Starmer doesn’t challenge the rise of the far right. Instead, he reinforces it.

Playing the immigration card simply echoes Farage’s despicable tactics.

By Alan Story

Even Keir Starmer and his handlers would likely agree with this reading of the political temperature for a year that is now coming to an end.

“There is little doubt that 2024 was a great year for the far right…” wrote Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde in an article out last week.

Providing tables that show the change in national electoral results for ten far right parties in 2024 compared to their share in the most recent elections, Mudde continued that “we see not only that almost all have won in 2024, but also that most have won big.” The same pattern was evident in elections to the European parliament in June.

Meanwhile, new political dinosaurs are popping up regularly, such as that of Calin Georgescu in Romania, and on 20 January 2025 we will see the return of Donald J Trump.

In our 4 July election, Reform got 14% of the total vote; mind you, that translated into a mere 0.76 % of the seats due to our archaic and undemocratic electoral system. A newly “professionalised” Reform is making headlines with its recent recruits. In case you missed it, Suella Braverman’s other half is Nigel Farage’s convert of the week as GB News helpfully tells us.

STARMER IS FLAILING ABOUT

Political centrists like Starmer are flailing about. What to do? Their chosen political response to the rise of the far right is one of accommodation, indeed capitulation, and trying to beat these reactionary forces on their own ideological turf.

Not only will this likely be a losing strategy - as mainstream political scientists will show us in a minute - but, in fact, only further push politics in a further right-wing direction.

How else to explain Starmer’s recent intervention on the subject of immigration which in 2024 has become, by some measure, the absolutely favoured red flag of right wingers across the globe?

In the same vein, less than 36 hours after Assad’s repressive regime in Syria was toppled over the weekend, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper rushed out to tell us that Syrian asylum seekers would henceforth be blocked from settling in the UK. About 6500 current clams have been suspended.

The last thing Cooper wanted was for Nigel Farage of Reform to make headlines with the same demand. “Watch out for/ cater to the far right flank” has become the watchword of this government.

In his own attack lines aimed at both the Tories and Reform, here is what Starmer said on immigration in a specially-called Downing Street press conference in late November. He repeated many of the same words at Prime Minister’s Question session today (11 Dec.) when he faced Tory leader Kemi Babenoch.

Said Starmer: “Nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023… It isn’t a global trend… Or taking your eye off the ball. No – this is a different order of failure… Policies were reformed…Deliberately …To liberalise immigration… To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders…”

THE USUAL OVERHEATED RHETORIC

Starmer droned on about Britain being “a soft touch”, of the “crack downs” to come now that he is PM, and put over the usual overheated rhetoric that “forgot” to mention issues such as global climate change or political hot spots and related triggers of increased migration. It was straight from the Braverman/Babenoch bible. You were half expecting the word “hordes” any second.

As an exercise in fabrication, Starmer’s press conference was hard to beat. Britain as “a one-nation experiment in open borders”? In fact, country-to-migration is going up all across the globe. “The total estimated 281 million people living in a country other than their countries of birth in 2020 was 128 million more than in 1990 and over three times the estimated number in 1970”, reports the UN’s World Migration Report 2024.

A 2015 Labour Party campaign message mug.

Promoting themselves as another “go to” anti-immigration and anti-immigrant party is an old Labour campaign tactic. Above is a mug specially produced for the 2015 general election when Ed Miliband was its leader. Back in 2022, Rachel Reeves earned this headline below for her party in THE INDEPENDENT: “Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves calls for deportations to be ramped up.” We can be sure she wished it had been copied in THE DAILY MAIL and THE SUN.

“CHOOSE THE ORIGINAL NOT THE COPY”

Far right politicians love the attention being put on “their issue”… and immigration is definitely and predominantly a Tory and far right issue.

Getting the opposition --- in this case Labour --- to focus on your issue is one well-known secret to electoral success. It is one reason for the rise of Reform. One old dinosaur, Jean-Marie Le Pen, former head of France’s National Front from 1972 to 2011, used to say voters “prefer the original not the copy.”

