Nations depend on rules – fair rules.
Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values.
They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another.
Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important.
Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.
People contacted me this week to say Keir Starmer had quoted Enoch Powell in his speech on immigration.
His phrase “an island of strangers” sounded a bit like Powell’s infamous line: “made strangers in their own country.” My friend wasn’t the only one to make the comparison—former Labour MP Zarah Sultana echoed the claim, and plenty of well-meaning lefties were up in arms.
But the context was completely different. Powell was pushing for a white Britain. Starmer was making a defence of diversity and praising the contribution of immigrants. Not that you’d know that from how it was reported—or shared on social media.
“Island of strangers” comes from Bowling Alone, a 20-year-old study of how Americans became more isolated, their social capital declined, and they grew less supportive of democracy. These days, the same voters are aggressively targeted online—mostly by the far right.
The idea goes back further. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that loneliness is a precondition for totalitarian terror. When we lose connections with others, it’s easier to see them as enemies.
Starmer’s argument was about fraying social bonds—people spending too much time online, not knowing their neighbours, and being prey to far-right propaganda.
When I spent time talking to Reform voters in County Durham, I found plenty of people with strongly held but shallow views. They were angry about small boats and so-called “illegals” swarming their communities—communities they’d never actually seen these migrants in. Asked why they felt this way, they couldn’t say. Or they just parroted slogans. The whiter the town, the greater the terror of being overwhelmed by foreigners. That these supposed hordes had never arrived didn’t make the fear any less real.
But it’s not all fantasy. The post-Brexit immigration system has led to a huge rise in non-EU immigration.
It’s easy to see Labour’s plans to reduce immigration as an opportunistic response to Reform’s rise. But the roots go deeper.
Labour has a clear diagnosis of post-Brexit Britain: low wages, low investment, low productivity, low growth. Their prescription? A shift to a high-wage, high-investment, high-productivity economy. The aim is more tax revenue and more money for the NHS and welfare.
Agree or not, it’s a consistent vision.
Labour wants to stop employers from relying on cheap labour and avoiding investment. They blame businesses for clinging to low-wage models instead of boosting productivity. They have a point.
To force change, they’ve raised the minimum wage by 6.7% to £12.21 an hour (about £25,000 a year), hiked employers’ National Insurance from 13.8% to 15%, and promised the biggest expansion of workers’ rights since the 1970s—including collective bargaining in the care sector.
And that’s just the start.
They’re also closing the pipeline of low-paid migrant labour. The Immigration Skills Charge (a fee for sponsoring overseas workers) rose by 32%. A five-year visa now costs medium and large firms £6,600. The salary threshold to bring family members is increasing from £29,000, and the Immigration Salary List—which offers discounts for in-demand jobs like care work—is being scrapped.
The logic? Boost productivity. Rachel Reeves identified it in her Mais Lecture as the root cause of stagnant wages. Labour hopes stronger rights from day one will embolden workers to job-hop and drive up pay.
Add to that a planned reset in trade relations with the EU, and this becomes a fundamental reworking of Britain’s economic model—especially the damage done by Boris Johnson’s botched Brexit deal.
The Treasury won’t say it out loud, but they’re banking on some creative destruction. Low-productivity firms will fail. High-productivity firms will thrive.
But there are risks.
What happens to sectors like care or construction, vital to Labour’s plans, that already struggle to recruit? The government hopes to fill the gap with the millions classed as “economically inactive”—but where’s the plan to make that happen? What happens to poor communities with inefficient business who can’t access capital to modernise? The many 1000s of high streets with low investment, labour intensive businesses?
And how far can you push employers before unemployment starts to rise? How much can wages rise before joblessness follows? Will domestic workers take up these jobs only if pay increases sharply?
The latest data is encouraging. The economy grew 0.7% in Q1 2025—its fastest rate in years and the highest in the G7. Inflation and interest rates are down. But unemployment is creeping up—now 4.5%, up from 4.4% at the election. It’s a small uptick, but it suggests the government is willing to accept some transitional job losses to reshape the economy.
Not since Thatcher has a government been so ruthless in pursuit of economic transformation.
And consumers? For decades they’ve paid extra for labour-intensive, inefficient craft goods. Gordon’s Gin and Stella are far more efficient than their artisan rivals—but do people want efficiency? Will they trade their barista-poured lattes for Nescafé?
Starmer was parking some tanks on Farage’s lawn. He dressed up established Labour policy in Reform-style language to land a punch.
But why play to Reform’s strengths, not their weaknesses? And they have spectacular weaknesses—not least their newly announced economic policies, which make Liz Truss look like Keynes.
The Mail gave Farage a big platform. His proposals? Predictable, enormous, unfunded tax cuts.
The Economist—hardly a lefty rag—was scathing:
For those who didn’t read them, here’s the short version:
And those Durham voters? They won’t notice a change in immigration levels—because the immigrants were never there in the first place. They’ve feared an influx for decades. The fact it hasn’t happened doesn’t change the fear. Under Starmer’s plans, they still won’t arrive—but that won’t stop the scare stories.
Labour is still trying to win a battle with reality. But they’re losing a battle against Farage’s online fantasies—engineered for likes and shares, backed by foreign money, built on nationalism, and endlessly amplified. And persuading middle class graduates that Labour are the bad guys is a big part of their plan.
Isn’t the real problem with the “Island of Strangers” speech that it needlessly antagonized non-white voters who believed it was a nod to Enoch Powell, even though it wasn’t meant that way?
I think that there is some truth in that. We have become used to the way that aggressive disinformation is being fed to right wingers to keep them in a permanent state of rage and bewilderment. What don’t always spot that the same is happening with the middle class left. Most of the people who were angry about Starmer’s speech were white, middle class graduates. The less likely they were to have non-white friends and family the more likely they were to be angry about Starmer. Often the white middle class left get angry on behalf of non-white people, something I find baffling, but happens a lot
Learning more about the speech, wasn’t the really offensive part not the “island of strangers” metaphor itself, but that it attacked the preceding Tory government for running a “one-nation experiment in open borders”?
I’m increasingly wondering if this immigration surge under Boris Johnson was indeed the reason why Reform’s vote surged in County Durham: not because the long-established population was especially anti-immigrant, but because the immigration surge intensified the pressure on local authorities in more prosperous parts of the country (where the immigrants were naturally preferring to go) to dump their unproductive housing-benefit tenants anywhere where there was surplus housing, for example in former pit villages that had little economic purpose beyond warehousing such unproductive people.
These people would naturally resent foreign immigration as they’d blame it for their displacement to isolated shitholes, and were likely a nucleus around which support for far-right ideas will have grown.
There could be some truth in that, a parrallel process is socially liberal voters moving out of London and making parts of the surrounding home counties labour or green. A great sort, as populations are segregated
Also – is part of the problem the absence or decline of the social realm? People are more isolated, don’t know their neighbours (or anyone), local shops all shutting, no cinema, swimming pool, no social clubs or hobby groups?