Keir Starmer is handling the violent disorder well. His experience as director of public prosecutions during the 2011 riots is serving both him and the country. He is very obviously playing on his home ground.
I had a feeling Starmer’s first crisis as prime minister would be on foreign affairs, but I was wrong. On the riots, the immediate priority is policing, and restoring control on the streets so that no one lives in fear. But when this crisis ends, his government will have some important lessons to learn to prevent a repeat of the unrest.
Labour politicians should resist the temptation to regard the problem as the very evident far-right racism and the solution as a tough response from the police and the courts. They will also need to address the alienation of people in left-behind communities who feel powerless and think mainstream politicians don’t respect them. Labour ministers cannot allow the many areas experiencing this wide sense of disillusionment to become a breeding ground for the far right, who will not disappear when some of their followers are in jail.
The far right is not only a British problem. Arguably, the UK is a little behind the European curve, but the 4 million votes won by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK last month showed, as Starmer rightly noted, that Britain is “not immune” from the rise of populism and nationalism on the continent.
Although some Labour figures will recoil from it, this challenge will require the government to adopt a policy on immigration that commands majority public support. Immigration is not a fringe issue: four out of five people are worried about the number of illegal migrants and a majority want to see lower a level of legal migration. If Labour ducks this challenge, it will risk losing power. Starmer will have to deliver the “change” Labour promised on this issue.
The lesson from Rishi Sunak’s government is that rhetoric is not enough: “stop the boats” became a millstone round his neck, and his party paid the price last month. Nor can Labour resort to a spray job like Ed Miliband’s “controls on immigration” mugs in 2015, which were aimed at countering Farage’s Ukip but convinced no one and advertised Labour’s divisions on this sensitive issue. Having a firm but fair immigration policy is not far right; it is what the country wants. The Tories purported to do the “firm”, but there was little of the “fair” – Labour can do both.
Some Labour figures understand this. In what now looks like a prophetic speech, Peter Mandelson told Le Cercle des Economistes think tank in Aix-en-Provence on 6 July that some progressives “run away” from the migration issue out of “discomfort”, rather than find progressive solutions. “There are limits to what is sustainable, and we should start by recognising those limits,” he said.
Mandelson argued that the disillusionment is about cultural as well as economic issues. He said: “Many on the left pursue a politics, as they see it, of inclusiveness, asserting the rights and voice of minorities. This is important. But all too often the left fail to see that their inclusiveness is also selective. And it denies the right of those in the perceived majority to have legitimate grievances of their own, and this further compounds them.”
He warned: “We will not reconnect with these voters unless we understand and adequately answer cultural anxieties and their sense of disempowerment. As politicians, we need to start listening to what these voters are saying to us.” Migration is not just a numbers game. It’s time the government invested just as much effort into ensuring integration and social cohesion, not just talking a good game and thinking these boxes have been ticked.
There is no justification for the violence or the racism. But there is a context, and it should not be ignored. Some 85 per cent of Britons oppose the unrest, according to YouGov, but people also acknowledge longer-term political causes: two in three think immigration policy in recent years contributed to the violence, and 55 per cent think recent Tory governments did.
By coincidence, as I was writing this column John Hayes, one of the heroes of the horrific Southport knife attack, hit the nail on the head in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Hayes, who heard screams, tried to disarm the attacker and was stabbed, said the Southport tragedy was a “catalyst” but not the “root cause” of the violence, which he believes is a “strong current of discontent”. Hayes, who has no political axe to grind, felt dismayed by Starmer’s and Yvette Cooper’s pledges to use “the full force of the law”.
He said they “need to address the cause not the symptom” and warned that putting people in prison would not address the core issue. Those in Labour who doubt the need for a much wider response to this crisis should take note.
