Starmer must stop pandering to Farage

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Starmer is aping Nigel Farage's anti-migrant rhetoric when no one would worry about migration if Labour delivered what people want from the government.

This is the audio version:

This is the transcript:


It really is time that Keir Starmer stopped pandering to Nigel Farage and all the myths and all the lies that he puts out into the UK political domain.

As is obvious, Labour is at present trying to take Farage on.

They're putting out material that even looks as if it comes from Reform.

They're filming themselves expelling migrants from the UK.

They're trying to look like the tough people who are dealing with boats on the beach.

And all of this is utterly politically inept. The reason why is actually glaringly obvious, except apparently to Labour ministers.

I get all the concerns of people who worry about migration.

People who do worry about migration talk about the pressure on social housing and that they can't get it, and they see people who don't look like them or sound like them getting houses, and they say migrants are to blame.

They see a queue at the NHS, and they can't get an appointment, and they say migrants are to blame.

They say they can't get a job, and they blame migrants who have got jobs.

They claim that the country is being overwhelmed by migrants and the truth is, it isn't.

Richard Tice appears on television and says that this is the biggest issue in politics today, and very bluntly, it's not.

And the reason why I can say with absolute confidence that this issue is not the big issue in politics today is because of all the statements that I just made.

People in the UK are worried about housing; they're worried about the NHS; they're worried about jobs; they're worried about education; they're worried about social care, and those other things that make their lives possible when they live on incomes that mean they are necessarily dependent upon the state for the supply of those services.

Because those services don't work, they're looking for a scapegoat. The scapegoat that Nigel Farage has been using for years, and every far-right politician is - and every far-right politician loves a scapegoat because that's how they operate - the scapegoat that Nigel Farage is using is the migrant into the UK.

But let's be clear; migration is of nothing like the order that Nigel Farage claims. The number of people who are actually coming, as he would put it illegally, across the English Channel into the UK is very small. It is tens of thousands a year, undoubtedly, but in proportion to legal inward migration, where we grant visas to the people coming, it is a very small proportion of the whole.

And even if we look at legal migration, the impact upon the UK is that the vast majority of people in this country are, as they have been for a long time, white, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh or other - but long-term resident in this country. In other words, this whole story that migration is the great threat is fabricated, and it is being used by Farage as a way to attack Labour and the Tories, who have failed to deliver decent public services.

And, now, Labour and the Tories are falling for the lie to cover their own failure and to suggest that, in practice, if only they could deal with migration, then everything else would be solved.

It is complete nonsense to suggest that everything would be solved if migration was stopped into this country. In fact, everything would almost certainly get worse.

We are dependent upon people who come from overseas to make our NHS function.

We are dependent upon people who come from overseas to make our social care system function.

There are quite a lot of teachers in the UK who were not born here or who are born of parents who themselves were not born here.

This is how a great many of our public services are now supplied.

As is commonly said, the person who is a migrant who is likely to be in front of you in the NHS is not the next person in the queue but is instead the doctor or the nurse that you're waiting to see.

We do need more people coming into this country at present in the UK for one very straightforward reason. Our birth rate is very low.

In the UK as a whole, it is well below 2 per woman. In Scotland, it's only about 1.2 per woman.

In other words, we are not reproducing our own existing population from the people who were already born here and living here. Therefore, if we are to look after our ever-ageing population, of whom I am a representative example, then we must have people coming into the UK to make good the shortfall in population that we have created by not having enough children.

It is as simple and straightforward as that. If the UK was a business, it would be recruiting overseas to fill its skills gap. Because we're a country, apparently, that's unacceptable. But why is very hard to work out. Unless we do want to go down the line of the business that fails to recruit people to fill those skills gaps, which is usually the pathway to failure. So, we do need migrants.

But what we also need is a government that works; a government that does solve the problems in the NHS; that does provide good education for everyone; that does provide social care; that does focus upon full employment rather than balancing the books.

We could have such a government. We could, if only we had a government that was not obsessed with book balancing and focusing only on private sector growth when the only source of growth in the UK economy at present is in the public sector. We could solve the problems, and if we did, there would be no issue about migration.

But, because the government is refusing to deliver social care, health care, education, a proper justice system, proper education, and everything else that we desire, we are still looking for scapegoats, and Labour is as bad when it comes to that, as are the Tories, as are Reform, and as is anybody else who is blaming migration for this problem.

Migrants are not our problem. Migrants are solving our problems. Our problem is government that refuses to work on behalf of the people of the UK. And until we get governments that do work on behalf of the people of the UK, there will still be scapegoats. And I don't like that because I don't like blaming people who are not at fault.

And that's what Tice is doing.

That's what Farage is doing.

That's what Starmer is doing.

That's what Yvette Cooper, as our Home Secretary, is doing.

That is what Kemi Badenoch is doing as leader of the Conservative Party.

They're all making excuses and blaming people who are not to blame for our problems but who are instead helping solve them when they refuse to take the necessary action to do that themselves.


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