12 July 2025

Starmer, New Labour, and Enoch Powell

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/13/no-10-defends-keir-starmer-language-immigration-speech-enoch-powell

When I heard Starmer's diatribe against immigrants in back in May, I thought of Enoch Powell and wondered if anyone would make the connection. They certainly did - at least in the UK.

Powell's famous 1968 'Rivers of Blood' speech has haunted British politics for more than fifty years and all the more given the growing hostility to immigration. This latest episode (along with Starmer's failed Albania scheme) further reveals the ugly side of the Starmer government and the Blairite Labour Party - a pseudo-Left political faction. They may not be as right-wing as the Tories but the old Labour Party of Tony Benn and Keir Hardie (Starmer's namesake) is clearly dead and buried.

Jeremy Corbyn was viewed as representing that wing but he proved unwilling to fight and his overall conduct reminds one of Bernie Sanders in the US and his relationship with the DNC. Consistently betrayed by his own party, Sanders just points his Left-wing faction back into the DNC and endorses its candidates even while he drones on about a 'revolution' in the ballot box - while people vote for the likes of Establishment pro-Wall Street and pro-Pentagon candidates like Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.

Corbyn has played the same role in Labour and Starmer is in many ways like leading figures in the DNC - pro-Capitalist, pro-war and anti-immigrant, while retaining a fig leaf pretense of 'Left-wing' ideology by means of identity politics.

Indeed Thatcher was right in 2002 when she privately remarked that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour. You can safely include Keir Starmer to the list.

Some have legitimately argued that just as Blair triangulated in the late 1990's and early 2000's to counter the conservatives, Starmer is looking with alarm at the rise of Nigel Farage, Reform UK, and a growing right-wing populist movement that is already beating him in the polls. He has attempted to undo some of the foundational aspects of Brexit with his EU Reset programme. Obviously many Brits will celebrate this as they have to come to view Brexit as a massive mistake. But others are beginning to understand that Starmer is attempting to undermine Brexit by means of a back-door and he's going to face some backlash because of it.

Blaming immigrants for domestic woes is an old if dirty populist trick but it works and the fact that Starmer isn't the recipient of greater opposition even within his party testifies to something rotten in Westminster.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/16/keir-starmer-biggest-u-turns-since-labour-came-to-power

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2025/06/spinning-israel-anti-semitism-and-los.html

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