Robert Jenrick claims immigration has already turned UK into ‘island of strangers’
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, was also doing an interview round this morning. Asked about Keir Starmer’s warning in his speech yesterday that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” because of the impact of mass immigration, Jenrick claimed Britain was already like this. He told Times Radio:
I think it’s true. In fact, I think in some places we already are. Aggressive levels of mass migration have made us more divided.
If you look at communities in our country, for example central Bradford, 50% of people were born outside of the United Kingdom; in central Luton, 46% of residents arrived in the past decade.
There are places like Dagenham where the white British population has fallen by almost 60% in the last 25 years.
People in many parts of our country are experiencing profound change as a result of the levels of migration that we’ve seen, and we’ve got to bring that back to the historic levels that we enjoyed as a country which enabled us to be a well-integrated and united country, rather than the one that we’re seeing today.
(A pedant might point out that, even though Enoch Powell and Keir Starmer were making a rhetorical point when they talked about “strangers”, technically we are an island of strangers anway. There are almost 70 million of us here, and most of us only personally know hundreds, or at best a few thousands, of our fellow citizens.)
Cooper defends Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ line but says she does not know if he was aware of Enoch Powell echo
Good morning. Yesterday Keir Starmer unveiled the government’s immigration white paper, a significant policy intervention on a topic that is near the top of the public’s list of concerns. Yet today the debate is dominated not by the actual policies – even though they could cause big problems in some sectors of the economy, as we explain here – but by the language Starmer used to defend them.
To recap, in one section of his speech yesterday Starmer said:
Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.
This generated huge controversy not just because of the argument (some people don’t accept the claim that high levels of immigration undermine social cohesion), but because the argument and the language echo what Enoch Powell said in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968. Powell said:
While, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.
Starmer was clearly echoing Powell. But what is not clear is whether, for Starmer and/or the person who write the speech, this was intentional, unconscious (people can remember phrases without recalling where they came from), or complete coincidence (politicians more than 50 years apart, making a similar argument, by deploying the same, not-particularly-unusual word).
Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech was denounced as racist as soon as he delivered it (although not so much for his comments about native Britons finding mass migration unsettling, where many people would agree he had a point, but for his suggestion that it would culminate in violence, oppression and social collapse, where he has turned out to be hopelessly wrong) and it is still widely viewed as abhorrent. Yesterday Starmer was condemned by leftwingers for saying something that sounded Powellite.
But ministers have defended him. Asked about this on Newsnight last night, Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, said comparing the Starmer speech to Powell’s was “wrong”. She went on:
Labour and Labour governments have always listened to people in terms of their concerns about their security and the opportunities that they want to have for themselves and their children. And when we see something that we understand that people believe is unfair, then we are going to take action on that. That’s what the British people expect us to do, that’s what Labour governments do.
This morning Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, was giving interviews, and on the Today programme she said she agreed with Smith. She went on:
I don’t think it’s right to make those comparisons [between Starmer’s speech and Powell’s]. It’s completely different. And the prime minister said yesterday, I think almost in the same breath, talked about the diverse country that we are and that being part of our strength.
Cooper said that, when Starmer talked about the rise of Britain being “an island of strangers”, he was referring to “the importance of recognising the impact … [of] this big increase in net migration, and also that we’ve got to have the support for integration, support for English language speaking, a lot of the measures that are set out as part of that white paper”.
Asked if Starmer or his speech writers knew that the “island of strangers” phrase echoed Powell, Cooper said she did not know.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
10am: Thames Water bosses give evidence to the Commons environment committee about reforming the water sector.
11.30am: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: MPs begin a debate on an assisted dying bill.
3.15pm: Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, gives evidence to the Commons business committee about industrial strategy.
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