The courage of their convictions

This week: how is Keir Starmer like Harry Kane? Also: why we need more empty houses; and I interview a woman who spent 48 hours on the tube.

Two unrelated things that this week are winding me right up.

The first is an old friend, who I haven’t had a go at for some time: the Labour party. Yesterday Keir Starmer told the CBI’s annual conference that “our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency... The days when low pay and cheap labour are part of the British way on growth must end”. 

This is, of course, nonsense. It’s true both that the British economy has, in recent decades, made strong use of migrant labour; and that the British economy has been bloody awful at generating pay rises. But evidence of a causal connection between those things has always been shaky, at best; now we’re facing a massive labour shortage and wages still aren’t rising in real terms. And so, it should be abundantly clear that the fact jobs in this country have become so crappy lately cannot be blamed on anything as simple as “an excess of foreigns”. 

Nigel Farage, incidentally, has welcomed Labour’s heavy use of the UKIP’s 2015 manifesto, and said that the party is now to the right of the Tories on immigration. Hmmm.

I put this into Craiyon and something horrible happened. Also, they were supposed to be hugging and on fire.

The other thing winding me up – less predictably given my general interests in life – is the England football team. Not on the pitch: they’re playing well enough, so far as I can tell (I haven’t been watching, though I may crack if they make it to the knock-out stages; it would be very in keeping if the first major international competition England wins in over half a century were the rubbish one no one’s that fussed about). No, what’s annoying me is the politics.

Because during Monday’s match against Iran, Captain Harry Kane wore a black and white armband reading “no discrimination”, rather than the rainbow coloured “One Love” one he had been strongly intimating that he would. In a joint statement, football associations from England, Wales and five other western European nations said that, “We were prepared to pay fines that would normally apply to breaches of kit regulations and had a strong commitment to wearing the armband”; but they could not put their players “in a position where they could face sporting sanctions”. God forbid that anyone should be given a yellow card, surely the worst thing that could happen to anyone involved in the World Cup in Qatar.

I said that these were two unrelated things, but in best columnist style, of course, I’m now going to point out how they’re one thing after all. Both stories are about a form of – I use this word advisedly – virtue-signalling. Starmer wants certain voters to know he wants less immigration; Kane that he’s against discrimination. But it’s hard to believe either of them. If you’re only willing to protest discrimination when doing so will have absolutely no negative consequences for you personally, can you really be said to be protesting at all? As for Starmer, there’s very little in his background or political journey to suggest nativism. There’s quite a lot to suggest he’s willing to say one thing while doing another, though, and we all know the British economy needs immigration to function. Why should anyone believe a word of it? 

Both would surely be more likely to impress anyone if they had the courage to stand up for what they actually believe in. That, though, might come with some consequences for them personally. So they don’t: instead, all we can see is the cowardice of their convictions.