Starmer's Warning
Is the British prime minister trying to avert civil war?
What’s gotten into British Prime Minister Keir Starmer lately? The following remarks stirred up tremendous controversy in the United Kingdom:
If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense.
So we’re raising English language requirements across every main immigration route.
His office also announced widespread immigration reform to make it more restrictive:
We're ending Britain’s open borders experiment.
For too long, businesses were actively encouraged to bring in lower paid workers, rather than invest in our own people.
We’re fixing the system and restoring control to our borders.
But what seemed most controversial was the following comment:
Critics, including left-wing heavyweight Jeremy Corbyn, said Starmer’s remarks echoed those of Enoch Powell, a right-wing British politician who passed away in 1998. Powell, who remains a divisive figure to this day in Britain, is notorious for delivering a speech in 1968 criticizing the levels of immigration and diversity across the British commonwealth, but particularly in Britain itself. Widely known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, it was controversial even for its time, though it must be also said that it received tremendous public support as well.
Here’s the passage from Powell’s speech which critics claimed Starmer’s remarks echoed [bold mine]:
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
It must also be said: Powell never uttered the phrase “rivers of blood.” Like many political speeches, what it came to be known as isn’t what it was. The late President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise” speech is an American example of this phenomenon.
Powell did, however, say this:
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
As always, read the entire speech in order to understand its full context. However, Powell’s bottom line was that immigrant populations, upon reaching critical mass, would organize and mobilize against the native British population in their own interests, and that these efforts would ultimately culminate in violence. Though there have been no rivers of blood, there has been violence, certainly, and social tensions in Britain are indeed reaching something of a boiling point. It’s safe to say Powell has, to an extent, been vindicated.
Britain: A Family Of Strangers
Not surprisingly, the reaction from the British Left, animated by its pseudo-religious belief in cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, has been overwhelmingly negative. There’s honestly too much of it to even bother sharing an example here, to say nothing of the fact it’s the usual nonsense we’ve come to expect from the Left. Some of it’s absurdly hyperbolic, including accusations that Starmer is indulging the far-right. As you’ll see in a moment, that’s a colossally stupid accusation only a liberal could come up with.
A common theme across reactions from the Left was that multicultural Britain isn’t, in fact, an island of strangers, that Britons have formed strong communities comprised of people from all different races and religions. I’d have to do a lot more research to take a deeper dive into the matter, but it’s safe to say such responses from the Left are entirely cope. At the very least, it represents elite opinion, not the day-to-day experience of the average Briton.
In fact, it turns out the Britain has been an island of strangers for many years now. Look at this story from 2018:
Half of adults say they do not feel part of a “good neighbourly community” and nine in ten admit they NEVER volunteer to help out with local charities and groups.
Only one in ten would assist with a local tidy up, 12 per cent would help with a charity event and a mere FOUR per cent would organise a fundraiser or attend a fun run.
Worryingly, four in ten people feel no sense of pride about where they live, and 84 per cent fail to participate in any local events.
These articles never mention the multiculturalism aspect of it. The illustrations they use for the pieces feature all White people, which is peculiar - if Britain is so proud of its multiculturalism, why not feature a more diverse range of people? Is it because they don’t want anyone getting the idea that multiculturalism is contributing to the increasing unfamiliarity among the British people?
Though it’s not a big difference, predominantly White rural areas do seem to enjoy a bit more community than the cities. From 2019:
It also emerged those living in the countryside are more likely to call their neighbours friends than city-dwellers (18 percent compared to 15 percent).
Having visited London, one of the things that struck me was the level of diversity, which was greater than anything I’ve seen even in the U.S. It’s not so much the demographics (though the number of Muslims was jarring to see), but the extent to which everyone lived and worked among people who didn’t look like them. If all those years ago, the vast majority of Britons already felt as though they were surrounded by strangers, then the role multiculturalism has played in fostering that attitude has to be part of the discussion.
It may not even be true that Britons of all different cultures live together:
Canadian-British scholar Eric Kaufmann noted in a study that White Britons mostly live among other Whites and non-Whites around other non-Whites:
Results from Britain’s census confirm what we already know: minority people move toward areas of greater diversity than whites. My study is based on a massive representative census sample of 123,000 intercensal movers, and it controls for a wide range of material factors, including education, income, age, marital status, distance of move, and living in a mixed-ethnicity household. It also accounts for the affluence and population density of origin and destination neighborhoods. For data security reasons, I had to divide wards (averaging about 6,000 people) into five groups, each containing a fifth of the country’s minority population.
