Liberal-progressives have lying in their DNA

This is an example:

Reform UK accuses Starmer of describing its supporters as racist – despite PM saying he wasn’t

But Nigel Farage’s colleagues are claiming that Keir Starmer was calling Reform UK supporters racists.

This is from Zia Yusuf, the Reform UK head of policy.

“Pay hundreds of billions for foreign nationals to live off the state forever, or we’ll call you racist!”

Labour’s new message to the British electorate just dropped:

And this is from the Reform MP Sarah Pochin.

Wanting to stand up for our country and stop our welfare system being abused is not racist, @Keir_Starmer. It is called standing up for the British people. You should try it sometime.

In his interview Starmer made a point of stressing that he was not calling Reform supporters racist. See 9.22am. [1]

This is from the Guardian. It caught my eye because of is manipulative dishonesty of a certain very specific type, which is part of the armoury of liberal progressive false narrative building. The context is the policy from the Reform party to massively tighten up immigration laws. Their plans including deporting irregular migrants (that is those who arrive without a Visa) who arrive from a safe country, and to abolish the Indefinite leave to Remain (ILR) status which, currently, is more or less automatically available to anyone who has been in the country on a Work Visa for 5 years. Most controversially the proposal includes a plan to rescind grants of ILR which have already been made. The policy, especially the latter aspect, may well be controversial. I suspect that it is widely popular in the UK, where millions of people have had enough of unlimited immigration.

The lie we see here in the Guardian is to say that the Reform party speakers are lying when they say that Starmer called their supporters racist. To develop this thesis the Guardian says “In his interview Starmer made a point of stressing that he was not calling Reform supporters racist”. Notice, immediately, the appeal to authority – a key aspect of cults. It doesn’t matter, however, what Starmer said about his comments. The fact is – if you say that a political party’s lead policy is X, then you are, by implication, calling the supporters of that party X’ists. Starmer is trying a little trick – of trying to separate the leadership of the Reform party from their supporters; the leadership is racist; the supporters are “frustrated”, (and, by implication, deluded). I suspect that for most Reform party supporters telling them they don’t really know what they are supporting is likely to add insult to injury. The comments by the Reform party speakers are ‘true’ at a level of polemics, because that is, basically, what Starmer is saying, despite his attempts to add a rhetorical distinction, and despite the Guardian’s attempts to further this device.

Starmer has recently announced a big new policy: electronic ‘ID cards’. The details are vague and neither of the media I’ve looked at in relation to this, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, seem to think it a responsibility of journalism to try to obtain specifics. It looks like the idea is more like a government services app, which could be used to verify identify in some way as well. The plan is being sold as doing something to control illegal working and thus reduce irregular migration. However, it will have no significant effect on migration. Obviously, it would not affect legal migration, as legal migrants will be given the card, or a substitute. As far as irregular migration goes, that is, chiefly, people travelling via boat from France to the UK, and, almost always, being ferried part of the way by the coastguard or RNLI – the vast majority of these people arrive intending to claim asylum and thus get ILR. An ID card system will not deter them because they have a very reasonable expectation of ending up on the right side of the law. Nor will the policy seriously affect those, the very small minority, who aim never to even try to apply for asylum, or those who are unsuccessful in their claim and who stay; these people will continue to work illegally as now. If someone is already employing unregistered labour what would a Digital ID card to do stop that? Nothing. When asked, in a TV interview reported by the Daily Mail, [3] to explain how a digital “ID card” would stop people working illegally, given that there is already a requirement on employers to ask for ID, would reduce illegal working Starmer said: “The difference is this is on point of starting, not a retrospective exercise as it now is. ‘It is an automatic collection of the information by the government so we know exactly who is working in our economy.”, which does not appear to be very clear. Employers are currently required to see ID before giving someone a job, which is not retrospective. What he means, I would guess, is that with an electronic system a National Insurance number can be verified in real time; but, the main point, I would assume, is that most people working illegally do so in collusion with the employer who has simply not asked for ID, rather than asked for, and being shown, a false document. Notice here; the blind and misplaced, faith, in some big corporate top-down IT system to solve a problem; this is a very characteristic feature of the government-corporate tie-up. (The iconic example of this approach being the 40 billion Track and Trace fiasco during Covid). I think the main point of this policy, apart from the usual money laundering of public funds to large corporations, is opportunistic, valueless and designed from top to bottom with Starmer’s electoral advantage in mind. The idea is to be able to say “we are doing something about illegal migration”, but, because the ID system will take a few years to roll out, you will have to wait. From beginning to end, it is a party political attempt to deal with the threat posed by the Reform party. That it won’t actually do anything to reduce immigration is, of course, a bonus. Starmer’s sponsors in the financial and corporate sectors certainly don’t want to see immigration reduced; they would have to start to pay more to train the UK’s workforce. Given the extent of Britain’s disability benefit culture, one can see why corporates would prefer to employ better motivated foreign workers for low-skilled jobs.

