On language, immigration and cohesion

Language matters. Cohesion matters. Language that obscures is incoherent.

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This week Keir Starmer launched Labour’s Immigration White Paper with a speech that included the warning that we “risk becoming an island of strangers”. All hell broke loose because this language has been compared to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which claimed that ‘white people "found themselves made strangers in their own country".

It has been firmly argued by number ten that the echo of Powell was inadvertent. That the policy is more inspired by Labour to Liberal switcher Roy Jenkins - with his emphasis on integration and Robert Putnam’s seminal book Bowling Alone, which talks about social atomisation in the US context.

But inadvertent or not, the language in this speech in this context, on this issue, was at best ill-advised and at worst wildly irresponsible. In ways I don’t think most of the measures in the actual Immigration White Paper are.

For example, one of the measures in the paper is a requirement for those coming to live and work in Britain (excepting asylum seekers) to have a higher level of English before they (or their dependents) can do so.

There is often a debate about this with some who consider it an unnecessary hoop to jump through (and with malign undertones of cultural superiority). I disagree.

I have been thinking a lot about community lately. In fact, I wrote a play inspired by a group in my own local, very diverse community (you can watch the play on YouTube here)

The community I was inspired by has many members who were not born in the UK, including people originally from Jamaica, Uganda, France, Poland and a host of others. But we all speak to each other in English. The lives of everyone are enriched by an ability to speak a shared language, and it is not right wing to say so.

Integration matters. However, how we speak about integration matters too. And integration - and societal atomisation - are part of a much bigger narrative. If Starmer is genuine in his desire to tackle that - that’s a good thing. But the hamfisted way it has been done this week does not give me hope.