Earlier this week, the Labour government released a white paper called Restoring Control over the Immigration System. On its own, this document should have been concerning to many people, since it signalled a major rightward shift in immigration policy by a putatively centre-left government. 

But what really made the headlines were Starmer’s remarks in the announcement speech on Monday. In this address, the Prime Minister fully accepted the Right’s framing of immigration as a cultural as a well as a material threat, arguing that immigrants should ‘commit to integration’.

Afterwards, Starmer’s government proxies were forced to defend his comments — and challenge the notion that his warning about Britain becoming an ‘island of strangers’ resembled Enoch Powell’s assertion (in the notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968) that Britons ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country’. But no-one comparing the two speeches could honestly say that the differences between them were at all clear-cut. 

Back in 1968, Powell was willing to say the quiet parts out loud, and to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion — a version of what we would now call Great Replacement theory. Not unlike Powell, Starmer fell victim in his speech to the far-right tactic of invoking images of filth and disease — labelling the current immigration system ‘squalid’, and suggesting that companies are ‘addicted’ to cheap labour. The ‘chaos’ of the current system was counterposed with the ‘control’ Starmer would apparently impose on it. 

What Starmer said on Monday was as wrong as anything Powell said in 1968. And while Powell was summarily sacked by Ted Heath’s government and denounced in the press, nobody in Westminster is calling for Starmer’s resignation. As this comparison shows, the Right has worked hard over the past sixty years to turn the Rivers of Blood speech into ‘common sense’, to the point that it can now be bowdlerised by a serving Labour Prime Minister. Tony Blair might have been Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, but Starmer is shaping up to be Powell’s, and all in aid of an imagined, entirely bad-faith discourse around ‘integration’.

In actual fact, the conservative Right shouldn’t really be in favour of the sort of integration which forms communities. The cod-Nietzchean hustle-bros who flit between London, Dubai, and their various podcast appearances, and the vast flows of planetary capital powering the finance and tech industries from which the Right draws much of its funding and personnel — these things are only possible because of a sleek, impersonal, borderless capitalism operating in glass and steel monoliths. 

And yet, the reactionary mind is perfectly happy with contradiction. So the Right also makes room for ‘Chestertonian’ conservatives, who yearn for the organic unity of the medieval village, and for whom non-white immigration is standing in the way. Starmer’s views are not quite in this vein. But they start from a broadly similar premise.

Michael Warren Davis’s 2021 book The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservatism is Not Enough is an instructive example of how bizarre the latter tendency can be. The book’s back-copy gestures at self-help, stating that: ‘In The Reactionary Mind, you’ll learn: why medieval serfs were probably happier than you are (and) why we should look back fondly on the Inquisition.’ But the book suggests nothing that can actually be done to expedite the conservative utopia — at least until all of history stretching back to the Reformation is somehow undone. 

In fact, the world Davis envisions is closer to Hobbiton than anything that has existed in the real world (along with C. S. Lewis and Chesterton himself, Tolkien is part of a holy trinity of influences for Chesterton bros from Georgia Meloni to Varg Vikernes). He wants modernity itself to be replaced with small agrarian communities: guilds, fraternities, and a quieter, more English version of fellow Tolkien enthusiast Curtis Yarvin’s self-consciously dystopian ‘neocameralism’. Davis is light on the detail of how all this might be achieved, as ‘return to tradition’ types tend to be.

David Goodhart’s 2017 tome Road to Somewhere is a less silly manifestation of this tendency, but it has a similar thesis. The formerly leftist Goodhart separates Britons into ‘Somewheres’ (whose identity stems from a particular place) and ‘Anywheres’ (university educated urban liberals and their multi-ethnic allies) — ‘real’ Britons, and rootless cosmopolitans, as it were. Goodhart has been termed a ‘liberal Powellite’ since at least as far back as 2004, when, echoing Powell and anticipating Starmer, he wrote that the ‘diversity, individualism and mobility that characterise developed economies — especially in the era of globalisation — mean that more of our lives is spent among strangers.’ 

At this point you have to ask: what exactly do Goodhart and his ilk want? What value is there in being able to ‘(predict) the attitudes, even the behaviour, of the people living in your immediate neighbourhood’, as Goodhart argues? If we have friends and family, then why should it matter what the people who happen to live near us think or feel, as long as they are otherwise civil? Why is race and immigration status relevant to this in any way? The logic falls apart so easily, it’s reasonable to conclude that these ideas are merely a post-hoc justification for something these writers know they couldn’t otherwise have got away with saying.

We can see hints of what this might be. While Davis and Goodhart were writing, changes took place in the global conservative movement that made community practically impossible. Throughout the first decades of the twenty-first century, the fact that conservatism was patently not working either economically or culturally meant that it had to reconstitute itself into a form of fandom or identity group (as opposed to a solely political movement). 

As described in Phil Burton-Cartledge’s book Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain, the Conservative Party once provided its members with social clubs and a ready-made cultural milieu to be part of. But as the twentieth century wore on, demographic, economic, and cultural shifts made this impossible, and today the Tories are a small cadre of committed activists attached to a mostly inert rump of elderly homeowners. 

In response, the movement shifted its focus away from local conservative groups and the Party itself, and towards the atomised individual alone with their TV or iPad. Conservative culture is now an interplay of ideas from the right wing press, think tanks and, increasingly, an online culture that exists downstream from image boards (4chan and the like). These media environments don’t just encourage strange beliefs; they can also mould their participants’ personalities, making them bitter, cruel, incurious, and emotionally brittle.

These are not, it should go without saying, qualities likely to engender a new class of pipe-smoking yeoman farmers. Antisocial subjects who spend ten hours a day watching GB News are not going to become Bilbo Baggins, no matter how ethnically pure the UK becomes — and accordingly we shouldn’t think that conservatives are serious about their visions of organic communities. 

In fact, such fantasies are a fig-leaf concealing their real desire: one we saw expressed last summer, which is to remove the people who cause them emotional discomfort in a direct, visceral way. Starmer should know this, and he should also know that the conservatives he seems to want to impress are already living in an island of strangers, but one entirely of their own making.