Who does Keir Starmer think he’s kidding? There he is in that glossy video imperiously decreeing there should be a State of Palestine, yet he can’t even hold the British state together. Under his half-hearted purview our borders have become more porous, our state machinery has become more enfeebled, and the country has become the laughing stock of the civilised world. Forget playing fantasy states overseas, Sir Keir: fix the one you run.
Here’s my question for the PM: when will you recognise the British state?
Here’s my question for the PM: when will you recognise the British state? We have become a nation where you risk being branded far right if you fly the flag. Where it’s considered extremist to want better policing of the borders. Where the chattering classes – Starmer’s mates – gaily mock those ‘gammon’ who hold the entirely reasonable view that illegal immigrants should be sent packing. Britain increasingly feels like a nation in name only. Restoring the state he rules should be top in the PM’s inbox, not Palestine.
Starmer’s video edict on the need for a Palestinian state would have been preposterous at any time. The man’s no Churchill. His wooden, nasal pose as a state-builder feels more cringe-inducing than history-making. But that his Palestine posturing came at the end of a week in which his own limp state failed yet again to deport illegal arrivals and reassert British sovereignty is almost too perfect. In essence: ‘We have no idea how to run a nation but we’re still going to magic up new ones overseas.’
The big political story of our time is state incapacity. The sheer impotence of the 21st-century British state has shocked even a grizzled sceptic like me. We used to rule the waves – now we struggle to eject from our own shores a handful of blokes who came here without permission. In the end, three illegal immigrants were sent home last week. I think. It’s hard to keep track of the rolling incompetence of the British bureaucracy.
At the same time, hundreds of new arrivals rocked up in small boats, making a mockery of our claim to be a sovereign nation with borders and laws. On Friday, more than a thousand people came. Many are probably young men from distant, regressive cultures, now ensconced in four-star comfort at the expense of us plebs. Starmer might have impressed the keffiyeh-draped middle classes with his Palestine stunt, but the rest of us are marvelling at the gall of a PM who poses as a state-maker on the world stage even as his own state falls deeper into disrepair.
Starmer makes much of his ‘one in, one out’ deal with France. But if last week is anything to go by, it’s more like ‘thousands in, three out’. The concerned mums who’ve been protesting at migrant hotels have been branded tabloid-addled idiots by trustafarian leftists, but they’re dead right. The laxness of our borders really matters. It’s letting in unvetted men and it’s hammering Britain’s very sovereignty. No serious state in history has permitted the arrival of thousands of unknown men week in, week out. Clearly we are no longer a serious state.
The lesson of recent weeks is that there now exists layer upon layer of legalistic activism and judicial overreach that seem singularly devoted to thwarting any meaningful exercise of Britain’s sovereign rights. For let’s be clear: a nation that has been so enfeebled by extrapolitical activity that it cannot even stop strangers from turning up, or deport them once they arrive, is not an independent nation. It’s a satellite state of the god of bourgeois opinion.
In recent decades we have witnessed the wilful selling off of Britain’s sovereignty in the name of globalism. The Starmerite classes have been at the forefront of this state erasure: human-rights lawyers, border-ignoring activists, lovers of the EU and its demand that member states pool ever more of their sovereignty. The end result, as some of us expected, is an increasingly sclerotic state, its sovereign muscles withered and puny from under-use. Last week it took the British state days of tortuous and expensive grunt work to eject just one Eritrean man – heaven help our anemic nation if we are ever invaded.
There’s a perverse logic to Starmer’s pantomime act as a state-builder for Palestinians – he hopes the noise of his Palestine recognition will distract attention from his failures at home. It’s his very inability to reinvigorate the British state that draws him to the fantasy project of a Palestinian state. Flailing domestically, he seeks fleeting glory overseas. ‘Palestine’ becomes little more than a moral prop for an at-sea leader whose grip on domestic power is waning fast.
So how about it, Sir Keir? Make a statement recognising Britain. Refortify our borders and restore our flag. Surely you care more about the nation you rule than about a nation that doesn’t even exist?
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