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Keir Starmer and Labour have just revealed their strategy for taking on Nigel Farage and Reform. And it’s the same strategy that, across the West, has failed the Left for the last twenty years. It is to call everybody they disagree with as “racist”.
That’s right.
Keir Starmer, who is apparently the same Keir Starmer who only twelve weeks ago warned the British people mass immigration is turning their country into an ‘Island of Strangers’, and who only last week proclaimed the Left “got it wrong” on immigration, has just branded the one movement that has become a home for millions of people who feel concerned about these very issues as “racist”, “immoral”, “toxic”, “far-right” and “stoking division”.
Sorry, but how on earth are we back here again? Have Starmer, the Labour Party, and the Left really learned nothing at all from the last twenty years in Western politics?
A brief history tour might help.
The Left’s strategy of dismissing voters who feel concerned about immigration as “racist” and “far-right” has done nothing, over the last twenty years, to stop the rise of national populist movements. On the contrary, it just made them stronger.
It did nothing to halt the rise of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) during the 2000s and early 2010s, which was noticeably put on turbo-charge shortly after Labour’s Gordon Brown derided a Labour-voting pensioner, Gillian Duffy, who voiced entirely reasonable concerns over mass migration, as “that bigoted woman”.
It did nothing to stop Brexit. It did nothing to stop Trump the first time and did nothing to stop Trump the second time, when he emerged even stronger despite the Democrats having spent an entire decade portraying him as a modern-day Adolf Hitler and ‘MAGA-extremist’ who presents an existential threat to democracy.
It did nothing to stop Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, to stop Georgia Meloni in Italy, to stop the Sweden Democrats, and to stop the freedom parties in the Netherlands and Austria, all of which are today stronger than at any point in history.
Hyperventilating over the supposed “death of democracy”. Catastrophising about the so-called “rebirth of fascism”. Denouncing your fellow citizens as “deplorables”, “gammons”, “dog-whistlers”, and “far-right extremists”.
All this has only further encouraged millions of people who do not want their nations to be destroyed by mass immigration and globalisation to abandon an establishment that looks increasingly insane and switch to national populists.
Which raises the obvious question, why are Keir Starmer, Labour and the Left recycling and doubling down on this failing strategy, in the hope it will stop Reform?
Because unlike the Old Left, which decades ago at least grasped the fact that people really do care about things like national sovereignty, national democracy, patriotism, and protecting workers from being exploited and undercut by mass migration and global corporations, today’s globalist New Left has completely lost the plot.
Over the last two decades, as part of what analysts call the ‘Great Awokening’, the Left has been flooded by urban, financially secure if not affluent graduates who have little life and work experience, incredibly insular social networks that are filled with people who look and sound exactly like them, hold hyper-liberal if not revolutionary ‘woke’ ideas, and are, in short, completely and utterly incapable of talking normally with voters about identity, culture, and belonging.
They are who David Brooks once called the ‘Bourgeois Bohemians’ —the BoBos—the people who, somewhere between the onset of the Blairite revolution in 1997 and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, dragged Labour and other centre-left parties so far to the cultural left they fell off the traditional political landscape and entered a completely different galaxy to the one that is inhabited by most voters.
Thanks to years of indoctrination in the universities, reinforced by the taxpayer-funded public institutions they usually work in, the New Left came to see Western nations as embarrassing sites of oppression and structural racism, minorities as more virtuous than majorities, and white people as inherently suspicious, if not evil.
Having been immersed in obscure and deeply divisive theories such as critical race and postcolonial theory, New Left activists, today, no longer even have the vocabulary to talk with normal people about mass immigration, broken borders, and globalism. They are simply incapable of having these discussions in any reasonable way.
All they can do, as Starmer and Labour now display on an almost weekly basis, is pursue two things, both of which reflect their increasingly desperate urge to try and control a national conversation that is now rapidly moving outside their control.
The first is to …
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