Britain is, the Prime Minister told us on Monday, at risk of becoming “an island of strangers” thanks to the “incalculable” damage being done by high levels of net migration into the UK.

His critics leapt to that exemplar of British racism, Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, for comparison. Mr Powell warned that white Britons risked becoming “strangers in their own country”. Downing Street pushed back, claiming that the “island of strangers” line was inspired by the work of Professor Robert Putnam, namely his 2000 book Bowling Alone, which charted the atomisation of American society in the 20th century.

They were right to do so – comparisons with Powell were inappropriate and borderline hysterical. But if Professor Putnam’s work inspired the Prime Minister’s speech, it was a grotesque perversion of that work that ignored the true drivers of social atomisation in favour of scapegoating immigrants. And it exposed a Downing Street operation happy to indulge in some of the worst excesses of post-truth politics, twisting facts and data to fit a narrative.

Is Sir Keir a Powellite? No. The Government’s new immigration policy, itself far softer than the rhetoric, comes nowhere close to Enoch Powell’s vision of mass deportation of immigrants and non-whites. Neither did Sir Keir’s speech, which stops far short of Mr Powell’s allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, foreseeing “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. Equivalising Sir Keir with Mr Powell is both intellectually dishonest and dangerous, ignoring the very real problems both with the speech and the policy.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

Sir Keir’s remarks were condemnable not because they were inspired by Mr Powell but because he falsely claimed........

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