Socialist Alternatives May/June 1987
Keir Starmer putting forward new restrictions on legal immigration on 12th May argued that Britain was becoming an ‘island of strangers’. It sounded rather like Nigel Farage, although, the kind of restrictions Starmer was proposing, have a solid Labour pedigree (lest we forget). Harold Wilson’s Governments in the 1960s did similar things.
Even so for Starmer the MP for Holborn and St Pancras, where Reform came fifth in July 2024 with 6.1% of the vote, the language was, in my view deplorable.
Starmer has been a North Londoner since the later 1980s when he lived in a flat on the Archway Rd near Highgate tube. He eventually ended up in Kentish Town. It might be argued that North London then and now is place of strangers, and actually a place where (despite issues of housing, poverty etc) people from a large number of countries get along fairly well. The economy and public services in North London depend to a considerable extent on migrants, who are mostly here because Britain at some point was in the country they come from.
Has Keir Starmer not noticed any of this in the last 40 years?
He certainly did when he was on the Editorial Board of Socialist Alternatives in the later 1980s. He first came across those who ran it when he was doing postgrad study at Oxford but was still involved when he lived on the Archway Rd (opposite Jacksons Lane Community Centre, a welcoming and very diverse place).
Judging by the extract from an interview he did with Tony Benn and Hilary Wainright in 1987 he did understand then (extract above). He writes of an alternative left that is fighting, racism, sexism, heterosexism.
This was hardly a unique Starmer insight but a fairly commonplace perspective in North London in the 1980s and 40 years on it still is.
Somewhere along the line Starmer moved from being part of North London to someone who was just in it…
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