A senior Labour Party politician has accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s government of being “too frightened” to tackle mass migration and warned that the left-wing party ignores the concerns of the working class in Britain to their “peril”.
Dame Margaret Hodge, who served as a Member of Parliament for three decades and who served in the governments of former Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has issued a stark warning to the fledgling Starmer administration over its failures to address concerns about mass migration in the wake of the protests and riots following the Southport mass stabbing attack that left three young British girls dead last month.
In an interview with the leftist Guardian newspaper, Dame Margaret urged the new Labour government to acknowledge the public’s frustration with mass migration and the ongoing illegal migrant crisis in the English Channel.
“We are all at fault that we’ve always been too frightened to talk about immigration. If you’re a politician, you have a voice. We need to use that voice to develop a new discourse about immigration – you lead rather than follow,” she said.
“People who want to hang on to their seats next time have got to worry that [the election] turnout was low, and be worried that there was this protest vote. We ignore it at our peril.”
Although she said that Labour should still stress the “richness” of immigration, Dame Margaret said ahead of last month’s general election that the political establishment in both major parties had ignored the costs of migration on working-class people, which have included radical changes to their communities, negative pressure on employment and wages, and the housing crisis.
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— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 10, 2024
Hodge, who stepped down from her seat in Parliament in May, has long warned that Labour’s failures to address immigration concerns within the white working-class populations could see traditional supporters of the party defect to right-wing alternatives at the ballot box.
The concern of white working-class voters abandoning Labour, recently echoed by legacy liberal media outlets in the United States, has grown since Dame Margaret first spoke of potential defections in 2006 given that Starmer’s government came to power with just 33.8 per cent of the vote last month and the increasing support for Nigel Farage’s anti-mass migration Reform UK party.
Farage’s party, which has called for a complete moratorium on immigration, won four million votes last month, which, due to the UK’s first-past-the-post system, only equated to five MPs, compared to 411 MPs for Labour’s 9.7 million votes.
However, despite being on the political right, Reform UK had a strong showing in traditional Labour strongholds, surpassing the Conservative Party to come in second to Labour in 89 constituencies.
Many of these seats were in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ areas in the north and Midlands of England, which defected to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in 2019 as Mr Farage stood down his then-Brexit Party in order to fulfil the mandate of the 2016 EU Referendum.
While one of the principal motivations to do so was to cut mass migration, Johnson’s Tories spurned such desires, opening the country to even more migration from non-EU nations, resulting in record levels of foreigners coming to the UK, despite multiple promises from the neo-liberal party to cut immigration.
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— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 4, 2024
This has left a political vacuum in the country, with both Conservatives and Labour — stemming back to Tony Blair — having both enacted effective open borders agendas.
Rather than using the opportunity of the Southport mass stabbing and the ensuing riots and protests as an opportunity to finally address the concerns of the public about immigration, Starmer, whose party is now more reliant on urban elites and migrant communities, has instead focused on a police crackdown on “far-right extremists,” despite most of the unrest having occurred in Labour-controlled areas.
Mr Farage said last week that the prime minister had “completely” misread the situation and that it was wrong to ignore the “general feeling of dissatisfaction” over mass migration and its impacts on British society.
The Brexit boss also predicted that Starmer’s response will drive more working class voters into the arms of Reform, saying: “If you use that term ‘far-right’, you’re using it against your own voters and a majority of the population.”
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— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 7, 2024