KEIR STARMER’S “island of strangers” nod to Enoch Powell’s “strangers in their own land” phrase in his 1968 Rivers of Blood speech has justly brought a backlash.

Snap polling suggested that while many agreed with Starmer, a lot of others strongly objected. Public discussion about his incendiary intervention is only just starting.

Millions of people who are perfectly settled and integrated in British society are outraged that they, their parents, families or friends are being scapegoated for the atomisation and loneliness felt in what is left of once actual communities that have been crushed under decades of neoliberalism.

Starmer — or more likely his programmers — dashed any hope by the end of the week that he would draw back from a historic rupture with what was never a great tradition in Labour but was at least one that sought some “balance” over immigration, migration and race.

He instead gave an exclusive interview to the Trumpist GB News. He flew to Albania to announce that he wants to deport those refused asylum in Britain to “hubs” in third countries. The Albanian Prime Minister said he would not participate in such a scheme.

Why should he? The EU carrot to Albanians to subordinate their economy to its interests is the prospect of easier visas and greater freedom to travel. How do you get that while agreeing to become a holding camp for those Britain and the EU expel?

For the same reason, Albania rejected a similar deal with the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Starmer says he has “a huge amount of common ground” with Meloni and praised her “remarkable” efforts to stop migration.

Those efforts involve franchising out the violent enforcement of Fortress Europe to Libyan mafia gangs and to an authoritarian president in Tunisia who jails the opposition. Starmer’s moral collapse is paralleled by his falling popularity. According to YouGov, he now has a net unfavourability rating even among those who voted Labour just 10 months ago.

His response to the drubbing in the council elections is to resist any shift away from the policies that are shattering support — winter fuel and disabled benefit cuts pre-eminently. It is to try to out-Farage Farage. That is not new in Labour history. But it has never been as bad.

The arrival of about 100,000 Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century led a failing Tory government in 1904-5 to divert discontent through the first anti-immigration legislation in Britain: the Aliens Act.

The newly formed Labour Party had just six MPs. All six voted against the legislation in 1905. Keir Hardie denounced the Bill as “fraudulent, deceitful and dishonourable” and called for a law to help the unemployed instead.

In response to another immigrant-bashing Act in 1919, the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme could proclaim: “We believe that the interests of the working classes everywhere are the same, and these gentlemen [the Tories] will find it difficult to spread a spirit of racial hatred among those people who realise that the brotherhood of man and the international spirit of the workers is not merely a phrase but a reality.”

The closer Labour got to government, however, the more that was indeed reduced to a mere phrase. An internationalist vision of working-class unity gave way to arguing that agitation in the 1950s by racists for more immigration control of people from former colonies was undermining Britain’s post-empire influence in the Commonwealth, where people were supposed to see Britain as the “motherland.”

The success of a viciously racist campaign in the Smethwick constituency in the general election of 1964, which Labour won nationally, led to outright capitulation to the anti-immigration demands. But it came with a balancing operation that distinguished Labour from the racist right.

Home secretary Roy Jenkins summed it up in the latter half of the decade by combining removing more people’s right to come to Britain with championing the integration of those who were allowed in. In 1966, he defined integration as “equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”

It was a formula that Labour by and large stuck to — thus a new Race Relations Act in 1976 counter-balancing more exclusions of British Commonwealth citizens as a sop to Powellite agitation.

The Blair-Brown governments inherited the framework, but took regressive steps towards where we are today. There was immigration in a period of economic growth and globalisation (as is the historic pattern). There was also a surge in deportations of asylum-seekers and other non-Europeans. There was no anti-racist defence of migration by the Labour governments. Instead, it was linked to the idea of an increasingly business-friendly and deregulated labour market in Britain and in Europe.

The argument “for immigration” was that it was good for big business. That is not the basis for convincing working-class people of a pro-immigration position in conditions where big business is attacking you hard.

