Keir Starmer has whatever beliefs he thinks will get him elected

2022-11-23

STEPHEN POLLARD: The trouble with Keir Starmer isn’t that he has no beliefs. It’s that he has whatever beliefs he thinks will get him elected

The word chutz-pah is sometimes defined as a boy who has murdered his parents pleading for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

That definition has now been superseded. Step forward Sir Keir Starmer, the personification of chutzpah.

Having spent his entire political career campaigning in favour of immigration and against restrictions on free movement from the EU, yesterday he turned up at the CBI posing as the man who is going to control immigration, telling his audience that a core mission of any government he leads would be to wean the economy off the need for immigrants.

It’s chutzpah of the very highest order — as though Liz Truss were to say now that she has always been in favour of reducing borrowing.

Power

True, Starmer softened his stance after his speech had been billed as a toughening of Labour’s position on the issue. He said Labour would be ‘pragmatic’ in the face of business demands to allow more workers to enter the country and would relax immigration rules in the short term to drive growth.

When he spoke yesterday, he was speaking not just to the CBI conference but to the wider public, as the man with a poll lead of at least 20 per cent. And he knows that immigration will be a key issue in the next election

But he insisted the UK had to end its ‘immigration dependency’ in the long term, and that firms would be required to do more to train British workers.

The Labour leader is often, rightly, accused of being a man of few principles. His most consistent form of behaviour seems to be a readiness to say and do whatever he believes will help him please his audience or win power.

When he ran for the Labour leadership in 2020, he carefully positioned himself as the heir to Jeremy Corbyn, promising Left-leaning Labour members that he was the candidate best placed to win support from voters for the party’s 2019 blood-red socialist manifesto.

Since becoming leader, however, he has carefully dumped almost everything in it. Quite rightly, we might agree — the manifesto was a basket case. Yet his behaviour shows that Starmer is a man prepared to win power by saying one thing and then doing something very different in office.

And if he can’t be trusted to behave as he said he would after the leadership election, how can we trust him not to do the same after a general election?

But there has been one lone principle throughout his political career which has moulded his response to pretty much every issue: a love of immigration and a belief that British borders should be open to anyone who wishes to come here from the EU.

Indeed, these were part of the core ten pledges he made on his personal website, keirstarmer.com.

Pledge six was headed ‘Defend migrants’ rights’ and included his commitment to ‘defend free movement as we leave the EU’. You can still find it online — even though he told the CBI yesterday that he believed the opposite, that we have to curb immigration.

His belief in free movement was one of the main themes of his 2020 leadership campaign, outlined in a speech in which he elaborated on why free movement was so vital.

Under his leadership, he said, Labour would ‘make the wider case on immigration’. He went on: ‘We have to make the case for the benefits of migration, the benefits of free movement . . . I want people in Europe to be able to come and continue to work here. I want families to be able to live together, whether that’s in Europe or here.

‘And I want people in this country, in the United Kingdom, to be able to go and study in Europe just as they can now, and people in Europe to be able to come and study here.

‘We have to make the case for freedom of movement. And we have to make it strongly.’

Asked afterwards by a journalist whether he was saying he would reverse then prime minister Boris Johnson’s ending of EU free movement if he became PM, Sir Keir replied: ‘On freedom of movement, yes, of course: bring back, argue for, challenge.’

What has changed between 2020 and 2022, you might ask. The answer is clear.

When he was speaking in 2020, he was addressing his fellow Labour members, who lapped up his warm words about free movement and immigration. When he spoke yesterday, he was speaking not just to the CBI conference but to the wider public, as the man with a poll lead of at least 20 per cent.

And he knows that immigration will be a key issue in the next election. Polls show that the Government’s once unassailable lead on the subject has vanished. A poll earlier this month showed that 59 per cent of people who voted Conservative in 2019 do not now trust the party to have the right immigration policies.

That is an opening for Labour that Sir Keir has sniffed, and he is up to his usual trick of dumping principles to win power.

Taunt

What makes this all the more shameful is that Sir Keir has said not a word about the origins of our problems with immigration. The opening up of our borders was not inevitable; it was a conscious choice by Tony Blair to refuse to consider imposing any real controls on entry as new members such as Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland joined the EU.

Indeed a deliberate choice had been made by New Labour to engineer mass immigration. Former Labour adviser Andrew Neather notoriously said this was a policy devised to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’ — that is, to change the UK’s ethnic make-up as a taunt to Middle England.

In a piece of grotesque misinformation, the Labour government said there would be around 13,000 immigrants a year from EU member states. The true figure turned out to be more than three million.

So for Sir Keir to talk now about the need to wean business off cheap labour is rich indeed, since it was Labour’s opening up of our borders that led to business becoming addicted to immigrant workers.

As we have seen, this is a man who has a habit of changing his views wildly, depending on what suits him best.

Today, for example, he wants to be seen as a resolute leader of the party who deserves respect for denying Jeremy Corbyn the Labour whip. Yet how does he reconcile this with the fact he spent five years campaigning to make the man Prime Minister?

Mute

While other Labour MPs behaved honourably and refused to serve under Corbyn, who they knew was unfit to be party leader, Sir Keir took on the key role of Shadow Brexit Secretary.

And when others protested about Corbyn’s behaviour over the party’s anti-Semitism problems, Starmer sat mute, seemingly concerned not with principle but with his own career advancement.

As Shadow Brexit Secretary, for example, Sir Keir infamously pushed for a second referendum in order to overturn the decision to leave Europe. But he was well aware that Labour was increasingly looking as if it was rejecting the result altogether, so he was careful to say in 2017 that there needed to be ‘some change’ to freedom of movement rules, then solidifying that later in the year to ‘free movement has to go’.

Yet by 2020 he was telling Labour members he was passionately committed to restoring freedom of movement.

The problem with Sir Keir is not that he has no beliefs. It is that he appears to have whatever beliefs he thinks he needs to have to win.

But, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’

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