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“I always sit in front of a Union Jack and I’ve been doing it for years,” Keir Starmer told the BBC this week, when asked about far-right activists vandalising roundabouts around the country with the painted St George Cross.
“I’m very encouraging of flags” he told the broadcaster.
Not wishing to be outdone by her boss, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper agreed, later telling the BBC that: “We actually have Union Jack bunting on our garden shed at the moment. I’ve got St George’s flags. I’ve got St George’s bunting… I’ve got Union Jack flags and tablecloths. We’ve got the lot.”
Of course in the current political and media climate, simply smothering your own living quarters with patriotic regalia isn’t quite enough to prove your inherent Britishness. For that you also need to signal your discomfort around foreign people.
Asked by the BBC’s Matt Chorley how he would feel if there was an asylum hotel on his own street and “your daughter was having to walk past one of these hotels every day?” Keir Starmer replied that “I completely get it”.
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Failing in any way to push back against the false far-right claim that refugees are inherently prone to be sexual predators, the Prime Minister insisted that: “I understand why people want the hotels closed. I want them closed”.
The fact that the national public service broadcaster is even asking such questions of Keir Starmer is a sign of quite what a dangerous spot we are now in.
Eleven years ago when Nigel Farage insisted that he would feel uncomfortable living next to Romanian immigrants, he was widely condemned for his comments, with then Labour leader Ed Miliband calling them a “racial slur”, yet now such sentiments are apparently not only condoned, but actively encouraged by our Labour Government.
Are you frightened of being sexually assaulted by a foreigner? Don’t worry, your prime minister gets it. And he’s willing to smother his home in Union Jacks just to prove the point.
Where Is the Political Leadership Against This Violent Far-Right Movement Terrorising Britain?
The silence of senior mainstream politicians and media organisations against the rise of a new well-organised far-right movement on Britain’s streets is a disgrace, argues Adam Bienkov
Echoes From History
I was thinking about all this while walking through Welling in South East London earlier this morning. This mostly white, working-class suburban area was previously host to the headquarters of the far-right BNP, which had its offices above a bookshop in the town.
Their presence coincided with a big increase in racist attacks in the local area, and was followed by the murder of Stephen Lawrence in nearby Eltham. Lawrence’s death was a turning point for race-relations in Britain, exposing the institutionalised racism in the criminal justice system and helped spur on national campaigns to rid British culture of such violent racist instincts.
Among those fighting to make that change at the time was Keir Starmer, who as Director of Public Prosecutions later helped to bring Lawrence’s killers to justice.
Marking the anniversary of his death last year Starmer Tweeted that: “I was proud to help bring his killers to justice, and I will continue my work with his mother, my friend Baroness Doreen Lawrence to rid our society of racism and break down barriers to opportunity for all young people.
“We will honour Stephen’s legacy for change.”
Yet one year later and not only is the Prime Minister not honouring that legacy, but he is standing by while far-right campaigners seek to tear it apart.
Back in Welling, where BNP activists clashed with anti-fascist protesters three decades ago, almost every lamppost is now festooned with Union Jacks, withering sadly half-mast by cable ties on the high street. Beneath them a new, much more diverse younger generation traipse past on their way to the local grammar school, no doubt largely unaware of the history of such symbols in this particular part of London.
However, in other parts of the UK the flags have already led to clashes. In Basildon a man was arrested after painting crosses on a row of shops while hurling racist abuse at a woman wearing a head scarf walking past with a child.
At the nearby Islamic centre red crosses were splashed across its walls alongside the words “Christ is King” and “This is England”.
“My wife and baby are growing up here,” one local Muslim man told Al Jazeera.
“I want to move out of the area. I just cannot stay here.”
Yet while the Prime Minister is keen to emphasise that he “gets” all those people driven by suspicion, fear and hatred of others, to mark their territory with flags, he has yet to offer any similar understanding to any of the people being made to feel fear by the gesture.
Instead the Prime Minister and his Cabinet are competing to bring forward as many new policies designed to crack down on incomers as they possibly come.
With Reform UK leading in the polls, barely a day goes by without some new immigration, or asylum crackdown being announced by the Government.
The Prime Minister, who last week tweeted a series of pictures of black people being rounded up for “detention and return”, has charged his Government with coming up with ever more restrictive policies on migration.
Just these past two days there have been new rules announced making it harder for children from war zones to come and join their asylum seeker parents here in safety, and new warnings to international students not to overstay their visas.
With the Home Secretary also announcing her ambitions to “reform” the European Convention on Human Rights, in order to make it easier to deport people, it can only be a matter of time before Theresa May’s famous “go home” vans are dragged out of storage and taken back on the road again.
There’s little sign that any of this will make a difference. Despite the Government overseeing significant reductions in migration into the UK (down more than half over the past year) and even reductions in small boat crossings last month (the lowest numbers in August for some years) British media outlets continue to demand ever more restrictive policies.
And for the outright far-right nothing will ever be enough. Over on the Prime Minister’s favourite website, X, it’s owner Elon Musk is loudly calling for anyone with an immigrant background in the UK to be “remigrated”, with even Farage himself being dismissed as too “weak” on migration. Asked this week about Musk’s comments, the Education Minister Stephen Morgan refused to condemn or contradict them, saying only that the Government “understands people’s frustrations across the country”.
Yet at a time when such “frustrations” are turning to outright racism, intimidation and violence, it’s no longer enough for the Prime Minister and his Government to simply stand aside, while bashfully waving a flag.
At some point they will need to actually challenge the growing far right movement in Britain, and the social and traditional media networks that appear to be supporting it.
If they fail to do so, then not only will it lead to the return of the sort of violent scenes we saw in Welling and Eltham in the 1990s but it will also lead to the removal of this current Government and its replacement with an explicitly anti-migration administration led by Nigel Farage himself. That, if nothing else, should be a red flag that even the Prime Minister can’t fail to ignore.