Guess what’s ‘fascism’ now? Expecting people who live in the UK to speak English. Yes, if you think migrants should learn the lingo of the place where they hope to set up home, apparently you’re a far-right nutter. Witness the digital wrath from the crackpot left in response to Keir Starmer’s comments saying, ‘If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English’. ‘Enoch Powell!’, they wailed. ‘Shameful and dangerous’, they cried. One Remoaner is even thinking of fleeing this racist hellscape and moving to France. Okay, but learn French.
The virtual frenzy over Starmer’s migration plan has been insane. No sooner had the PM unveiled his white paper promising to reduce immigration than leftists across the land were rage-tweeting from the fainting couch. They accused him of pandering to the ‘far right’, of mimicking notorious Tory Enoch Powell, of engaging in ‘anti-migrant rhetoric’. All he suggested was that net migration should be reduced, that we should err towards migrants with certain skills, and that you should have some grasp of the local tongue before you come here. It’s hardly Himmler, is it?
It was his use of the phrase ‘island of strangers’ that really got the digital left frothing. If we don’t fix the immigration issue, he said, we ‘risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together’. Normal people knew what he meant: that Britain is at risk of Balkanising, of becoming a patchwork of cultural identities rather than a nation cohered around shared virtues and visions. Yet all that the race-obsessed dweebs of the overeducated left could hear was bigotry. ‘He’s calling migrants strangers?’, they howled, on a loop, for 24 hours.
Someone clocked that Enoch Powell also used the word ‘strangers’ in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. Immigration risks turning Britain’s ‘existing population’ into ‘strangers in their own country’, Powell said. It’s official, cried Corbynistas still sore over the trouncing of Magic Grandpa at the ballot box in 2019: Starmer’s a Powellite! He’s ‘imitating’ Powell, said Zarah Sultana, the Member of Parliament for Zarah Sultana. He’s a ‘disgrace’, she said; his rhetoric ‘puts lives at risk’. What low moral blackmail, to imply that criticism of mass immigration might lead to violence. The ‘disgrace’ here is not Starmer’s comments but Sultana’s ghoulish marshalling of the spectre of death to try to silence them.
Eco-oddball Zack Polanski of the Green Party got 13,000 likes for a dumb meme featuring Powell alongside Starmer. Labour MP Nadia Whittome, plummy darling of the post-class left, accused Starmer of whipping up ‘anti-migrant rhetoric’ and mimicking ‘the scaremongering of the far right’. Labour left bigwig John McDonnell tweeted that, as ‘the grandson of an Irish migrant’, he thinks Starmer’s immigration chatter ‘shockingly echoes the divisive language of Enoch Powell’. Well, as the son of Irish migrants I think it’s batshit insane to damn every critical comment about immigration as Powell-style hate.
There’s a twisted irony in all this Powell-shaming of Starmer, which is that it’s the left that is now in the grip of a racialised ‘foreboding’ not dissimilar to Powell’s. People forget there was a double bigotry in his 1968 speech: there was his migrant-bashing, of course, but there was also his elitist dread that England’s natives would rise up in racist fury and spill ‘rivers of blood’. Today, such classist terror is more common on the woke left than the Tory right. Indeed, when Zarah Sultana says Starmer’s ‘sickening’ comments risk stirring up ‘anti-migrant rhetoric that puts lives at risk’, what’s she saying exactly? Does she foresee rivers of blood?
The patrician conceit of the Starmer-bashers is summed up in their use of the term ‘dog whistle’. He’s blowing a ‘xenophobic dog whistle’, they say. What a dehumanising term. The implication is that there are ‘dogs’ out there – makes a change from calling them ‘gammon’, I suppose – who are so grossly dumb and racist that they respond to political speeches in the same way mutts respond to whistles. That is, instinctively, wildly, their teeth bared for blood. There’s far more bigotry in the rage over Starmer’s plan than in the plan itself: it has exposed just how much the bourgeois left dreads the oiks.
What are these faux-leftist influencers saying? That there should be no rules at all on immigration? That fortifying one’s borders and making demands of new arrivals is by definition racist? Do they not know how unhinged that sounds? It is unheard of in human history for a society to say any Tom, Dick or Harry can rock up and become a citizen regardless of work ability, language skills, or willingness to obey the law. It boggles the mind how staggeringly out of touch ‘the left’ is. They’ve gone from saying you can be a lesbian with a cock to saying it’s fascism to think migrants should learn English. That’s not anti-racism – it’s unreason.
I find the demonisation of integration profoundly chilling. Surely it is better both for society and for migrants themselves if they feel a part of the nation and embrace our language and values. The left so often mistakes atomisation for ‘diversity’. It thinks the existence of ethnic enclaves is a victory for human variety when it often speaks to Britain’s failure to bring migrants on board with the national project. Wanting new arrivals to speak English and feel British is not ‘far right’ – it’s the decent, welcoming thing to do.
In its fury with Starmer, the left has exposed its neo-segregationist tendencies. It seems these phoney progressives are content to see migrants live separately from mainstream Britain and be deaf to the language we speak. So long as the Romanian au pair fetches their kids from school on time and the Pakistani waiter gets their order right, who cares about their actual lives, right? I’ll say it: treating migrants as mere symbols of diversity so that the middle classes feel like they live in an exotic new world is what is really racist here.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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