Choose neither, reply left-wing commentators, as we attempt to be at THE LEFT LANE. We would briefly add:

1) A main reason (but not the only reason) for the global growth of the far right is down to the growing crises, turmoil, and gross inequality of capitalism and imperialism and the fact that none of the mainstream parties has answer serious answers to them. In Joe Biden’s USA, a study I just read shows that “the collective net worth of America’s top twelve billionaires has surpassed $2 trillion as of December 3”. That’s up 193 per cent since 2020. Any surprise that this is one reason why Trump thumped Harris just over a month ago…and this while more and more American are being refused private insurance claims for medical expenses? Here in the UK, homelessness has jumped up 14% in the past year.

2) Focusing on immigration simply divides workers (and others) of other countries from British workers and overlooks the gross inequalities of a system that, in the case of UK, has produced 165 billionaires.

3) Political operators like Trump and Farage are racist bullies. Humour or accommodate a bully and they get the last laugh.

4) Concentrating on immigration and immigrants promotes nativism and a fear of strangers, as well as promoting attacks on those born elsewhere – and/or with ancestors from elsewhere (and especially people of colour).

We could go on. But one final point:

5) The idea that the UK is “asylum seeker central” is a myth created by DAILY MAIL headline writers, Farage, Babenoch and their ideological bedfellows such as Starmer. Check out the number of external refugees who have fled from Assad’s Syrian hell hole since 2011. The UK is not even in the top ten listed host countries. But we are only a small country geographically, reply Farageists. The Netherlands is one sixth the size of the UK, yet it has taken in about twice as many displaced Syrians as the UK since 2011.

ATTACKING IMMIGRANTS IS A LOSING STRATEGY

Mainstream professional political scientists, who are primarily (but not exclusively) concerned with what party will win elections, are also dismissive of Starmer’s approach of accommodating far rightists over the immigration issue.

One of their main conclusions after studying many elections – in one case over 350 elections - and particularly those in Europe is this:

”We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies [undertaken by mainstream parties] reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right”, one 2022 study found.

In other words, capitulating to far right parties boosts rather than diminishes their electoral support. Does this “fate” lie ahead for us?

Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine in a 2015 photo.

France provides a particularly striking negative example of this phenomenon. Writing in 2022 – that is, before the 2024 surge of France’s far right National Rally (formerly National Front) that is led by Martine Le Pen - journalist Pauline Bock documented how President Emmanuel Macron “exploited” the anti-immigration views of Le Pen “for his own political gain” and “helped to create this far right monster.”

Macron, another centrist like Starmer, never said to his far right opponents: you are completely wrong on the immigration issue. Instead, Macron called in right-wing politicians to brief him on what immigration measures they wanted for France and “remained silent” when left-wing leaders were targeted with death threats by far right extremists.

The situation in France today? The government has recently collapsed, Marine Le Pen is in a powerful position, and she “has cemented the impression that she’s now well established in the centre of France’s political game,” Jacob Ross, an expert on French politics and Franco-German relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told Al Jazeera.

In coming weeks, Farage will be looking both east to Le Pen’s France and west to Trump’s USA.

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Let’s end with two depressing questions:

Will Starmer VS Farage AND Badenoch be the main battle lines in the next UK general election? And will the main issue be who can turn around more small boats in the English Channel?

And here is one potentially energising suggestion:

Perhaps the left will “get its sh*t together”, create and build a new socialist party that will unite progressives, and start to organise an alternative party (and not just for elections!) to the Farageist/ Trumpian/ Starmerite nightmares ahead.

Yes, a new party would be a small step at the beginning, but at least it would be a significant change of direction. We’d become political actors.

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HANDS OFF SYRIA

For more than five decades, the people of Syria have lived - and died - under the repressive father and son Assad regime.

On the weekend, the son, Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, bringing an end to a 13-year civil war that killed more than half a million people and created millions of refugees.

Syrians are jubilant. But the country’s short- and long-term future is uncertain and, not surprisingly, the word “turmoil” best describes the situation.

Sensing an opportunity, the governments of three countries well-known for political opportunism in external relations and military matters – namely, the United States, Turkey and apartheid Israel – have all made a number of land and air incursions against Syria in the past five days.

The position of the UK government on Israel’s attacks? We are right with you, you can read on the website of Labour Friends of Israel ( and reason #63 why we need a socialist party in the UK.)

HANDS OFF SYRIA

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

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