Keir Starmer has handled the far-right riots as a policeman rather than a politician.
Any previous premier would surely have addressed the country in one form or another after such a signal crisis. Margaret Thatcher — even Boris Johnson — would have had something substantive to say, however misjudged.
As for Tony Blair, he felt the need to speak to and for the nation, lip trembling, after the death of the “people’s princess” in a Paris underpass, an event of no general significance at all except in so far as it highlighted the emotional intelligence deficit in the House of Windsor.
Yet Starmer appears to have not got further than winding up senior cops and state functionaries to administer condign punishment to perpetrators — a good deal too condign in fact.
As for what he thinks the riots say about our society, and how he might propose to address whatever problems are revealed — we are none the wiser.
Of course, silence is itself a form of speech, so what has the Prime Minister not said? He has declined to mention Islamophobia or to express any particular solidarity with the Muslim community, even though Muslim people and places of worship were the main targets of the riots, along with the overlapping category of asylum-seekers.
It may be a banal point, but it is literally inconceivable that riots which attacked synagogues would not be greeted with official denunciations of anti-semitism, and rightly so. The same would hold true for Hindu or Sikh temples, should they ever become the target of neofascist aggression.
Asked by this newspaper whether the Prime Minister had met any Muslim organisations since the riots, or had any plans to do so, No 10’s spokeswoman was unable to provide an answer.
Labour Party national executive member Mish Rahman has called this out. “The Conservatives are guilty of intentionally stoking division and hatred,” he said. “The Labour Party, in my opinion, has not shown that it has the solutions or understanding of how to deal with racism.
“Before the election you had Jonathan Ashworth and Keir Starmer bragging about sending back Bangladeshi people back to Bangladesh because it is a safe country,” he added. “We cannot disconnect the language and the subsequent actions.”
He is right. Part of the problem is opportunist pandering to the existence of racist attitudes held, with varying degrees of vehemence, by people whose votes Labour would like to bank without risking the hard work of confronting aspects of their world view.
But that is only one side of the problem. For 15 years now governments of both parties have boycotted all links with the Muslim Council of Britain, the most representative Muslim body.
The reason for this alienation is that the MCB could not remain true to its representative role without expressing the deeply held opposition of British Muslims to the foreign policy of the state — over Iraq, Afghanistan and above all Palestine.
Since then, Whitehall has been casting around to find Muslims that could be invited in for safe interactions free from any discussion of foreign policy.
Not particularly easy, it turns out. That may be connected to the fact that every country in the world with a Muslim majority was under colonial or neocolonial domination, most usually British, not very long ago.
The Muslim community sees settler-colonialism and imperial aggression when they manifest and calls it out too. It has no monopoly on these insights but is stubbornly cohesive in articulating them.
Starmer serves the state first of all. His commitment to continuity British foreign policy may be the one thing he believes in more than anything else.
Certainly it apparently matters more to him than holding a dialogue with the representatives of four million British people now living their lives in the shadow of actual and threatened violence.
That is not an easy position to turn into a Blair-style speech. Much easier to reach for the truncheon and jail key.
Source: Morning Star