With his reputation of being a staunch advocate for the rights of the working class now seemingly abandoned, Keir Starmer sinks to the level of direct criticism towards immigrants. As a well-known defender of civil liberties as a human rights lawyer, his transformation as a politician seemed promising. But, at present, all those preconceived potential attributes now lie discarded, revealing a stark contrast to his expected political trajectory. The realm of politics within a class-divided society has always been about finding a balance of power and compromising, but that shouldn’t interfere with one’s principles.
The objective of every elected representative is to leverage the balance of power where the majority of it typically resides with employers, and try to chip away at it to the advantage of the average worker. It is expected that when such an individual occupies the prime minister’s role, the dominating power of employers would wane somewhat, and the welfare state’s protections would be bolstered. To the dismay of many, with his domineering majority, Prime Minister Starmer has gone against these rational expectations, countering them with disappointment and neglect.
The betrayed expectations range across various sectors of society. These include the pension commitments made to the Women Against State Pension Inequality, the decision to withdraw winter fuel allowances for numerous pensioners, and limiting child benefits to families with more than two kids. Coupled with this, is the government’s unfortunate subservient posture towards the United States, closely mirrored with an incongruous associate, the apparently oppressive administration in Israel.
These concessions do not symbolize principled compromises born out of a desire to facilitate a higher goal. Rather, these are indicative of an entire surrender to neoliberal conventions of an exchequer heavily linked to, and influenced by, the financial hub of the City. This amounts to a subservience to financial capital’s constraints and the supposed omnipotence of collective debt issuers.
The escalating popularity of Reform UK is certainly a worrying point for every Labour MP who dreams of a long-standing career in parliament to witness their young children graduate to secondary school educational stage. Yet, the Labour party’s stance towards immigration represents an upsetting demeaning of their prospects to regain the lost trust of the working class. By succumbing to xenophobic characterizations of immigration and demonstrating a failure to provide an informed understanding of it as an artefact of a colonial past and a neoliberal present, Starmer now indirectly echoes the ideological views of Nigel Farage.
The proposed plan to terminate authorized immigration for individuals engaged to work in the healthcare sector will only further exacerbate the existing predicaments of the NHS, leading to a deterioration in the quality of life for many people receiving care. This outlines an aspect of current immigration into capital-driven nations, which counters both Farage’s arguments and Labour’s mimicking of them. A workforce boosted by migration precisely enhances those profits – unpaid wages reserved by employers – that would otherwise lower if businesses were obligated to train local individuals and adequately compensate them to ensure a viable supply of workforce.
A logical approach would rather entail criticizing Farage for his support of privatization, his disregard for employment rights, his eagerness to sell-off the NHS to US-based corporations. The most effective strategy would be to champion the very ideas that most Reform UK supporters — and indeed, a majority of the nation’s population — are in favour of: state ownership, increased taxes on the wealthy, and abolition the special privileges enjoyed by the plutocrats.