The Telegraph, Wednesday 14th May 2025
Starmer’s migration turn shows how even the elite now can’t defend multiculturalism
His words are a welcome start, but they must be matched by real action if we are to restore a shared sense of nationhood
Keir Starmer now says risk becoming “an island of strangers.” A phrase designed to linger as the headline takeaway from his latest intervention, ostensibly a pivot towards disgruntled Red Wall voters and a nod to a truth long considered unspeakable in polite society: that immigration, or rather its scale and speed, has rendered parts of Britain unfamiliar even to those born and raised in them.
Coming, as it does, hot on the heels of dismal local election results – and with reports of a Brussels compromise on free movement next week – it was hard not to see this as a form of political theatre. A rehearsed “get tough” stance on migration, performed for an audience that has grown suspicious of the actor.
Those of us who have, for years, raised concerns about the cultural and civic consequences of mass migration have not been met with rational counterargument but with accusation: racist, Nazi, Enoch Powell. To hear a Labour Prime Minister echo some of the truths we have long advanced – truths about economic strain, civic cohesion, and national identity – was a grim vindication. Perhaps he believes it. More likely, he recognises that Reform UK is scooping up votes in his heartlands.
But even performance reveals priorities. That Starmer felt the need to say it is a measure of how far public opinion has shifted, and how untenable the elite consensus has become.
We often talk about migration in terms of economics, as if the only relevant question were numbers. But integration is not about GDP-per-capita deltas or net fiscal contributions. It is about whether a nation still knows itself; whether its people recognise each other as part of the same story.
That question – who are we, and what do we share? – has for too long been brushed aside in favour of a shallow managerialism. But no society can survive on economic metrics alone. Cohesion is a cultural project. And when that project is neglected, the results are visible: alienation, fragmentation, despair.
We’ve known this for decades. Back in December 2006, Tony Blair gave a speech titled The Duty to Integrate: Shared British Values. It came in the wake of 7/7 and the revelation that the murderers of fellow Britons on the Tube were themselves British – citizens of this country, educated in its schools, shaped (ostensibly) by its values. And yet they despised it.
Blair’s words then would, today, be branded controversial: “Conform – or don’t come here.” He argued that multiculturalism had its limits, that belonging entailed duties as well as rights. A multicultural society, he said, depended on integration: shared values and mutual recognition.
Trevor Phillips warned of, “sleepwalking into segregation”. David Blunkett commissioned the Cantle Report after the 2001 riots in Bradford, Oldham, and Burnley. It spoke of “parallel lives” – of communities living side-by-side and yet utterly apart, with no meaningful contact, no shared civic rituals.
This isn’t a Right-wing critique. It has been made again and again by thinkers and politicians of all stripes – by David Goodhart in 2004, in his prescient The Discomfort of Strangers, where he warned that ethnic diversity, absent common culture, risked eroding solidarity. And by David Cameron, who in 2011 declared that state multiculturalism had failed: not because difference was bad, but because we had forgotten to ask what we share.
As expected, the reaction from the liberal-metropolitan set to Starmer’s speech was one of moral confusion. But in Islington, I love the mix! they say, sipping flat whites in cosmopolitan comfort. Of course they do. Because this is not about them. It is about the forgotten towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, Bradford, where inward migration happened not as a feature of global glamour but as a wave of social upheaval.
These are the places where English is no longer the first language in school playgrounds. Where attitudes towards women are drawn not from British law but from imported, often regressive, religious codes. Where first cousin marriage and female genital mutilation are the norm. Where hotels become makeshift hostels for illegal migrants – young men, often unvetted – while local families struggle for housing. Where the Union Jack is jeered and Palestinian flags are proudly waved. Where institutions turn a blind eye to criminality for fear of appearing racist. Where the teaching of history has become so distorted that Churchill is demonised. Where the stories of grooming gangs and sexual exploitation went untold for years – because the victims were the wrong kind of victims.
As Jonathan Sacks once wrote, democracy is a conversation – not of monologues, but of voices committed to building something together. And building requires agreement: not on every detail, but on the foundations. A common story. A shared purpose. A language of belonging. Britain needs more of this today.
There was a time when schoolchildren were given mugs and coins to commemorate royal events. When the national anthem played at the cinema. When the Empire was taught not as original sin but as complicated history. When Christian prayers were heard in classrooms. When duty, service, and love of country were normal – unremarkable, even.
Those rituals didn’t make us better. But they made us one.
So yes, Starmer has named the problem. But will he act? Will he confront the failed orthodoxy of multiculturalism and replace it not with nativism, but with something noble – an integrationism rooted in shared contribution, civic pride, and the dignity of difference?
Because if he does not, the warning implicit in his own phrase will become prophecy: Britain, once a nation, will become merely an island of strangers.
Suella