Figure 1, based on a 1 percent linked sample of the census of England and Wales, shows that, among people moving from the most diverse quintile of wards (averaging 66 percent minority), both whites and minorities move away from diversity—by necessity, because their only choice is similar or lower levels of diversity. However, the average white British person moves to an area fully three quintiles less diverse (averaging 13 percent minorities), while the typical minority moves to a neighborhood one to two quintiles less diverse (averaging between 27 percent and 43 percent minority). This ethnic difference holds regardless of where people start from. Thus, in the most homogeneous wards (averaging 2 percent minorities), everyone moves to more diverse places, but minorities move to more diverse areas than white Britons.
Two things can be true at once: though I’m highly skeptical of the claim, given what we know about living patterns, cosmopolitan elites may in fact share communities and lives with people of different cultures. It’s also true that this isn’t the norm for most Britons, not necessarily. It means that most of the people on social media reacting critically to Starmer’s pronouncements simply don’t represent public opinion and should be regarded with deep skepticism.
What does public opinion say about the PM’s remarks, exactly? As Powell did, Starmer appears to have their support, though not to the same degree:
Even as there exists a noticeable partisan divide, even large percentages of left-leaning Britons seem to share Starmer’s concerns. Other polls show that immigration is high atop the list of concerns for Britons across the political spectrum. The real divide seems to be a matter of how honestly and openly anyone’s allowed to talk about it.
Some of Starmer’s critics accepted his premise of the UK as an “island of strangers,” instead laying the blame at the feet of the economy, instead of multiculturalism. This one’s easy to refute, as I’ve done many times already: if it takes widely-distributed prosperity to maintain social tranquility, that’s an argument against, not for, multiculturalism. If even homogeneous societies can end up in conflict when there are fewer resources than people (the literal definition of an ‘SHTF’), then why would a heterogeneous society fare any better?
What’s Starmer Up To?
What are we to make of all this? Is this a genuine shift on the part of Prime Minister Starmer? Does this say anything about the social climate of Britain? Is this an acknowledgement that yes, immigration and multiculturalism are both causing serious social rifts that cannot be repaired without a major course correction?
I’ve been highly critical of Starmer here on this blog, and for good reason. It was just days ago Starmer was still very much on the multicultural bandwagon, glorifying the increasing Islamization of Britain, doubling down on the country’s two-tiered legal system, indulging in fabricated moral panics, and generally contributing to the increasing discord in his land.
Even now, he’s attempting to re-write the narrative, blaming the British Right for failing to deal with immigration. This might be true in a factual sense, but it’s the pot calling the kettle black, since Starmer and the Left were the ones who demanded Britain continue bringing in foreigners from all over the world without limit. Now that the backlash has arrived, Starmer wants to pretend like he had nothing to do with it?
It’s worth mentioning that many of Starmer’s own allies - Muslim London Mayor Sadiq Khan being among the most notable - have criticized the PM’s comments, showing just how out of step it is with the British Left. There’s no question he’s taking a tremendous political risk in saying what he’s saying, but until he delivers results, he deserves no benefit of the doubt.
Also worth remembering: under the current British regime, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to say what Starmer said without prompting a visit from authorities. If the prime minister says it, does it make it fine for everyone else to, also? Or is speaking honestly about immigration and multiculturalism solely the province of the PM?
There is, of course, a strain of anti-migration protectionism in the socialist left, who oppose open borders for their diluting the price of labor, and placing downward pressure on the cost of housing and public services for the working class. But despite paying lipservice to it today, Keir Starmer has never been a part of it. In “Immigration Law and Practice” in 1988, Starmer wrote that a “racist undercurrent … permeates all immigration law”. Last week, he brokered a contentious new trade deal with India, which exempts Indian migrants from paying the same National insurance (healthcare and pensions) tax contributions that his government just raised for British workers; and which creates new visa routes for Indian chefs, musicians, and yoga instructors. Given Wetherspoons is Britain’s most popular curry vendor, we are not in dire shortage of New Delhi’s cooks.
Even in today’s announcement, Starmer couldn’t help but peddle the fiction that mass immigration is an inextricable part of British history:
“Immigration is important for Britain. For centuries people have come to this country to build a better life, contributing economically and culturally to our society and helping to rebuild our country after major shocks such as the Second World War.”
There are obviously problems with this narrative, but that’s not the point, not today. The point is that Starmer still believes in the narrative which has defined much of British culture and politics since the 1960s. In that sense, he’s no Enoch Powell, who believes very strongly in a British identity rooted in something more than something as nondescript as “values.”
