The UK's political map is changing almost overnight. Starmer will have to get tough

Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of the Victorian 19th century and the beginning of the 20th reputedly said that “whatever happens will be for the worse”. Hence “don’t do things”; and do your best to keep things as they are. Certainly Keir Starmer must recognise this condition as his 10 months in office has proved. Financial crisis, military crisis and then the crisis that he swore blind to end: the crisis of people making their way across the English Channel from France. And the enormous cost to a stretched treasury, intent on cutting costs not increasing them. 

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Starmer was certainly bold and forthright and critical of the last administration’s handling of the small boats crossing. The displaced of other countries arriving to run up costs in supporting them in the UK. He was going to get in amongst the boat-organising gangs, obliterate their ability to function and solve the problem that has foxed many others. But it’s got worse.

And Reform UK, building on the sense of dislocation that boats and illegal immigration throws up, are nipping at his heels in forthcoming elections. Reform becomes a party of the disgruntled – and it would seem that many of Labour’s former base are joining the disgruntled and changing the political map of the UK almost overnight. 

Lord Salisbury was largely talking about world affairs, but Starmer’s currents that drive him into heavy waters are deeply domestic. Even to the extent that his claim that we are becoming a “nation of strangers” has led some to compare it to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968. This does seem an extreme response to Starmer’s desire to get tough with the boats, but one can see he is caught by his inability to end the arrivals and solve the problem of those who already have arrived. 

In the same way that his government is going to get tough about rough sleeping in London, by awarding the mayor of London £17 million to create a network of access hubs for street homelessness. And to try to work on preventing people falling on the street, as well as handling people more efficiently when they do. The resultant pledge by Sadiq Khan to end London street homelessness by 2030 is one that has been made by every administration I have known since 1991 when we started Big Issue. 

Starmer will, it seems, have to devise newer and tougher responses to the uses of public money: should he spend it on thousands of new arrivals? Or on homelessness and its public face in our streets? Or on reviving worn-down economies in numerous cities? Or building up the armed forces to protect us from an increasingly unstable world order?

There are strong signs that Labour face a serious threat from Reform, who are doing well in Labour strongholds where the electorate have expected Labour to protect them from the inherited poverty that has dogged Britain since the collapse of industry, orchestrated under the Thatcher government. And where uneasiness about the boats and immigrant hostels has caused a growing disdain for government’s inability to address poverty. 

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I remember the year I was radicalised aged 21 into a revolutionary Marxist; followed the next year by Powell’s speech. “Disembowel Enoch Powell” became the most popular slogan on the demos I went on – to register my disgust at his turning on the people who, when he was minister for transport and then health in the 1950s, he had visited in the Caribbean to invite them to come and work for Britain’s recovery from war. And to then a decade later lace his argument in such incendiary terms that cast him as Britain’s premier racist. 

But what shocked us leftists was the response of the London dockers who came out in great numbers to support Powell. One of the most organised sections of the British working class, with the leader Jack Dash a communist, the left was let down by the very class they had set their hearts on liberating. 

I was in a small revolutionary group at the time and the idea of parts of the working class having ‘false consciousness’ gained traction. I was not surprised because virtually all of the working-class people I grew up with were prejudiced against Black people and Jews; and in fact anyone who was not like them. My brothers and parents celebrated Powell’s denunciation of the West Indians who had become their neighbours. For it was not the posher parts of London that absorbed the new intake, but the poorest, most troubled parts of the capital. 

My own Notting Hill had exploded 10 years before Powell as it became increasingly West Indian in population with poor fighting poor. And now, just like then, people not living in the leafy suburbs are voicing their disdain for what seems like a moribund government unable to respond to their fears. 

The boats are changing British politics in a previously unseen way. Certainly being reminded of Powell throws up images of rightward moves away from previously held left beliefs. A frightening thought that we are being pushed towards a dominant force for change that is not of our choosing. It is the loss of belief in the effectiveness of government itself that registers most worryingly.

A result of very ineffective government responses to poverty. A sense you can make a claim to sort out a problem, social housing for instance, yet obstacles litter the road to delivery. Or end street homelessness: easier said than done. Or end the arrival of people. 

Lord Salisbury echoes all over the current Starmer administration’s desires, but they have to be more than desires, and claims, and targets.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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