I will not vote for someone hostile to immigrants

'We are not the country of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. In the coming weeks we must take the fight to those who challenge our values. Labour is an internationalist party and always will be.'

Keir Starmer, 2019

I had a fairly idyllic childhood in urban Bristol. I happened to grow up living with huge numbers of different people, probably from about 10-15 different countries (that's a rough estimate - not sure I can remember them all!) I had friends from pretty much every different class background, and I went to a secondary school so racially diverse that in some of my classes I, as a white person, was actually in the minority. It's only been during my adulthood that I've come to realise how privileged I was to grow up like this. It's given me the advantage of being able to relate to all kinds of people without seeing them as fundamentally different kinds of humans - which is something that most of us do, even if we don't like to admit it.

In my early twenties I was a student at the University of Essex, and it was this experience in particular that made me realise how flawed my view of the world had been. I had grown up naively believing that whilst incidents of racism still happened, it was predominantly all in the past and that we were swiftly moving in the right direction - even the President of the United States was a person of colour! Then I moved to Colchester, and this optimism died quite quickly. I had to walk past this extremely racist political poster every morning on my way to Uni:

Colchester is a garrison town, which tends to lend itself to quite extreme right-wing opinion. I remember a conversation with someone once where I told them about my experiences of sometimes being in the minority of white people at school, and their reaction was, 'Wow... didn't that make you feel weird and uncomfortable?' I was quite shocked by this at the time, but thinking back it actually says a lot about our knowledge of our own inherent racism; that person must have known, deep down, that the life of an ethnic minority person is often quite miserable largely because of the racist majority, therefore they presume that anyone in any minority group must feel that way. Whereas the reality, of course, is that if you grow up in a diverse community, you know nothing different and the idea of feeling uncomfortable for that kind of reason just doesn't occur to you.

This is not even taking into account that during the time I was a student, there was a lot of discourse within the media about EU membership, culminating in the 2016 EU referendum. There was a great deal of noisy opinion being shared about this by my fellow students, and the Leave vote happened a week after I graduated. I was distraught. Then later that year, the supremely racist and extreme-right Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. I was distraught again, but in a bit more of a cynical way - I'd come to expect it by this point.

I don't wish to speak badly about Colchester, because I did make some very close friends there - it was simply that living in that town caused me to realise that far from my perception that I'd arrived just in time to see racism disappear from our culture forever, I'd just happened to grow up in one of the very few progressive bubbles that happen to exist from place to place. This is not a Colchester thing - it's a thing that exists overwhelmingly across the UK and the world at large, and I just happened to have grown up not really witnessing it. I consider myself really fortunate to have had that - but it also made me very naive, and seeing a bit of the rest of the world and the attitudes of the people who live there was an important wake-up call. We still have a fundamentally callous and racist society, and this is reflected in the attitudes of our politicians.

This week, the leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) where he said, and I quote, 'our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency. To start investing more in training up workers who are already here' (you can watch the speech in full here). Steve Topple of the Canary points out in this article that Starmer may as well have said 'those bloody foreigners coming over here and stealing our jobs'. There were other points to this that I will go into shortly, but it's worth pointing out before I do that this kind of rhetoric is so problematic that even Nigel Farage has endorsed it, saying that it's straight out of UKIP's 2015 manifesto (let's recall, the manifesto that ultimately caused then Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a referendum on EU membership, turning an immensely complex issue into a slapdash yes/no question, and we've lived with the consequences ever since.)

Farage does acknowledge that Keir Starmer may not have meant what he said, and I have no idea if he did or not. Politics is such a dirty game at the moment that I don't think we can rely on nearly any politician to tell the truth at any given time. This article from the BBC highlights the incoherence of Starmer's position rather well - he knows that in reality, reducing immigration would be a disaster waiting to happen. He's trying to pander to two demographics people at once - firstly, figures in big business who rely on cheap labour from immigrants, and secondly, typical Conservative voters, who most likely have racist tendencies and are hoping to hear a politician promising to get rid of all those foreigners (promises that right-wing politicians have been making for decades, and it still hasn't happened). There are two problems with this: the first is that as I said above, these two positions are completely incoherent, which isn't a good look for a party leader; and the second is that these two demographics of people are probably the most destructive to our society, and by pandering to either of them Starmer is proving himself to be a cynical and morally corrupt human being. The choice should not be between a) getting rid of all the foreigners or b) using the foreigners as cheap labour. Both of these positions are actually pretty racist in themselves, in that they remove the agency of immigrants and consider them to either be a nuisance or a means to an end.

I wrote the other day about how I consider Labour to be an extremely racist party, in some respects even more so than the Tories. I do not say this lightly, as I have seen how badly racist the Tories are, and I don't want to water that down at all. But for quite a few years now, Labour has been trying to out-Tory the Tories on some things. I will remind you of this mug that some genius thought it a good idea to bring out in 2015:

Remember, they lost that election very badly, and the reason they lost it badly is because this kind of thing doesn't fly. People with these kinds of horrible opinions will just flock back to the Tories (especially when the Tories are emulating UKIP). Meanwhile, this kind of rhetoric will turn away anyone who actually wants us to embrace immigration and to treat these people as legitimate human beings who are welcome here.

But even worse than the racist attitudes is the cynicism involved. Look at that quote I've put at the top. Just look at it. It was only three years ago that Keir Starmer said that. In as little as 1,291 days, Keir Starmer has gone from publicly decrying the kind of attitudes espoused by Nigel Farage to being commended by him for echoing them. And this is not an isolated incident either. Labour lost the 2019 General Election largely for being seen as sore losers for calling for another referendum on our EU membership or lack thereof. This was the only major difference between this manifesto and the far more successful 2017 one, and Starmer was the Shadow Brexit Secretary at the time, meaning he is largely to blame for the outcome. It's quite staggering to see someone so opposed to UKIP's ideals that he'd call to reverse the electoral decision UKIP was heavily involved in creating go to actively peddling the same kind of shocking rhetoric.

Keir Starmer has no consistent political viewpoints. He blows in the wind, aligns himself with whoever appears to be powerful at the time and has absolutely no shame. As Owen Jones points out in the video below, Boris Johnson may have been an awful Prime Minister, but at least his bid to become Conservative Party leader was honest; Keir Starmer deliberately misled the Labour membership about what kind of leader he was going to be, and has ridden back on all of his ten pledges. Whether he actually holds racist views, I cannot say without knowing him personally - but he is trying to align himself with people who do. This is dangerous and highly concerning.

I'm going to finish with a rather good video from Owen Jones concerning exactly what causes the current issues regarding immigration and skilled workers (which is a valid concern, even if the solution is unethical and won't work anyway) but before I go I'll just clarify why so many foreign people choose to come to the UK, as opposed to other countries. The reason is that they mostly speak English. And the reason they mostly speak English is that historically, we invaded their homelands. When we spread our language around the world as effectively as we have, the consequence is plenty of people choosing to come where they speak the language. And personally, I don't have a problem with any immigrants coming here whatsoever - but if anyone does, they may want to get involved in climate activism, because we haven't even scratched the surface of how many refugees will be trying to escape their home countries when climate change really takes hold.

I will not vote for anyone who is remotely hostile to immigration. It's harmful rhetoric, largely untrue and deliberately misrepresents the causes of people's problems.

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