Why "Island of Strangers" still makes me furious

I was disgusted when Keir Starmer channelled Britain's most notorious racist Enoch Powell to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments in his "Island of Strangers" speech, and I'm still furious about it now.

You may know this or you may not. I’m white-British and from a working class background in the north of England.

On paper I’m probably the kind of person that Keir Starmer’s focus group wonks thought they would be appealing to when they put that diabolical "Island of Strangers" speech in his hand, and told him to read it out to the nation.

That speech disgusted me, not just for the divisive anti-immigrant rabble rousing; the cynicism; and the dishonesty, but for other reasons too.

I grew up in what was as close to white-British monoculture as it’s possible to imagine. I barely even knew that languages other than English existed until I was well into primary school. Black and Asian Brits were fairly familiar sights on the television, but I never came across them in real life.

In adult life I’ve lived in real multicultural places: Leicester, Sheffield, and Leeds-Bradford, and come to realise what a culturally isolated and unusual upbringing I had "oop north".

One of my favourite things about living in Leeds-Bradford was meeting Asian Brits with even stronger Yorkshire accents than my own. How fucking dare anyone imply that they’re not just as much Brits and Yorkshire folk as I am, and that their being here is somehow "pulling our country apart"?

Look at the aspects of British culture I’m most fond of, and the influence of immigrants is absolutely essential.

The old trope that "British food is rubbish" is an outdated and inaccurate legacy of the austere post war period of shortages, rations, and grotesque tinned meat. Nowadays our cuisine absolutely rocks, thanks in a large part to the contribution of immigrants.

Our major cities are bursting with cuisine from all over the world; pretty much every small town has far more diversity of food options than similarly sized places across Europe; and it’s possible to find amazing traditional British food too, if you know where to look. Especially places that add little twists of multicultural fusion to traditional British fare.

In music the immigrant influence is perhaps even more profound. How is it possible to enjoy genres like House, Drum n’ Bass, Northern Soul, Dubstep, British funk, British blues, rock, trip hop, etc without knowing that we’d probably still be Morris Dancing if it wasn’t for overseas influences, and especially the contributions of the British Afro-Caribbean community? (no insult intended to Morris Dancers).

I don’t think I even need to go into the contribution that Commonwealth Brits and people from immigrant backgrounds have made to British sporting prowess, do I?

To summarise this part: Screw anyone who tries to make out that immigration has been bad for Britain. It’s made our culture so much stronger and richer.

Are there bad people with immigrant backgrounds? Of course there are, just like there are diabolical people from white-British backgrounds too.

Why are some multicultural areas so run down and full of crime? Maybe ask the capitalists and politicians who shut down the local industries and left these communities for dead for so many decades?

Why do immigrants often end up doing low-paid exploitative work? Maybe that’s a question for the exploitative employers who pay such paltry salaries that only desperate people would want to work for them?

Why have immigrants come here? Maybe because our ancestors looted their countries during the age of empire, and they followed their own nation’s wealth over here to the so-called "motherland"? Maybe because they’re refugees fleeing countries that our own political class have ruined with disastrous foreign policy interventions (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, post-colonial Africa …)?

I just hate the racist bullshit, and I hate that Keir Starmer chooses to imitate Reform and their National Front style rabble rousing, rather than opposing it and offering a the better alternative of investing in Britain and raising the living standards of the majority, no matter what their class or ethnic background.

I despise the idea that white working-class people like me can be won over by divisively channelling Enoch Powell, the National Front, the BNP, and Reform. It’s so fucking patronising.

I’m not angry that Britain has got worse because my friendly and polite taxi driver is of Pakistani origin; the local shop is now run by a nice Chinese couple; the guy who unblocked my drains last year is from Poland; my new neighbour’s grandfather was born in Kenya or wherever; or that refugees from war-torn lands try to seek safe haven in our country.

I’m angry that Britain has got worse because an out-of-touch and elitist political class have been imposing ruinous hard-right economic dogma on our great nation for almost five decades, to the detriment of almost everyone bar themselves, and the mega-rich class that bankroll their political operations.

I’m angry that the political class that has inflicted all of this damage on the UK consider people like me with such disdain that they think we’ll buy their blame-shifting propaganda about immigrants ruining our country, when it was them, and their greedy capitalist buddies that screwed us all over.

The "strangers" aren’t first, second, or third generation immigrants, they’re the out-of-touch and self-serving Westminster establishment elitists who consider themselves so much better than the riff raff and rabble they see us as. They live separate lives from the rest of us; disregard our welfare; and only consider us at all when they’re trying to trick us into voting them into power.

I’m also irritated because immigration rabble-rousing is such a shockingly naive tactic for the Labour Party to be pursuing. The people who are so pickled in right-wing propaganda that they fall for this kind of xenophobic Faragist blame-shifting are NEVER GOING TO VOTE LABOUR anyway.

Then there’s the way Starmer’s morphed from defending minority communities from hateful extreme-right rhetoric when he was running to become Labour leader, to deliberately imitating it now.

The man is a moral vacuum. Just when our country needs a strong and principled leader to guide us though these challenging times, we’re stuck with this serially dishonest haircut in a suit, who just mindlessly reads out whatever his handlers tell him to.

I’m white-British and proud of my working class origins, and I abhor racism and xenophobia.

I’ve got far more in common with any first generation immigrant than I have with the Westminster elitists and greedy capitalist looters who have wrecked our country.

And it makes me fucking furious that Keir Starmer and his obnoxious policy gonks think that I’m so dumb that they can win me over with blame-shifting anti-immigrant rabble rousing, to disguise the fact that they’re vehemently opposed to radically changing the Westminster status quo to prioritise materially improving conditions for people like us, and the communities that we live in.