Right, so Keir Starmer’s abhorrent anti-migrant speech and the fallout from it is still causing Labour irreparable damage, it now earning itself a Rivers of Blood style name, being widely referred to now as the Island of Strangers speech, a speech where Starmer outed himself not as someone to stand up for migrant rights and making the moral case for migration as he stood on a platform for election to do, but to continue to attack and demonise them instead, Starmer the petty, vindictive liar and racist and never will he get away from such accusations again and compounded in my view by his support for Israel against the people of Gaza, because where he deems migrants to be unwelcome here, having caused incalculable damage as he put it, Israel are find occupying land illegally as they have done since 1967, so he can add hypocrisy to his racism. But at last someone has said it, at last someone has pointed out that where Starmer is copping all the flak here, he isn’t really in the drivers seat and never has been and Zarah Sultana, suspended from Labour for daring to vote against keeping kids in poverty, has clearly got no illusions about getting the Labour whip back, because she just named the real power in Downing Street on live TV and if you don’t know about this guy, it’s way past time you did.
Right, so that was Victoria Derbyshire’s interview with suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana on Newsnight last night and frankly if McSweeney isn’t behind that speech as Sultana suggests, then I’ll eat my shorts, he is the real power in Downing Street. But what Sultana did there was something no other mainstream media moment has ever adequately done and that is it peeled back the facade of leadership in Britain to reveal the true power behind Number 10. That name, still largely unknown outside Westminster, should become a household name in the same vein Dominic Cummings did, because it’s the same behind the scenes machinations going on. The name Starmer should become synonymous with McSweeney, just as Cummings did with Johnson. According to Sultana, Keir Starmer’s horrendous “Island of Strangers” speech — justifiably condemned for invoking Enoch Powell-esque racist rhetoric — could not have gone ahead without McSweeney’s sign-off. In here view there, nothing does. In that one sentence, Sultana exposed not just a political strategy, but an entire shadow governance structure shaping the nation in silence, just as Dominic Cummings did for Boris Johnson, it is the same thing, nothing has changed therefore.
The British public have got to become a lot more familiar with Morgan McSweeney, urgently so given the direction he is de facto leading Labour in, because Starmer is just his puppet, he wears the brylcreemed borefest like a glove. McSweeney’s fingerprints are all over the political and moral decline of the Labour Party and far from being merely a backroom advisor, Morgan McSweeney is the real Prime Minister, but he’s not infallible and just as he’s made mistakes before, he’s made another here. The catastrophic strategy of mimicking Nigel Farage has backfired, it will only drive voters to Reform UK and it will continue alienating core supporters.
Morgan McSweeney’s ascent is one of modern politics’ most chilling case studies in power without scrutiny, he’s been around for decades and is still pretty much unknown. McSweeney began as a relatively obscure Labour organiser and strategist, rising through party ranks by building connections and crafting influence networks rather than through any form of public mandate. He helped co-found Labour Together, a contradiction in terms since no faction within Labour has done more to tear it apart, but that became the go to place to be for the Labour right, who only care about power and control of the Labour Party, seeking to wrest the party away from the Corbyn leadership and put the left of the party back in their place.
McSweeney’s mission at heart has always been a simple one: Purge the party of its left-wing ideals and repurpose Labour into a sanitised, power-at-all-costs vehicle for the establishment. McSweeney’s model was not about policies or vision, which you might have noticed Starmer has always been short of, but about control. His playbook replaced hope with triangulation, ideology with optics, and grassroots activism with ruthless centralisation of the party’s power structures.
The Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire book Get In, the sequel to their analysis of the downfall of Corbyn called Left Out, lays bare McSweeney’s dominance though. Despite being a book supposedly about Keir Starmer’s rise to power, Starmer himself actually gets rendered to a secondary figure. The authors explicitly state: “McSweeney isn’t a part of the Starmer Project. He is the Starmer Project.” In other words, we have a Prime Minister who is not and never has been in charge.
So Zarah Sultana’s claim that this speech could not have occurred without McSweeney’s approval is almost certainly true — and terrifying as that is, Derbyshire disappointingly opining that McSweeney was not there to answer for that, but then, he never is.
