British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/Getty Images
Fifteen years ago, a British prime minister lost an election after he accidentally told the truth.
Following a campaign-stop conversation with a pensioner who told him there were too many of a certain ethnic group (“Eastern Europeans”), prime minister Gordon Brown was caught on a hot microphone in the back of his limousine venting to his staff about the elderly interlocutor, who he called “a bigoted woman” – accurate, but far from polite or prudent. The fallout from “bigot-gate” turned a potentially winnable 2010 election into a sure defeat for his Labour Party, ending its 13 years in power.
Today, Britain is led by a Labour Prime Minister who last year clawed his party back to power by studiously avoiding the campaign mistakes of his predecessors.
Now Keir Starmer finds himself in trouble, his party bleeding support in all directions – this time, in the view of many within his party, after a summer in which he has avoided telling the truth about bigotry. The voice of intolerance and prejudice this time around is not individual old ladies with ideas from the tabloids, but Britain’s leading opposition party.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage rose to political notoriety a decade ago as the leader of a single-issue party devoted to conspiracy theories and false narratives about the European Union. They played a big role in bringing about the slim “Leave” majority in the 2016 Brexit referendum. His single issue vanished when Britain actually left the EU in 2020, resulting in economic devastation and permanent damage to living standards. So he pivoted, taking over a renamed party with a new single issue: immigrants.
One year in, Keir Starmer’s government is in turmoil
There is an irony here, because Brexit was largely responsible for making immigrants more numerous and visible. Britain’s first year outside the EU left shelves empty and the economy frozen because the Europeans who did the driving and stocking could no longer work there. So the Conservative government filled the gap with Commonwealth immigrants – in effect replacing white-skinned immigrant labourers who spoke poor English with a larger number of fluently English-speaking darker-skinned ones. This was no issue to most Britons, who have been very diverse for decades and have some of Europe’s highest rates of racial tolerance and intermarriage – but it had a ripe constituency among disillusioned Tory voters in marginalized mainly-white communities.
Mr. Farage has ridden this issue, along with ugly protests over a boat-people refugee crisis that has been insignificant in size but badly managed by both parties, to make Reform the most popular party in Britain. Though there will not be another general election until 2029, Reform is currently winning a huge slice of voters away from the perpetually shambolic Conservatives.
You would think that Mr. Starmer, seeing his right-wing opposition in many ridings divided between two parties competing to move to the right of the cultural mainstream, would see this as an opportunity to gain ground among the majority of reasonable-minded middle-class voters.
Instead, he has repeatedly tried to appeal to Reform voters by echoing their Leader’s sentiments. As one Labour figure told me in a private conversation, his PM is “cosplaying Nigel Farage.”
Opinion: Mark Carney, heed the harsh lessons from the imploding British government
It began when Mr. Starmer declared last year that the Tories had run “a one-nation experiment in open borders” and vowed to “shut down the lab,” echoing Reform’s accusations. In May, he said Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers” without tougher immigration rules – a counterfactual phrase straight out of Britain’s racist-right history. He apologized for that line, but then released a white paper claiming that “the damage this has done to our country” by the Tory immigration rise “is incalculable.” And just last week, when asked about extreme-right protesters outside refugee shelters, he stated he was “completely at one with them.”
Political strategists warn that there are now three major parties vying for a dwindling angry white vote without anyone to call out their fictions. “The mainstream right and the mainstream centre-left have stopped doing the boundary-calling, and I think Reform, the Conservatives and sometimes the government are now crossing the line, because they’re unwilling to criticize anybody, whatever they’re saying,” Sunder Katwala, head of the think tank British Future, said in a Guardian interview.
But those intolerant and fearful views do not represent a path to majority. Recent polls show the number of Britons who want fewer refugees is similar to the number who want the same or more refugees, and that those who are tolerant of immigration continue to represent a strong majority.
“The long-term trends in British society on tolerance of people across ethnic and faith lines are powerfully and strongly in a pro-tolerance, pro-liberal direction,” Mr. Katwala concluded, warning, like many other British voices, that their PM is risking his party’s future by dancing with bigots.