Even if Starmer isn’t being honest here, it does beg the question: why feign such a dramatic shift? The reaction he got from the British Left and Labour voters has been overwhelmingly negative. Politicians don’t do and say things which put them at odds with their base, not without strong incentive. What’s influencing Starmer, here?
The simplest and most likely explanation is… politics. In the latest local English elections, Labour lost a back-breaking 187 seats in local councils. To be fair, this paled in comparison to main rival Conservative Party losses, and the Left still made gains via the Liberal Democrats Party. However, the biggest winner was the right-wing populist Reform UK Party. Along with the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK represents a major shift in the British political landscape, an indication that finally, Britons are strongly considering leaving the legacy parties of Conservative and Labour in the past, after years of failing to address the citizenry’s needs.
In that context, Starmer is merely responding to these developments. As both PM and Labour’s number-one figure, he’d be derelict if he didn’t attempt to course-correct and stop the bleeding in some fashion. Whether it’ll work is both unknown and beyond the scope of this discussion. All that needs to be said now is that Starmer is a professional politician and this job entails forcing changes on both his party and the country’s politics. In that sense, he’s only doing his job.
But there’s another explanation which came to mind almost immediately upon seeing Starmer’s remarks. This is entirely speculation on my part, but I wonder: did Dr. David Betz, the King’s College London professor who’s been sounding the alarm about the danger of civil war in the UK, get to Starmer? Is the British prime minister trying to avert civil war?
I’m not suggesting Betz had an audience with Starmer. However, Betz’ commentary has made the rounds in elite, intellectual circles. He’s undoubtedly the most credentialed and reputable figure to openly broach the topic. Though I doubt Starmer spends all day on social media - he has people who do so on his behalf - I have a tough time believing Dr. Betz’ commentary didn’t make it into the PM’s ears at some point, either. Remember that King’s College London is one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious academic institutions, and many of its alumni and faculty members are either in British government or have strong connections to it. At some point in the last few months, Starmer must’ve seen something related to Betz or civil war.
If he did, that’s a positive development. It might not be enough to avert civil war, but the worst thing that could happen is if political leaders were either oblivious or willfully ignorant and made no attempt to prevent catastrophe. As dysfunctional as government might be, I think everyone still expects them to address glaring threats to civilization. Again, this is speculation, but Starmer’s rather hard-line rhetoric can be only explained, in my view, if he came to the realization the terrible consequence that awaits his country if immigration isn’t brought under control and the cleavages in society wrought by multiculturalism aren’t addressed.
What are we to learn from this? First, it does suggest there does, in fact, exist a breaking point. Nobody anticipated this change of tack from Starmer. But it happened and can only be explained by someone or something telling him that he needed to change course to avoid going off the cliff. However, it takes a long time to reach that breaking point. 67 years separate Starmer’s remarks about Britain becoming an island of strangers with Enoch Powell’s remarks saying the same. That’s a lifetime. But no matter how long it takes, you eventually get there. The only question is whether it’s too late. History tells us that it probably is. In that sense, Starmer’s change of tune should be heeded as a warning of how close we are to the precipice.
Second, if Dr. Betz’ own warning somehow reached Starmer, it’s a reminder that who says it is as important as what’s being said. The fact is, you need reputable figures in elite circles to get the message out. It’s simply a reality that many of the voices who’ve been warning of civil war coming since the 1990s are perceived by the public to be cranks, often for good reason. We live in a time when expertise has disgraced itself, nuking their own credibility, but this doesn’t mean all the experts are wrong. It’s important to be discerning and recognize which experts have been compromised and which haven’t. There simply isn’t a sufficient substitute for someone who devotes their working hours to studying and better understanding our world.
Along the same lines, regardless of his authenticity, only someone like Starmer could get away with criticizing immigration and multiculturalism in 2025 Britain. His political base didn’t let him off the hook, but a far-left society like Britain isn’t going to suddenly start voting for the Right over it. At worst, this will hurt Labour, while making alternatives like the Liberal Democrats more appealing. In many ways, nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of how Britons think. What’s changed is who they’re willing to trust with the reins of power.
Germany’s Managed Democracy
Though unrelated to the UK, we need to briefly address this topic, it relates to the state of Western liberal multicultural democracy. Unlike Britain, it appears, in Germany, mass immigration will continue until morale improves.
