Starmer’s abject failure of leadership

Western Daily Press, 6 August 2024, p. 17

I hope you will indulge this long letter, as it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the issue it addresses. It is also written from the left of the political spectrum, not from the ‘far right’, which, given the subject matter, makes it especially prescient.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has demonstrated an abject failure of leadership in the face of the riots recently engulfing the country, thus missing a golden opportunity to heal an open wound that has plagued the UK for years. All Starmer has done to date is to predictably grandstand about ‘law and order’, ‘far-right extremists sewing hate’ and the machinations of social media – utterly failing in the process to address the real issue.

An unfortunate metaphor, perhaps, but the very last thing we need right now is a Prime Minister fiddling around while Rome burns. I hardly ever quote Tony Blair favourably; but Starmer would do well to recall Blair’s mantra, ‘Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime’.

By flagrantly ignoring the underlying causes of these riots, Starmer will virtually guarantee that such appalling discord and unrest will continue. What he should have done following his ritual condemnation of the violence was to say something like the following: “I recognise, however, that this unrest is underpinned by the abject failure of the political class effectively to address the question of mass immigration, and the concerns it is raising amongst a substantial number of our citizens.

To this end, I am immediately calling the first of a series of meetings with Rishi Sunak, Nigel Farage, Sir Ed Davey, Carla Denyer and myself to address the underlying causes of these riots, and to seek an agreed cross-party response that will materially and effectively respond to the concerns.

I undertake to listen carefully and open-mindedly to what my fellow leaders have to say. We are determined to set right politicians’ abject failure over many years to take this vexed question seriously.”

At a stroke, such an initiative would disarm any ‘far-right’ violence, and signal at long last that the mass-immigration question is now being taken seriously by our political leaders and policy-makers.

Failure to take this course of action, or something close to it, will merely add to the understandable suspicions of so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ that mass replacement immigration constitutes a de facto policy commitment that has been signed up to by the main political parties, wedded to a globalist agenda and with no democratic legitimacy to underpin it.

It’s not as if our political leaders haven’t had sufficient notice of this issue. One just needs to consider the rise of UKIP and its successes in the Euro elections; its 2015 General Election performance (3,881,099 votes, 12.6 per cent – and just one seat); the Brexit referendum vote of 2016; UKIP’s deliberate standing-down of 319 candidates in 2019 to assure a Conservative victory in exchange for addressing the immigration issue – which, of course, the Tories signally failed to do, following the years of broken promises from David Cameron et al. to deliver on his party’s empty undertakings on the mass-immigration question.

Contrary to the ritualistic smears of the woke commentariat, it is emphatically neither ‘far right’ nor ‘racist’ to have grave concerns about a nation’s cultural fabric when subjected to mass replacement immigration. Starmer has the opportunity now to heal a wound that has plagued this nation for years, but will he have the wisdom to do so? I wish I was holding my breath – but alas, I’m not; and voters will reach their own conclusions if he fails to seize this historic moment.

Dr Richard House

Stroud, Gloucestershire