#SwindonsSundaySermon: if you can’t beat ’em – make sure you’re even worse

If you can’t beat them, join them. Right? If Keir Starmer hasn’t joined them, he certainly has just made the daunting prospect of a Farage-led government just that bit more likely.

Addressing the nation this past Monday, Keir Starmer finally came up with his response to the advance of the reactionist right and claimed that Britain risks “becoming an island of strangers” if net migration doesn’t come down.

The wholly unedifying spectacle of a Labour, I repeat LABOUR PARTY Prime Minister, desperately attempting to out-Farage, Farage himself by using language designed to provocatively enflame rather than enlighten doesn’t sit well with me.

Does Keir Starmer even know what he is ‘protecting’?

This deeply unpleasant amoral tabloid-speak, aping the rhetoric of the far-right, doesn’t deliver the change that Keir Starmer promised, but it does quite clearly guarantee a path of continuity with the demonisation of migrants set to intensify for the foreseeable future.

Does anyone with just a degree of sensibility honestly believe a care worker from Cameroon or a bus driver from Bangladesh is a risk to the British way of life?

What is this British way of life that Keir Starmer thinks that he is protecting?

A tin of beans costs nearly as much as a pint, and if you do your weekly shop at Waitrose you might want to consider selling a kidney on the black market.

We used to have wet springs. Do you remember something called “April showers”? That’ll be the title of a Bonnie Blue movie these days. Bognor is the new Benidorm, thanks to climate change.

The notion of a generous benefits system is a whopping great lie. If I can find that out with a quick Google, so can a migrant, so can an ignorant right-wing headbanger with the likability of haemorrhoids.

For the record, the UK has the third lowest welfare value across the OECD and is no more than a middle ranker when it comes to welfare spending (as a percent of GDP).

Britain does not have a generous benefits system.

The poorest parts of the UK are now poorer than the poorest parts of Malta and Slovenia. You won’t hear Keir Starmer scream that from the rooftops, front door ablaze.

What other British values is he trying to protect? Record NHS waiting times? We love a queue, after all.

Illusion – or delusion?

Starmer seems to have this illusion of a Britain that is characterised by politeness, social etiquette, and individual liberty. Perhaps it’s supposed to be that way, maybe it used to be that way (although I doubt it), but this isn’t a Britain that I recognise in 2025.

Keir Starmer isn’t interested in protecting the British way of life, however you may define it. Keir Starmer is only interested in protecting himself and the assets of those that pull his strings.

This disastrous immigration speech — which even had the liberal media screaming “rivers of blood” — felt very anti-British, if like me you also feel that tolerance and compassion are amongst our greatest unspoken strengths.

We mobilise in our hundreds of thousands for Palestine. We are good people and we are so much better than the way our compromised politicians represent us on the global stage.

While Starmer himself must always take ultimate responsibility for his government and what they stand for, surely there must be someone in power that needs to take his speechwriter to one side and help them clear their desk?

The substance of the speech was entirely lost in the hateful and divisive language of the speech. That didn’t happen by accident. How bad does it have to be to receive a nod of approval from the far-right Orban Hungarian government?

I remember one of Jeremy Corbyn’s speechwriters, a very talented man named Alex Nunns. I got a mention, and a signed copy of his fantastic book The Candidate once upon a time.

Alex used to write about togetherness, peace, decency, the importance of community, solidarity with the oppressed, dignity for the vulnerable, and every single speech that Jeremy delivered had hope at its very core.

This felt like patriotism to me, not this overt hostility that has been scrambled together with the help of Grok and some highly questionable and completely dishonest data from a shitty right-wing clickbait website.

We’re a little over ten months into the Starmer era and barely a day goes by without me feeling just a bit more disgusted by their behaviour than I was the day before.

There was never any doubt that we were in for a very bumpy ride under neoliberal Labour, but even I thought this Reform-esque rhetoric might be beneath the Labour leader.

Starmer’s Britain: where racists are the victims

Talking of hate speech, I came across the case of Lucy Connolly, this past week.

Mrs Connolly, who is married to a former Tory Councillor, was jailed for 31 months for a hateful social media post, much to the anger of the hard-right and that irrelevant attention whore, Dan Wootton.

By the time you get around to reading this, Lucy may well be free, but has she learned the very simple difference between free speech and hate speech?

The criminal, Connolly, got no less than what she deserved, and yes, I have read the notes from the appeal and I feel nothing but absolute sympathy for any parent that has lost a child.

But let’s turn the content of Connolly’s ugly social media post around for a moment.

What if Mrs Connolly was instead a British Muslim, calling for hotels full of white “bastards” to be burned to the ground?

Would we all gather outside of the Court of Appeal to hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah until the British Muslim was released from prison to a sea of ISIS flags and Kalashnikov gun fire?

I rest my case, your honour.

Featured image via Rachael Swindon