The right-wing populist Alternative for Deustchland (AfD) party has been designated an “extremist” organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Analysis from The Atlantic:
Last week, the German domestic spy agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz declared the AfD an “extremist” organization, which makes it eligible for surveillance, infiltration, and a potential outright ban. Other groups previously singled out for attention and investigation by the agency include the Islamic State, various unruly Marxist-Leninists, and the Church of Scientology. These others can boast a ragged caliphate, closets full of Che T-shirts, and an upcoming Mission: Impossible movie, respectively. But they do not have what the AfD has: nearly a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament. The AfD has already challenged the “extremist” label in court, and the BfV has withdrawn its finding until the court rules on it. The case is expected to take months, possibly years, and in the meantime will throw German politics into disarray.
The German far-left, which includes The Left party, is under no such scrutiny. This, despite Germany’s own experience with far-left politics under the communist regime of East Germany during the Cold War. Apparently, the modern-day Germany regime doesn’t think communism could ever return, but is deathly afraid that Nazism will.
Germany had a lukewarm, milquetoast response to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s reaction:
It seems Germany has a different understanding of democracy than most do. I’d have a much easier time accepting this explanation if Germany didn’t claim to be a democracy. At best, this is managed democracy, where citizen participation in the political process is entirely for show, but the outcome ultimately decided by the state. Democracy isn’t perfect, it’s not sacrosanct, yet extolling democratic values while dictating the outcome is, as the Secretary of State says, tyrannical. But what else do you expect from Germany?
Really, if German democracy amounts to this, why pretend the citizenry has a choice?
It seems, in Germany, democracy amounts to imposing policies upon the citizenry that were never asked for, then denying them any avenue for redress or reform. The real message behind designating the AfD an extremist organization isn’t “Don’t vote for AfD.” It’s actually, “You cannot stop mass immigration.” The German regime has shown no indication it has any interest in dealing with immigration and the action taken against the AfD stifles the only meaningful opposition to regime policies.
Dr. Betz said that Germany is probably fourth behind the UK, France, and the U.S. in terms of risk of civil war. I further surmised that if that’s really the case, Germany’s risk is still dramatically lower than that of the other countries. This is because I don’t get the sense that Germany has social tensions to the scale of the Anglosphere and France. Germany has diversity, but it’s not as diverse as the other three countries. There’s still more consensus in politics in Germany than there exists in the other three, as well. But a lot of this is generalized speculation on my part. Anyone with insight into German internal politics should feel free to weigh in.
Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that democracy in the West is a facade and a fraud. A discussion about the efficacy of democracy is long overdue and criticizing it shouldn’t be off-limits. But as long as the regime’s of the West spend day and night worshipping democracy, they should be forced to live up to their own lofty standards.
That’s what democracy is all about, after all.
British When They Want To Be
Sometimes, it takes a British-born Pakistani Muslim to remind us why Enoch Powell and now, Keir Starmer, are right about immigration:
Our feelings on burning religious texts aside, central to Powell’s point is that minority groups of foreign origin will eventually attempt to use the power of the state to protect their preferred in-groups. Being British is simply a gateway to accessing that privilege. It’s a meal ticket, not an identity. It works, too. No other religion in Britain enjoys the status Islam has.
Adnan Hussain makes it clear what his real identity is, what group he really belongs to. It’s not British:
Clearly, if a British-born individual still sees his heritage rooted in a foreign identity, then no assimilation has taken place. Perhaps its the whole point of multiculturalism, but that just means “Britishness” today isn’t strong enough to forge any kind of unified identity.
After trying to play the tried and true race card, someone came back at Hussain with a retort for all time:
I'm uncomfortable with 6.5% of the population responsible for:
90%+ of terror deaths since 2000
75% of terror threats
84% of child gang rapes
18% of prisoners
6,000 female genital mutilations a year
1.5x birth defect rate
48.6% of 16-64 not employed
27% in social housing
But sure, the real problem is that Muslims aren’t shown proper respect.
As of this writing, PM Starmer has yet to let up on his newfound hardline tack against immigration. Perhaps an encouraging sign, but again, we need to see what the results end up being. We’ll also need to see what kind of opposition he ends up running into. It’ll also be interesting to see if other Western countries start following Britain’s lead on immigration. Though I doubt it’ll avert armed conflict, if there’s any hope of doing so, it’s national leaders tackling the problem head-on. In other words, doing their job.
What do you think? Is Keir Starmer being real, here? What - or who - do you think is influencing him? What are your thoughts on anything else discussed here?
Talk about it in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Pretty out of character for Starmer to say these things. Must be a lot more trouble brewing than we are led to believe.
I don’t believe Starmer has had a come to Jesus moment about immigration, he’s just trying to take the wind out of the sails of the Reform movement