Starmer is failing his first major test

It’s entirely understandable that the Prime Minister has hit out at “far-Right thugs” who have been responsible for the violence that has erupted across the country in recent days.

Those who attacked hotels accommodating asylum seekers represent the very worst of Britain, taking out all their resentments and hatreds against innocent people who have nothing to do with the grievance that sparked off this latest round of mob rule.

Attacking the perpetrators of this latest round of violence is necessary, but it is also, for politicians, the easiest and most comfortable response. The alternative, one that our leaders have tried to avoid at all costs, is to lead a debate about the issue that sparked the violence in the first place: immigration.

That prospect seems more remote than ever; indeed it would be foolish to concede anything to the mob, lest they conclude – rightly – that their violence, intimidation and thuggery was being rewarded with an acknowledgement that things have to change. 

Yet by labelling the perpetrators as “far-Right”, by refusing to acknowledge explicitly that political violence and intimidation has been the recent modus operandi of groups with other, no less appalling, ambitions, Keir Starmer risks being seen as an apologist for “two-tier” policing.

If even his Chancellor can warn that a failure to curb immigration will lead to rioting, it seems eminently sensible to consider that there is more to the latest unrest than mindless, opportunistic violence by the far-Right.

In 2016, Rachel Reeves, then a Labour backbencher and one of the more thoughtful voices on the defeated Remain side of the vexed Brexit debate, warned that high levels of immigration and EU freedom of movement had to come to an end: “We have got to get [Brexit] right because there are bubbling tensions in this country that I just think could explode. You had those riots [in London] in 2011… If riots started again in Leeds and bits of my constituency – it’s like a tinderbox.”

Turns out she was right.

Obviously, Reeves was not remotely justifying in advance any such violence, but was merely reading the runes. That she was willing to issue such a warning publicly is to her credit. And yet anyone doing so today – even in precisely the same terms that Reeves used eight years ago – would risk condemnation as an enabler of the violence we’ve seen over the last few days.

But instead of acknowledging the frustration and anger that exists in communities across the country, as Reeves did in 2016, the government and the wider establishment instead seek to delegitimise concerns about immigration, perhaps in the hope that, contrary to all experience and common sense, the issue will just go away. 

Political violence in a democracy is unacceptable. It was unacceptable in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis. It was unacceptable when rioting broke out in Leeds, sparked by local anger at the removal by social workers of two Roma children from their families. It was unacceptable last year when ethnic rivalries erupted on the streets of Leicester. It was unacceptable in London in 2011. It was unacceptable in 1984 when a taxi driver taking strike-breaking miners to work was killed by a lump of concrete thrown through his car’s windscreen by striking miners.

In all these cases, the motivations of the perpetrators were examined and even sympathised with; but this has not happened in the latest episodes of violence.

The political priority, of course, must be to stop the violence immediately and to bring to justice anyone involved in perpetrating or encouraging it. But the Prime Minister cannot be allowed to pretend that such violence is the sole preserve of only one group of people just because it is comforting and convenient to do so. And he cannot hope to pretend that the unacceptably high levels of immigration that we have endured since leaving the EU can be continued without the kind of consequences that the Chancellor warned of nearly a decade ago.