Labour's cowardice in the face of extremism

The party's silence is an act of moral debasement.

Nigel Farage MP (Clacton, Reform UK) @House of Commons

What we experienced this week was a complete collapse in our moral functions.

There's no other suitable description for what took place here. It was one of those moments where the sense of national decline is so severe, so profound, that it takes your fucking breath away. Something in you dies, some lingering hope about what this country represents, about the kinds of things it would never tolerate, would never do or say. It was a godforsaken fucking week in a godforsaken fucking year.

The key moment came after Nigel Farage's speech on a mass deportation programme. It is the kind of thing which he would not have said a year ago. We know that because he refused to. "It's a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people," he said a few months back. "We simply can't do it." Now his position had changed. He believes it could be achieved if we pay the Taliban to accept the return of people they intend to murder.

Farage did not change his mind because of the credibility of the plan. He changed it because we are all trapped in a radicalisation engine, where the things which recently seemed like universal moral norms no longer have any purchase.

The primary mechanism in the radicalisation engine is Donald Trump. He makes what was once unthinkable a daily occurrence: Mass deportations, a domestic camp network, police action against opposition politicians, the deployment of the military onto the street, the eradication of independent power sources, the silencing of critical commentary, the threat of dictatorship, the creation of military zones in major US cities.

These extreme actions are normalised inside and outside the US. Domestically, they are made to feel ordinary by the deference the media pays Trump in the wake of the election result. Respectable outlets, like CNN or the New York Times, criticise him but they work to balance-out their coverage in a way that gives it the impression of convention. Internationally, they are made to feel ordinary by world leaders adopting a strategy of snake-charming. Instead of denouncing or challenging Trump, they believe they can influence him and hold the Western alliance together by flattering him through acts of ritual emperor worship. This creates a global elite perception that what he is doing is perfectly acceptable.

The secondary mechanism is X. We have to accept now that Elon Musk's takeover of the site was probably the most effective single action for the far-right since the early 20th Century. We are in the worst of all possible worlds. The site has become a far-right information system. Mainstream journalists and politicians still use it, however, and seemingly consider it a barometer of the public mood. Most liberal voices are completely absent - either because they've gone into self-exile or because the algorithm silenced them.

In the UK, we experience a third mechanism by virtue of the press and BBC. The inbuilt right-wing lean in the British press has become particularly acute as a result of X's freefall. It is then fed into a national broadcaster which bases its current affairs output on press coverage.

The Times - supposedly the newspaper of record but now increasingly nativist apologia - covered Farage's speech by saying: "Nigel Farage’s deportation plan is challenging - but may put him in No 10." The Mail said he is "in tune with Middle England" - basically its highest form of praise. These views are then hoovered up into the BBC agenda. They are promoted using Farage's ideal framing on the main news website and the Today programme. More perniciously and with less attention from the political class, they are also filtered into the rest of the corporations output - local radio, music radio, and so on. The places where normal people get their news.

That is what led us to the moment of moral collapse. It was not the Farage speech. It was not even the press coverage of the Farage speech. It was Labour's response to it.

As the Guardian's Jessica Elgot reported: "No10 spokesman not prepared to criticise anything about Farage speech today. Not his description of 'invasion', not his prediction that the UK on brink of civil war, not plans to pay the Taliban or Iran to take back migrants, or indeed to rule out doing so themselves."

That right there is the end point. A progressive governing party has become so mute in the face of the radicalisation engine, so stricken with internal neurosis, that it has lost the ability to recognise extremism. It was an act of complete political and ethical surrender.

To a certain extent, Keir Starmer's position is consistent with his centrist heritage.

During the 1990s, the right-wing press was obsessed with what it called "bogus asylum seekers". New Labour embraced this terminology. In 1995, opposition leader Tony Blair said: "We oppose bogus [asylum] applications and fraud and we recognise the need for immigration controls". Shadow home secretary Jack Straw said: "No one doubts the need to tackle the problem of bogus asylum seekers."

Once in power, they partly delivered on that rhetoric. Blair tried to slash the appeals process and restrict access to legal aid in asylum cases. He helped create the 'leftie lawyers' sneer which exists today with talk of a "gravy train of legal aid". He also attempted to take personal control of asylum policy, mobilising Royal Navy warships to intercept people traffickers and RAF transport planes to carry out bulk deportations.

All of this has more than an echo of our present debate, but two things have changed. The first, obviously, is the environment Labour operates in. New Labour took place during an era of triumph for liberal democracy. This government is taking place as liberal democracy threatens to collapse. Blair was dealing with a right-wing which was still capable of moral sanity. Starmer is dealing with a right wing that is undergoing a daily process of radicalisation. When Blair triangulated against his opponents, he could place his flag in solid ground. For Starmer, there are only shifting sands - the desert amid the wind.

It's presumably this which led Starmer to turn his X account into a replica of the GB News Channel. He - or whoever is running his account - seems to have gone completely native, burning his own dignity as if it were a daily chore. This week he put out a post saying: "If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return." It featured numerous photos of black men being fingerprinted and incarcerated. Underneath it, his intended audience simply demanded more. Raheem J. Kassam, former chief adviser to Farage, insisted he actively try to kill asylum seekers. He replied: "Sink one boat and it all stops. Go on…"

Back in the 90s, triangulating to the right on asylum meant promising strict controls. Today, it means murdering asylum seekers. The environment has simply changed too much to allow for a replication of the same tactics.