Worse, it went hand in hand with new forms of racial distinction. Most obvious, and most powerful, was Islamophobia, the necessary ideology of the war on terror.

Blair and then Brown spoke of “British values.” In so doing, they took the popular understanding of multiculturalism — as in getting along with people of all sorts of cultures — and robbed it of any anti-racist content.

The argument went that we are “tolerant” of other people’s cultures. They are entitled to express them — within limits, which means largely at home and in the private sphere. But we insist that all people coming to Britain adopt a common body of “British values.”

The “British values” were things like democracy, respect for the other and fairness. Those are far from uniquely British. Also, British history is far from universally characterised by them. There is the British empire and starving millions to death in Ireland and Bengal.

So universal, good human values became defined as British. And things which are peculiarly British — such as apparently loving a hereditary head of state — became redefined as marks of universal goodness and civilisation.

What was then left over were other people’s “cultural values” which were, by definition, not good things like the British ones, both the universal ones that had been nationalised as British and the features of national imperial history that had been universalised as moral goods.

In this way, we could have under those years greater immigration into Britain, but alongside the reproduction of the idea that newcomers, and Muslims of any sort, were different in a bad way.

The official image was of a limited cosmopolitanism. In it, we were all supposed to be enjoying the financial benefits of getting our house done up by cheap Polish builders. Beneath the image was the reality of new hierarchies and divisions generated from the top down.

There is one great principle upon which the labour movement was founded. It is class.

The basic sense of “them and us” has historically been a powerful counterweight to racism and scapegoating ideologies of all kinds.

To realise that means collective struggles by working-class people in which that community of interest is forged with a pointedly internationalist conception of what we mean by “the working class.”

New Labour did away with the whole notion of the party being an institution of the working class. In its place was the idea of “communitarianism.” British communities united by values and tradition. Yet the very economic processes of advancing the market and the cash nexus into more and more areas of life ripped apart the community in any meaningful sense.

While in the growth years prior to the 2008 great financial crisis, governments could make a claim to community and Britishness being post-racial and cosmopolitan (Muslims excepted on account of supposedly “self-segregating”), now we see the old reactionary ideologies bubbling up.

That’s the full import and horror of the path Starmer-Labour has embarked upon. It is not about the numbers coming to Britain. You can discuss that rationally — even as the current points-based quota system means 131,000 vacancies in the care sector. Gone is the old Labour matching anti-immigration legislation with words and sometimes action for genuine integration, not flattening assimilation. The 1966 Local Government Act, for example, included funding to help new arrivals learn English and get help finding work.

Not now. Despite belated attempts to slot in some soothing words about migration’s positives, Starmer’s press conference, followed by Yvette Cooper in Parliament, identified immigrants overwhelmingly with social and economic ills. A drive to get “the numbers down.” Even when the official numbers include overseas students whose exorbitant fees are all that stand in the way of more universities facing bankruptcy.

It is a flight to irrational reaction with not even the previous dented shield approach by Labour of yesteryear. It will not hamper Farage and Reform UK. His grin this week shows it. And this direction is now set by the Starmer government.

To change it requires two things of the labour movement. A massive, popular campaign rejecting this government-sanctioned xenophobia. “We are friends, workmates, neighbours, classmates — not strangers! Mr Starmer.” The trade union and social movements have the capacity to flood the country with that message. The radical left should urge that they do.

The second thing is a direct struggle over the social issues that people told anyone who was listening motivated their voting this month. The cost of living. The means testing of pensioners’ fuel allowance. The cut to PIP, thus sinking tens of thousands of disabled people into despair.

If the labour movement and the left prove incapable of doing so, then we face the prospect of a soaring radical right in the shape of Reform UK and, as last summer showed, emboldened fascist thugs who proclaim that while all the politicians talk about the “immigration problem” they will take action.

Kevin Ovenden is touring Britain next week, launching an updated edition of his book Malcolm X: Socialism and Black Nationalism — for event details see www.counterfire.org/events.