Labour: compassion free stance on Immigration

JVL Introduction

Labour under Starmer has bought into – and fed – the frency about immigration.  Here Nesrine Malik writes in excoriating terms about this and notes, eg. that “In the past week alone, Starmer has posted 14 times on X; 10 of those posts were about immigration, particularly irregular arrivals and those arriving on small boats.”

She also shows that while “Labour continues to fuel the sense of crisis, then chase it, never catching up, and always setting the stage for those further right to make ever bigger promises of crackdown and deranged claims about housing and crime. … The more Labour presses the issue, the more it reinforces the validity of anti-immigration rhetoric, empowering Reform as the specialised vehicle of crackdown. To voters mobilised by this, Labour can never be better than the real thing.”

Meanwhile, the reasons behind those desperately trying to reach the UK and the severe limitation on legal routes are not discussed.  No compassion for the people, no attempt to combat Reform’s reprehensible rhetoric, let alone recognition of the UK’s culpability in creating the reasons for leaving their home countries or the fact that we take a tiny proportion of those fleeing war, famine, desperate poverty and persecution.

LL

This article was originally published by The Guardian on Mon 11 Aug 2025. Read the original here.