It’s come to this: Keir Starmer is now just the warm-up act for Nigel Farage

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/18/clear-keir-starmer-warm-up-act-nigel-farage

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As Labour flounders and dabbles in the politics of hatred to gain a point or two, it is those far from power who will suffer most

In the days since the largest far-right rally in British history, I keep hearing the same phrase. Friends will talk about those scenes, how London was packed with more than 100,000 day-trippers chanting “send them back”. Then they’ll say: “It’s the 1970s all over again.” I can almost see their minds playing the old reels of Enoch Powell and the National Front.

Being of similar vintage, I too know about abuse in playgrounds and getting chased by skinheads and the house-warming gift of a brick through the window (which the police didn’t deem racist because the motive wasn’t sufficiently explicit – guys, next time wrap it in a memo!). We’re still some way from those days, thankfully, but one important aspect is much worse. Back then, racism was a furtive, guilty pleasure: deep down, even bigots knew their bigotry was ugly. No more.

What was striking about last weekend’s march wasn’t the turnout, easily matched by some of the protests about Gaza. It’s the lack of shame, the brazen insistence on an Englishman’s right to make others feel small. It’s the normalisation of what was until recently considered malicious extremism. And a big driver isn’t the crowds down in the street, but the suits in our supposedly progressive government.

Whenever confronted with violent prejudice, Keir Starmer coughs, splutters and takes the coward’s way out. He either pretends not to see racism or panders to it.

Just over a couple of months ago, in small towns across Northern Ireland, migrants were burned out of their homes and a mosque was petrol bombed. The prime minister’s response? First and foremost, he deplored attacks on the police. Muslims deluged with hate and fearing for their lives got only a promise of “every step possible to keep you safe”. Stripped of rhetorical flourish, this is the bare minimum any citizen might expect from a state. It was much the same from No 10 after last summer’s riots: a huge and often heavy-handed crackdown on law-breaking, and a vast and strategic silence on the prejudice and disinformation that fuelled the savagery.

Worse still is when Starmer simpers in the face of prejudice, something he is doing more and more as his approval ratings go further and further south. At the end of last month, Nigel Farage promised mass deportation of practically anyone seeking asylum in this country, even if it meant handing Afghan women over to the Taliban and sending Iranian dissidents to their deaths. To the press, No 10 didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at the Reform UK leader referring to other humans as a “scourge” or an “invasion”. For the great unwashed, it posted the most extraordinary advert. “Whilst Nigel Farage moans from the sidelines, Labour is getting on with the job,” it read, showing an image of Starmer stamped with “removed over 35,000 people from the UK”. Why vote for the full-fat hatemongers when diet racists will do the job just fine?

Plenty of Labour people will say they aren’t racist at all, and I wouldn’t wish to argue. But one lesson about prejudice I learned fast growing up was to focus on impact rather than quibble about intention. A brick, in other words, is always a brick, whatever the reasons of the clown chucking it.

However impeccably liberal Labour ministers might think themselves, they are in effect dabbling in the politics of hatred in order to gain a point or two in opinion polls. Getting thrashed by Reform? Then we’ll get the prime minister to call migration a “squalid chapter” causing “incalculable” damage to Britain. Voters won’t wear that? Then we’ll say the entire speech was a big mistake caused by, um, the PM having a lot in his in-tray.

For the sake of a few inglorious careers, no tactic is too cheap and every single principle can be chucked out of the window. So after a bit of throat-clearing, No 10 tells the Guardian and other leftwing outlets how worried it is about Saturday’s march of extremists, while sending a minister on TV to tell everyone else that Tommy Robinson’s rally shows free speech is “alive and well”.

“The British people have a far more nuanced view of immigration than the media and political narrative would have us believe,” observes Nick Lowles of anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate in his new book, How to Defeat the Far Right. Only one out of 10 Britons is outright opposed to immigration, while many who identify, say, asylum seekers as a huge issue have never met one. Of the top 50 areas in the UK most vehemently opposed to Muslims, Lowles finds that 27 are in the district of Tendring, in Farage’s constituency of Clacton. Yet how much of Tendring’s population is Muslim? Fewer than one out of 200: 0.4%.

Armed with such findings and a historic majority, Labour could easily counter some of the wild extremism. Ministers might point out that “English patriot” Robinson is an Irish passport-holder (up until last summer, anyway) who hunkers down in Spain and has a list of criminal convictions long enough for a tattoo sleeve. Starmer might observe how much of the UK would simply fall apart without migrants and their children – from your local hospital to the school to the care home. How universities are facing collapse without foreign students and their bumper fees. He might even point out – imagine! – that migrants are human too, with their own lives and dreams for themselves and their families. We could get on to the legacy of empire, and about how the climate crisis and poverty force other populations to move.

But who am I kidding? This government would rather entertain a planeload of rich Americans, over here this week to take our land for their datacentres, our subsidies for their businesses, and demand we alter our tax code for their investors. As for the rest of us, any hope of material improvement is forbidden by “the markets”, “fiscal rules” and of course “asylum seekers”.

History has a habit of giving little men big tasks. Joe Biden had one job: to stop Donald Trump returning to power. His failure will have consequences for the world. Starmer’s one historic role is to stave off the hard right. He is not only failing, he is paving the way for Farage and his crew. The supposed “centrists” are ushering fringe politics into the mainstream and normalising the abhorrent.

But just listen to the speeches and chants made by the extremists. Robinson no longer talks about small boats; he wants his country back. After years of resisting mass deportations as “impossible”, Farage now touts them as the solution. The Overton window is shifting further and further to the right. The ultimate price for that will not be paid by a politician, but by people far from power: an Ethiopian boy, perhaps, with no family, or an Asian kid looking out the window one evening.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist