Keir Starmer's Reform-Lite Strategy Reaches Breaking Point

The Government's attempt to mimic the anti-migrant, anti-refugee politics of Nigel Farage is a recipe for moral degradation and defeat

Labour’s anti-migrant advert (left). Nigel Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster (right)

Henry Ford once remarked that his customers could have any colour car they liked, as long as it was black.

A similar choice is currently being presented by UK political parties as they each compete with each other to be as hostile as they possibly can to anyone wishing to come to this country.

The news that the Home Office has issued new guidance, all but forbidding any refugee who arrives in the UK via a “dangerous” route from ever being granted citizenship, is just the latest depressing example of this trend.

The guidance, which is an even more restrictive version of guidelines issued to enforce the Conservative Government’s unlawful Rwanda scheme, is also a potential breach of the UN Refugee Convention.

Under the convention, which the UK helped to found, states must not penalise anyone seeking asylum, even if they do so by entering the country illegally.

The new guidance allows itself some wriggle room, by saying that those arriving “illegally” will only “normally” be refused citizenship.

However, the Home Office has already made it clear how they intend it to be followed, saying in a statement that “This guidance further strengthens measures to make it clear that anyone who enters the UK illegally, including small boat arrivals, faces having a British citizenship application refused.”

“Home Office insiders” reiterated this to The Guardian, telling the paper that “the guidance rules were tightened so that the Government would replace the ban that was imposed by the cancelled Illegal Migration Act.”

In other words, this is intended as a like-for-like replacement of the rules enabling the immoral and unlawful Rwanda scheme.

The change comes as Keir Starmer’s Government ramps up its attempts to mimic the anti-migrant politics of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

Earlier this week the Home Office sent out dehumanising videos of migrants being rounded up by immigration officers.

At the same time, the Labour party has published adverts on social media boasting about their record of deporting “illegal” migrants, alongside a ‘Breaking Point’ style picture of a queue of silhouetted migrants.

Other adverts put out by Labour party accounts, include this picture, supposedly of a handcuffed ‘illegal migrant’, which promotes and links to an article on the anti-migrant news channel GB News.

The direction of travel is clear. Faced with opinion polls showing Reform level, or ahead of Labour, Keir Starmer is engaging in an obvious attempt to outdo Farage’s party at its own game.

That this is a strategy doomed for failure should go without saying. As the Conservative party showed when they attempted the same strategy while in government, all this achieves is to raise the salience of immigration as an issue on which Farage and his party can, and will always, go further.

It also creates a situation in which all three parties are engaged in a perilous contest to make Britain as hostile an environment as possible for anyone not born in the UK.

We are already seeing this play out. The Home Office’s new guidance banning anyone arriving via a “dangerous” route from ever claiming asylum goes even further than the time-limited ban imposed by the Conservatives.

Similarly, Kemi Badenoch’s proposals to make people wait 15 years before claiming citizenship, while banning anyone who claims benefits during that period from ever doing so, is another attempt to ramp up the anti-migrant, anti-refugee contest between political parties in the UK.

The problem with starting such an arms race is that it can only end in one place, as it already has in the United States, with demands for mass deportations and much more.

While we are still some way off of that in the UK, it is still a highly dangerous game being played by the current Government.

Yet as well as being politically stupid, it is also morally reprehensible.

As a descendant of a Polish refugee who took his own very “dangerous journey” in order to arrive in the UK, this latest attempt by Keir Starmer’s Government to engage in the anti-migrant, anti-refugee politics of Nigel Farage, is a deeply alarming one.