Keir Starmer's 'Deep Regrets' about the 'Island of Strangers'

What's wrong with U-Turns? Is Blue Labour on the wane? And how has Big Tech alienated us? Join Hardeep Matharu, Adam Bienkov and Peter Jukes for the latest news & discussion of our July print edition

This afternoon we’ll be talking about an important apology by Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his now infamous speech on immigration in which he summoned up the fear that the UK was becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’.

In a piece in the Observer by Tom Baldwin, Starmer has explained he ‘regrets’ making those remarks, and certainly didn’t intend any echo or reference to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968.

Since I wrote an editorial about his remarks at the time (‘The Kindness of Strangers’), and our new July edition of Byline Times is devoted to the various other ways in which we have often made us feel like ‘strangers in a strange land’, we welcome this apology and clarification.

People make mistakes. We learn by failure. And after 15 years of Conservative rule in which the blustering Johnsonian position was ‘never apologise, never explain’, it’s refreshing to move towards a political culture in which we can share our mistakes and learn from them.

Our Editor in Chief, Hardeep Matharu, wrote about this in our March edition, looking back to a dramatic reconstruction of a debate between Margaret Thatcher and LWT interviewer Brian Walden when the then Prime Minister admitted “I don’t know” when asked whether she could have stopped then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, from resigning.

So this afternoon on Byline Live, I’ll be talking with Hardeep and Adam Bienkov about the role of U-turns and apologies.

Is there anything wrong with the Labour Government amending their planned benefit cuts, just as they have partially reversed their policy on winter fuel payments? Why is intransigence praised and flexibility condemned?

Surely, in order to navigate the increasingly bumpy and complex terrain of modern politics, U-turns (as any driver knows) are necessary and functional. What is it about our political media culture that turns our complex world into binary positions, and turns leadership into a ‘lose/lose’: damned if you do, damned if you don’t?

We’ll also be discussing the fate of Blue Labour and the apparent pushback against Starmer’s key advisor, Morgan McSweeney, after Adam Bienkov’s exclusive new investigation in the current print edition.

Join me, Hardeep and Adam at 5pm to find out more