17 May 2025, 14:59

By Humza Yousaf MSP

This week, Sir Keir Starmer warned of Britain becoming an “island of strangers.” The phrase dripped with the same fearful undertones as Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech

Framing our increasingly diverse nation as being contaminated by foreign customs, languages, and loyalties. It was a moment that underlined a lamentable truth: the Labour Party has become so desperate to stem the decline in their polling, they haven’t just lurched to the right but are comfortable embracing rhetoric once confined to the hardest edges of the Conservative Party and now central to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

Powell’s 1968 speech warned of immigration as an existential threat to “our blood and our culture,” stoking racial panic that led directly to decades of hostile migration policies.

Starmer’s invocation of “strangers” is a modern echo — a dog-whistle to voters who blame migrants for every social ill, from stretched public services to the cost-of-living crisis. It betrays a failure to understand, or deliberately mask the fact that Britain’s prosperity depends on migration, on openness not building walls.

Let’s be clear: no one sensible advocates complete open borders.

But the line between “managed migration” and “hostile migration” is crucial. In NHS England, roughly 35% of doctors are non-British, they........

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