[Robin McAlpine Blog] Starmer’s migrant-hatred is economically illiterate

[ALBA-Bot]

Starmer's migrant-hatred is economically illiterate

It’s hard to work out what we’re supposed to think Starmer is. He runs two personalities at once. One of them he’s like a kid with ADHD in a prejudice shop ("I hate the disabled! No I hate foreigners! No I hate newts and people with HIV!"). The other is a stable, technocratic statesman who is here to save us from Reform.

The combination of this makes him sound like an early form of voice synthesis which was trained on hate speech. It spins between boring and comical and utterly disgusting in the blink of an eye.

I don’t want to waste your time here; you’ve heard Starmer’s intention to end the ‘squalid open borders’ policy he just made up. We’ve been through ‘it wasn’t a Nazi salute’ with Elon and now Keir has us doing ‘it wasn’t intentional that I used imagery from Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech’ (hint guys; if you find yourself in either category, you’re definitely doing something wrong).

By now you’ll have decided if he’s ridding us of Muslims to save us from Islam or whether he’s a far-right-pandering monster whose lies about who he is and what he stand for are now so overwhelmingly blatant we just assume them.

This isn’t about the rights and wrongs of his immigration policy on a moral basis nor another article about how care homes won’t be able to operate. It’s a more straightforward point; this literally doesn’t make sense in the terms in which he’s set it out.

Or let me put that another way. Starmer has made clear he hates bats and newts because he wants you to understand that he’s not into that namby-pamby high-quality development, he’s a build it fast and stack them high kind of guy. But that leaves him with a problem; building fast and stacking high in this economy needs a lot of migrants.

Starmer is going to have to decide whether he hates bats and newts more (his symbol for rejecting high-quality development) or wether he hates foreigners more (pretending this is because he’s rejecting the low-quality economy) because he can’t hate all possible economic futures equally. He’s going to have to choose. Or rather, he’s not, he’s just going to fail and ruin lives on his way out the door.

You can’t just will problems away or magic them with blunt policy

In fact what Starmer has done in Britain is almost exactly what Trump has done in the US, just with a different slant. I’m not even saying either of them is necessarily wrong, I’m saying that you can’t just will problems away or magic them with blunt policy. You need to get your hands dirty, and clearly neither of them want dirty hands.

Let me explain. Trump isn’t wrong; American doesn’t make anything any more and its economy is so heavily reliant on imports just to function at a basic level that they could be held economic hostage by China at will. In fact Trump tried to do it the other way round (hold China hostage) and China simply made clear to him who is whose captor.

His problem is not that China undermined the US, it’s that Wall Street did. Wall Street demands a return on capital (profits made from owning money) that is so high now that you can only meet their demands through speculation. That rules out the productive economy. To put it another way, it can be a factory or it can be a casino but not both.

So he needs to force Wall Street to accept a long-term decline in return on capital and he needs to force that money to slow down and invest in the real economy. And then he needs to help the real economy establish itself via an industrial strategy. But that’s a lot of work, so he’s tried to bypass it via tariffs – and that has failed already.

Back to Starmer. Equally, he’s not wrong that Britain created a low-pay economy and to do that it needed a large ‘surplus army of labour’ and to create that they relied heavily on migrant labour. There has been a daft war between two sides, one who thinks migration is inherently ‘good’ and one who thinks it’s inherently ‘bad’. They’re both just wrong – sort of.

The pro-immigration people point to areas of the UK where growth is highest and correlate those with where immigration is highest to show they ‘go together’. Setting aside cause and effect (if you’re here for work, go to the strongest economic region), it ignores the ‘unit effect’.

Which is to say that if you divide the growing wealth by the number of people who are sharing the wealth you can differentiate whether something is getting bigger or whether there is simply more of it (think ‘giant rabbit’ or ‘more normal rabbits’). And what you’ll find is that there is simply more of it. Wealth per person has been static. No-one in the economy has gained from this.

If Starmer wants to make these low-pay sectors fair-pay sectors then in the short term he’s going to have to sacrifice GDP growth

Who has gained is whomever makes money from extracting from the economy (i.e. those who own capital or have wealth). It doesn’t have to get ‘bigger’ for them – if there is more of it. These figures don’t show growth and they don’t show development, they show expansion. Only the ownership class and the tax-taking class really like this.

The other side tries to argue that immigration has undercut wages. The evidence here is much slimmer. Yes, this has happened in some sectors (construction, hospitality, care), but these were low-pay sectors in the first place (not so much construction which was a skill shortage problem). It kind of looks like migrants are reducing the wages in these sectors but what is really happening is that low regulation means employers are reducing wages and then demanding immigration to sustain the industry.

Care home owners are not going to take smaller profits to pay better wages to attract domestic employees. Government isn’t going to pay more. All that will happen is that standards are squeezed – so care gets worse and wages don’t improve. If migrants were undercutting pay on their own, pay would rise when they depart. That isn’t what is going to happen.

But Starmer isn’t entirely wrong. These are industries which survive by attracting low-pay workers to do jobs which are unattractive to the locals. That isn’t good. But Starmer has already made clear that he is a growth at any cost person. If he wants to make these low-pay sectors fair-pay sectors then in the short term he’s going to have to sacrifice GDP growth.

Because (dramatic music swells), the only way on god’s earth that this can happen is if he raises regulatory standards on low pay employers and that is approaching something like the opposite of Starmer’s whole thing. He’d be back to paying people to protect newts and bats, that sort of thing. And he’s been clear about this attitude to bats and newts.

So what is really happening? Nothing is happening. It’s just that numb-nut Morgan MacSweeney again. The guy’s never-ended reserves of shallow misunderstanding of modernity mean that he just makes Starmer say things about people he thinks he needs to signal hatred for in his ‘look man, the data doesn’t support this in any sense at all’ rush to court Reform voters.

We really have reached full postmodern politics. There is nothing under the surface. It’s just surface, all of it. Starmer’s failure is shaping up to be epic. How are his plans supposed to work? How is any of this supposed to work? Or, to put it really simply, does no-one in government think using their brains any more? Or just their hatred.

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