Labour’s island of strangers: race, class and the politics of immigration in Starmer’s Britain

This article examines the politics of the Labour government’s immigration clampdown, locating them as a partial response to racist riots which swept Britain in the summer of 2024. It explores how debates around immigration and the ‘white working class’ played out among Labour politicians in the north-east of England, using the towns of Hartlepool and Middlesbrough as case studies. It is argued that the Labour Party’s self-image as an anti-racist party is dependent on its strategic disavowal of more structural and institutional forms of racism, and that this, alongside its espousal of increasingly extreme rhetoric on immigration, can be understood as a feature of ‘labourism’, a political formation that plays a continuing role in the reproduction of racial capitalism in Britain. The racial regime maintained by the current Labour government is made to resonate with voters at a local level to sustain its efficacy, and it is sometimes at a local level that the finer points of Labour’s anti-immigration agenda are both contested and refined. Using critical discourse analysis to examine the social media output of Labour parliamentarians and councillors in the aftermath of the riots, the article provides evidence of how the labourist tradition can accommodate very different responses to such events, ranging from a nativist left-wing populism on one hand, to a left-populist anti-racism on the other.