The other thing that has changed is the talent of the leadership on display. I like Starmer - even now I think there is a better man there trying to get out, although I recognise that this is beginning to look naive. Yet no matter his qualities, he does not have Blair's confidence in selling a message, or the convictions which allowed him to come up with that message in the first place. And yes, before you say anything, Blair did have convictions - they led him into some of his greatest errors, like Iraq, and some of his greatest triumphs, like Kosovo.

In the case of asylum, they allowed him to draw a moral line. During the 2005 election, he said the following: "We are a tolerant, decent nation. That tolerance should not be abused. But neither should it be turned on its head. It is the duty of government to deal with the issues of both asylum and immigration. But they should not be exploited by a politics that, in desperation, seeks refuge in them."

It is very hard to imagine Starmer having the confidence or the clarity of vision to say that today.

Labour's cowardice on this matter will not work, even on practical terms.

It serves to deprive the party of a meaningful attack. YouGov polling this week found that the public implacably oppose Farage's policy. Just 17% of people thought it was acceptable to pay the Taliban to return migrants to Afghanistan, compared to 61% of people who thought it was unacceptable. It didn't even have majority support in the Reform party. In fact it's so unpopular that Farage seemed to row back on it.

Most people in this country have not gone insane. They might be worried about immigration, fed as they are a daily diet of hysteria. But they have not lost all remaining sense of moral reason.

Labour's cowardice meant it lost a golden opportunity to define itself against Farage. Yes, it needs to show competence and control on asylum. But it could also show that it remembered compassion and decency. That opportunity is now lost, fumbled away in a state of moral bewilderment.

In the long term, this confusion will undermine its own election campaign.

Public concern over immigration is focused on the small boats and the sense the government has lost control of them. It is not overly concerned with immigration. Labour could have made sure it kept the asylum and immigration issues separate. Instead, it muddled them.

Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech mixed these two matters together and then introduced a key policy change: it doubled the permanent residency timeline to an eye-watering ten years. This is just one of several obstacles to people coming to the UK to work. The salary threshold for a skilled worker visa is around £41,700. The fees for employers are around £10,000 per worker over a decade. Several visa routes, like social care, are now effectively closed. Dependent eligibility has been significantly reduced.

Not every wealthy country does this. Canada, for instance, has streamlined Express Entry and Provincial Nominee Programme systems. They signed off on 485,000 permanent residents in 2024. Immigrants now make up 29% of the country's labour force. This matters, because those workers will be economically beneficial. Canadian firms owned by immigrants show 2.4% higher labour productivity compared to their counterparts. Productivity, I don't need to remind you, is the key problem facing the British economy.

Where will a skilled, talented immigrant go? To a country which charges them thousands and imposes a decade-long wait for permanent residency? One which treats them like a burden? One which prevents them from bringing their partner? One which might change the rules again at any time in a highly unstable and toxic political environment? Or will they go to the other place?

As Steve Cooper, coordinator at the Canadian Citizenship Information Service, said recently: "Skilled workers want stability, fairness, and long-term security. Currently, Canada offers all three while the UK appears to be moving in the opposite direction, making it increasingly difficult for migrants to plan their futures with any certainty… Talent goes where it's welcomed, not where it's tolerated."

He's not exactly an unbiased voice, but the point is sound. Labour is not going to win the next election on small boats, nor will it lose on that basis either. It will win on whether the economy is improving and public services are getting better. It knows this. But its cowardice on immigration is a direct sabotage of that very effort.

Truth is, I don't really care about the practical arguments anymore. Not really. I just put them there out of habit.

The real business here is moral. It's about the soul of the fucking country. If Labour needed to take damage in order to stand up for basic decency - for the shred of civilization that marks us out from beasts - then I would expect to see them fucking do it without the need for a self-serving argument to justify it.

Talk of mass deportation is Nazi fucking bullshit. You can pretend otherwise, but that's what it is. In order to even countenance it, you must reach a point of hatred towards a minority group which is reminiscent of the very worst moments of human history. In order to implement it, you would need a system of control and surveillance which goes well beyond any traditional notion of what this country, or indeed any free society, is about. In order to enact it, you need to split people into valid and invalid categories, round them up and concentrate them in advance of deportation, necessitating the use of camps. And yes, if you're going to land those planes at their destination, you will need to do deals with tyrannical governments so that they can murder the people who tried to escape them.

That's the reality of it. Those who promote the idea should be treated like the moral discharge they so truly fucking are. Those who countenance it should hang their fucking heads in shame. And those who know it's wrong should stand up proudly to state their opposition to it, as we would expect of anyone with the stature and vigour to operate in a civilised society.

Labour doesn't need to turn into an asylum support group, but it can damn well lay down the clear lines it will not cross. It can demonstrate the levels of conviction showed by Blair, which does not seem an impossible level of decency to aspire towards. It can show one tissue-thick whimper of fucking courage. Because by Christ if it doesn't do that soon there'll be precious little left to defend.