Keir Starmer has finally realised that he needs to tackle rising immigration. The Prime Minister said yesterday that Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ if nothing is done. Predictably, his speech has gone down badly with the usual suspects.
There may be a simple reason why some of Starmer’s critics will never see eye to eye with him on migration
There may be a simple reason why some of Starmer’s critics will never see eye to eye with him on migration: their main preoccupation appears not to be with different cultures or individuals. Rather, they seem to regard human beings as parts of a bigger, more important whole. These materialists see us as cogs in the machine.
This mentality afflicts materially-orientated people on both the left and right. People of this ilk, who understand society foremost as composed of physical objects, institutions and markets, have been out in force since Starmer made his speech.
The reaction of leftists has not only been tiresomely predictable with its cries of ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’, but we have also seen resurface the all-too-familiar symptoms of NHS-worship and with it the return of the noble savage in the guise of the modern-day immigrant.
Jonathan Lis, the journalist and deputy director of the think tank British Influence, summed up the sentiment in all its mendacious sentimentality and hyperbole: ‘Migrants quite literally built this country. The NHS and care system would have collapsed several times over without them.’ Or, as the former Scotland First Minister, Humza Yousaf, wrote on X: ‘What have immigrants ever done for us? Coming to our country…creating jobs, staffing the NHS, winning Olympic gold medals, adding £bns to our economy.’
In his parting words, Yousaf betrayed a preoccupation we more associate with materialists on the right: ‘the economy’. Note his deployment of that abstract noun. Not ‘jobs’, ‘people’s wages’ or ‘living standards’. It’s simply, and always, ‘the economy’.
This argument regarding the utmost importance of ‘the economy’ is invariably rolled out in the pages of the Financial Times or by those in the City. We witnessed this in all its grasping avarice during the 2016 referendum to leave the EU, when big business, with its reliance on cheap foreign labour, issued hysterical forebodings about the UK’s economic collapse should it vote Leave. The result of that vote didn’t see the demise of their myopic argument or their fixation with markets and statistics. They still remind us how important immigrants are to the economy and sainted GDP figures.
This GDP-obsession may be nerdy and mindless, but few find it surprising. We expect big business to be heartless. Likewise, the undimmed NHS-worship among many leftists is as mechanical and moronic as it is predictable.
Just as with those who worship money, those who bow down at the altar of an institution are prone to forget about actual people. We saw the gruesome consequences of this mindset during the lockdown years of 2020-21, when the imperative to ‘save the NHS’ was often raised above the need the save the lives, livelihoods and sanity of actual individuals.
Yet even in relation to the NHS, underneath the reverential talk of altruism, there is at work greed and selfishness. When those on the left ask us rhetorically and righteously, ‘what would the NHS be without the immigrants who run it?’, what they ought to be asking themselves is, ‘what would the NHS be without the dirt cheap labour poached from poor countries, countries who spent considerable sums training these doctors and nurses?’
This state of affairs is an unmentionable truth for left-liberals always eager to demonstrate how more compassionate they are than callous capitalists on the right. Yet vainglorious leftists are not so different in their indifference to poor people who live in Britain. Cheaper labour imported from abroad, whether it be to help the health service or keep the economy running, doesn’t always work to the advantage of the working class who live here already.
Yes, of course nurses and doctors of whatever background ultimately help us all as individuals, just as we all depend on a functioning and healthy economy. Yes, we do need men and women to work in care homes. But the elderly in these places would probably prefer to be tended to by people like themselves, who understand what they’re talking about, who readily comprehend their idiomatic, informal or archaic use of the English language and who get the cultural and historical references of which they speak.
This timeless and universal need in humans for commonality, and the essential role performed by a shared culture and language, are things that can’t be measured or counted. But culture has always been overlooked by materialists on the right and left, those inclined to see humans as just producers or consumers. Both sides fail to see that the concerns of humans are often invisible and intangible. In Britain today, these concerns very much do include those over community, cohesion and a sense of belonging.
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