I would guess that Starmer’ explanations are convincing very few people outside the circle of the moderate “Labour” movement. This, incidentally, is why the Reform party is, currently, so popular. The lines that Starmer is trying: “to be anti-immigration is to be racist”, “trust me, I am the leader”, are wearing quite thin with large sections of the population. They might have worked 10 years ago, (and, obviously, there is always some kind of overlap between anti-immigrant attitudes and outright racism), but with legal migration running at hundreds of thousands a year, topped up with tens of thousands of irregular migrants, to be anti-immigration has now gone mainstream – and does not always correlate with racism. It is notable that both the Reform Party and Tommy Robson’s populist movement both have non-white people in leadership positions. Meanwhile; Starmer’s Trade Union bill of rights is still working its way slowly through Parliament, and, will, when enacted, do little other than to give Union agitators more power. And, so far, few of the promised 1.5 million plus new homes have been built [4]; not surprising, since it turns out that the main idea was to tweak planning regulations and expect the private sector to solve the problem. It is, of course, easier to come up with a gimmick policy, than really improve the “standard of living” of people. To some extent that is, of course, not Starmer’s fault. The UK’s media driven political circus with a new season launched (with many repeats) every five years promotes gimmick policies. Which then have to be sold by lying. While, all the time, more public money flows to private purses.

Update.

A senior Guardian columnist is aware of the danger of Starmer’s “racism” accusation against Reform supporters: “Starmer was careful in his interview to delineate his view of the policy and the party’s voters. But there is no naivety in No 10 about bad-faith actors who will say Starmer has now cast all Reform-curious voters as racist bigots.” – “Bad faith”; in fact, as we explain above, it is Starmer who is in “bad faith”.

The reason I linked to this “analysis” is because of this:

There is a nervousness, too, among some Labour aides about this newfound Starmer aggression. There are hard lessons to be learned from the two Democratic campaigns against Donald Trump – Hillary Clinton’s attack on the “deplorables” among Trump’s supporters and Kamala Harris’s insistence that democracy itself was at stake in 2024. Both claims were true but voters did not respond to them

I am, as always, interested in the epistemological frames of liberal progressive cultists. The typical way that the concept of “truth” is hijacked is to collapse all polemic, all claims, all interpretative statements and all opinions to the single plane of factual truth, “fact-check” them, and then decide that, if uttered by a “populist”, they are, of course, “false”. “Both claims were true”; this is a new variant on “truth”. When Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables” she was insulting them, abusing them, calling them names. This is a family newspaper so I have to be careful with my examples, but if I call someone, who, for example, accidentally drops their suitcase on my toe at the airport a “twit”, let’s say: is that “true”? Is it “true” in the same way that, say, it is true that penguins can’t fly, or that UK national debt is currently around 96% of GDP? No; of course not. It is an ejaculation, an expression. Even the person uttering it is unlikely to want to defend it as a factually true statement, saying something verifiable, about the suitcase dropper. Liberals are really challenged about the concept of “truth”. For liberals there is only one plane of truth. The real world of human experience, in which there are all kinds of different types of truth, is far too complex for them. This is a key feature of cults.

Notes

Liberal-progressives have lying in their DNA

Reform UK accuses Starmer of describing its supporters as racist – despite PM saying he wasn’t

Related Posts

Political class politiciansPolitical class politicians

The ascendancy of the victim narrativeThe ascendancy of the victim narrative

Popular narratives and the car accident in LiverpoolPopular narratives and the car accident in Liverpool