DESNÉ MASIE: Starmer tries to out-right the right-wing on immigrants
While conflict, unemployment and climate change keep displacing people, uncontrolled migration will not go away
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a speech on May 12 in which he warned that uncontrolled migration risked making the UK an “island of strangers”. He said this at a press conference on a new immigration white paper introducing several stringent immigration policies to more than halve net migration from about 728,000 in 2024 to 300,000 by 2029. Much of the “political content” of his speech, including the “island of strangers’” comment, has been redacted from the official government transcript.
What was not redacted from the speech was a thinly veiled attack on the Conservative Party, which was in power for more than a decade, in 2010-24, and during which net migration skyrocketed, despite promising to “take back control” of the UK’s borders...
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