only how we phrase it.
What is clearly happening in Britain is that an appalling combination of the far-right in the US, the Daily Mail and its racist propaganda machine and the fucking Labour Party have operated to bring Tommy Robinson out of the cold. To ‘counter’ him, Labour are normalising his talking points. Those then become social cues, things people say.
Do they mean them? Not really. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has complained about immigrants in front of my partner (who is Mexican and not white). But my partner is really nice so without fail her shocked or scared or upset facial expression triggers a sudden response of ‘oh, but not you Cristina’. As if that makes it alright.
If they want foreigners deported but not the foreigners they know, that very strongly suggests they are responding to social cues. You can see the same thing in young men in the US; they are actually becoming more liberal all the time, in their day to day lives. The anti-immigrant narrative exists separate to their experience of immigrants in their actual lives.
Labour has not been following public opinion in hardening its stance on immigration, it is leading it, shaping it
But in time social cues do change how you think. As has been shown over and over again, if you create a consistent and hostile enough narrative about ‘blue eyes being a sign of evil’, eventually people will find blue eyes to be a sign of evil, simply through repetition.
People don’t dissect all of this enough. You all know (or should) that every study done in Europe shows that centrist parties echoing anti-immigrant sentiment only normalises and boosts their far right opponents. What I’m trying to show you is that you don’t need a retrospective study to show you that, in Britain you can see it happening in real time.
Labour has not been following public opinion in hardening its stance on immigration, it is leading it, shaping it. Like I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I’ve reached the point where I can only assume that Starmer’s Labour wants to be a hard-core anti-immigration party and is using Reform as an excuse to do it.
Why? Because I’ve also concluded that the Starmer project is at heart a Zionist, anti-Muslim project and the evidence for that is stacked high – Forde’s ‘hierarchy of racism‘, a senior aid calling Muslim councillors leaving Labour ‘the fleas‘ and he’s still in employment, Starmer claiming he’s good with a medieval siege on Palestinian civilians, the blanket failure to comprehend that the ban on violent Israeli football thugs wasn’t to protect the Israelis from the Muslims…
Here’s my question though; who is representing the majority? The majority who don’t think like this. The majority of people in the islands of Britain who can go to the supermarket and not want to deport every brown face they see? Who represents them now? Not Labour.
It is the one thing I give the SNP credit for, the one stance where they genuinely and consistent do make a moral case and do make the right decisions. Labour is now fighting Reform and the Tories for the racist vote in Britain and it is resulting in their destruction as a political force. For what they have done to the debate over race and racism in this country, they wholly deserve it.