FOR someone who is so devoid of any obvious signs of humanity, it ill behoves the Prime Minister to preach about morality. But there he was on the BBC Sunday politics show – evidently among friends – condemning Reform’s plans to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR).
Asked by the smug Laura Kuenssberg whether he thought that the plan was ‘racist’, he replied: ‘I do think it’s a racist policy, I do think it’s immoral – it needs to be called out for what it is.’
Evidently keen to keep the focus elsewhere (although I don’t know why), he added: ‘It’s one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here, I’m up for that,’ but then declared: ‘It’s a completely different thing to say we’re going to reach in to people who are lawfully here and start removing them.’
If he ever acquired enough self-awareness to understand why he is the most hated premier in living memory, he would surely be exploring his next sentence, where the Devil speaks in tongues to project a pastiche of reasonableness, asserting that ‘these people are our neighbours, they’re people who work in our economy, they’re part of who we are. It will rip this country apart’.
On the face of it, it does sound oh-so-reasonable, but it offers a complete inversion of the truth, hedged with non sequiturs. So, yes, they are ‘our neighbours’, in a manner of speaking.
Yet that is largely the problem. In such large numbers – the lawless, unassimilated ghettos that are overtaking entire cities, and the badlands of the inner-city slums – may be positioned alongside us, but these people are not our neighbours in any meaningful sense of the word.
We didn’t ask for them to be dumped alongside us, most of them we do not want to live alongside us, and the most prevalent response when they do appear is to distance ourselves from them – the essence of white flight.
And yes, they work in our economy – but entirely out of self-interest and all too often extracting more from it than they contribute. Overall, we would be better off without all but the top 1 per cent, some of whom do have something worthwhile to offer.
As for being ‘part of who we are’, this is the Devil speaking. These people, by and large, are the very antithesis of who we are. Their ghettos are a malign, brooding presence, redolent of a colonial occupation, especially the Muslims whose alien politico-religious movement is an entirely negative quantum and wholly incompatible with civilised Western society.
Therefore to assert that necessary measures to get rid of these people will ‘rip this country apart’ is a travesty. Decades of mass immigration have done incalculable damage to this country, which increases daily as alien ghetto-dwellers reject any notion of integration and seek to impose their primitive customs, their mores, their corruption and degenerate religion on our society.
Now, with our population having grown by three-quarters of a million to a record 69.3million in the space of a year, net migration having accounted for nearly 98 per cent of the growth, the word being used by the Telegraph is ‘unsustainable’.
This is far too measured a word. Catastrophic might be closer – a terrible scourge of unwanted, alien and increasingly hostile humanity.
If a nation is its people, we are on the path to extinction, and Starmer has the gall to say that Reform’s timorous, hesitant measures to redress that ill will somehow ‘rip this country apart’ could not be further from the truth, not least when historic villages are being devastated by ‘new towns’ to accommodate the surge in population.
For sure, many of the migrants who would not have been here but for the abject failures of British immigration policy, and the ‘progressive’ open-borders claque might not like moves towards a remedial policy, but they are not the ‘country’ and their resistance to the necessary measures is part of the problem.
Branding as ‘racist’ anyone who recognises the peril that this nation faces, and seeks to do something about it, is straight out of the Guardian playbook, where ‘innocent’ passive immigrants are painted as the victims, used as scapegoats by the ‘far right’ who load all the ills of society upon them.
Ironically, as is detailed in the Times, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is proposing a series of measures on ILR which, over term, will have much the same effect as Reform’s timorous policy.
At present migrants can apply for ILR after five years, which is often granted automatically when basic conditions are met. Mahmood is now proposing to lift this ‘baseline’ to ten years. Right to remain (also referred to as ‘settled status’) will have to be earned through a number of qualifying criteria. These will include being in work, making National Insurance contributions, not claiming benefits, learning English to a high standard, having no criminal record and ‘giving back to your local community’ through volunteering.
Those who do not contribute sufficiently will have to wait longer than ten years while others will not qualify at all. Migrants who commit crimes will not automatically be barred from settlement but will be penalised by having to wait longer to apply for it. The length of time will depend on the severity of their crimes: those who commit serious crimes will be barred from staying permanently.
The way this works is that migrants who do not qualify for settled status would be required to apply for an extension visa, with fairly hefty application fees. Some would probably be rejected on the basis of criminal records, or other undesirable attributes – which can be progressively extended.
Those whose visa applications are rejected would have to leave the UK voluntarily or face deportation. Together with the ‘hostile environment’ created by the long-term uncertainty and the not insubstantial visa fee, this has the first elements of a remigration policy that would see many thousands leave the country.
This similarity with the Reform scheme was quickly picked up by the Sun which is running a piece headed ‘New Starmer gaffe as PM slams Farage’s “racist” migrant plans only for Home Secretary to vow similar crackdown’.
In a pull-quote, the paper deploys Reform’s Zia Yusuf to say: ‘Labour’s message to the country is clear: pay hundreds of billions for foreign nationals to live off the state for ever, or Labour will call you racist.’
The Mail does it better with a headline which declares ‘Worried about immigration? Starmer says you’re racist’, having him ‘accused of insulting millions of voters worried about Britain’s borders’.
Even his own side think Starmer is misguided. One Labour source said: ‘I know he’s talking about Farage and this horrible, divisive policy. But there is a danger that people with legitimate concerns hear it and just think he is calling them racist. I’m not sure that is really the best way to win people back from Reform.’
And there’s the rub. To complain about immigration or its effects will have the moralist Starmer brand you a racist, which has real world effects. Starmer heads a ‘trickle down’ policy which ends up with North Yorkshire plod locking my son Pete in a cage and dragging him to Harrogate for an interrogation in the small hours about a ‘racist’ tweet.
People such as Starmer and his progressive fellow travellers have had it their own way for far too long. The way they deploy the slur ‘racist’ to head off criticisms of a decrepit, failed immigration policy is truly despicable to the point of evil, both in concept and execution.
One recalls the words attributed to the French poet Charles Baudelaire, that ‘the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist’. The power of his trick is weakening with Starmer standing in for him.
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on September 29, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