In that appalling speech, Keir Starmer suggested that immigration had caused “incalculable damage” to Britain, describing migrants therefore as a destabilising force that threatens the social fabric of the nation, despite this being a nation built on multiculturalism. The outrage was immediate. Politicians, journalists, activists, and academics alike drew immediate parallels to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech — a speech that saw Powell suspended from the Tory Party the next day coming now from a Labour leader, though Labour in name only.
Alternative media notably slammed it. Here’s an excerpt from Counterfire:
‘Starmer is clearly trying to block off Reform’s racist appeal. But he has enhanced its appeal. His ‘Immigration Plan’ was immediately seized on by Reform’s Richard Tice as ‘our policy’. And Farage was able to call it out as a ‘knee jerk reaction to our success’. For people who voted Reform because of immigration, Starmer just confirmed their judgement…
Every racist act that spilled innocent blood thereafter can be linked to Powell’s idea of ‘defending the nation’ from immigrant hordes.
Just last year the country saw the worst race riots in decades, in areas that had all recorded a high vote for Reform and their racist propaganda. And now Starmer and his equally obnoxious Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, are feeding the hatred by claiming that we are becoming ‘an island of strangers’.
Many of us have been nursed, educated, befriended and entertained by people from migrant backgrounds. To blame the real divisions in society on migrants is pure scapegoating.’
Others, like Richard Murphy in his Funding The Future blog, noted how personally offensive this was to millions of families, including his own, who have made immense contributions to British society, with a name like Murphy it likely comes as no surprise he spoke of an Irish grandfather. He described Starmer’s language as “a disgrace” that had reduced decades of national service, cultural richness, and economic input to xenophobic scapegoating.
As for the mainstream media, well, some have sadly leapt to Starmer’s rescue.
Sky News’ Beth Rigby, in what can only be described as a tortured act of damage control, tried to convince readers that Starmer’s speech was inspired by Roy Jenkins rather than Powell or Farage – a splitter who sabotaged the Labour left, I can’t imagine why Starmer finds him inspirational, but in this instance it supposedly comes from something Jenkins said in 1966 which was:
‘Let there be no suggestion that immigration, in reasonable numbers, is a cross that we have to bear, and no pretence that if only those who have come could find jobs back at home our problems would be at an end.
But it does not follow that we can absorb them without limit. We have to strike a balance. That is what we are trying to do and I feel that we have been reasonably successful in recent months. We cannot lay down absolute numerical quantities, but I think that we have struck a reasonable balance and also that in the past year we have made substantial progress towards producing a healthier atmosphere, in terms of integration, on both sides - amongst both the indigenous and the immigrant community.’
Yeah, but Powell said ‘they found themselves strangers in their own country’ and Starmer said ‘we risk becoming an island of strangers’ and Jenkins never mentioned islands or strangers. Nobody is buying this load of chuff Beth, but nice try.
Starmer’s imitation or attempted imitation of Farage and his ilk has served only to legitimise Reform UK’UK more and push more voters into their arms. The backlash by people opposed to that language, particularly among young voters, progressives, and ethnic minorities, has been swift and unforgiving, losing Labour still more voters.
The tragedy is not just in the language of the speech but in its fundamental dishonesty. Migrants have not caused damage to Britain. They have held it together.
From the NHS to public transport, agriculture to academia, Britain’s infrastructure rests on the backs of migrant workers and has done for the last century or more. They are doctors, nurses, builders, carers, researchers, teachers, and delivery drivers. They are taxpayers and community builders. And now, they are being told they are unwelcome, that they damage British society and its bull.
Starmer’s speech was a betrayal of everything Labour once stood for, it certainly doesn’t stand for any of that with him in charge. This was not simply a policy error — it was a moral collapse, one that began not with Starmer himself, but with the man whispering in his ear, or handing him his to-do list as might be more accurate: Morgan McSweeney.
To fully grasp the authoritarianism McSweeney represents, here’s a good example. Consider his crusade against The Canary, the left-wing news outlet that dared to challenge the Labour establishment attacks on Jeremy Corbyn at the time. As reported by The Canary itself and other outlets as well, McSweeney allegedly orchestrated an elaborate campaign to destroy the platform – in part the driver behind the antisemitism campaign against Corbyn, this was McSweeney’s brainchild, this is why he is also known as the architect of Corbyn’s downfall — but he went after The Canary too, trusted by the left on equal par with the Guardian at the time, where McSweeney, from behind the scenes was pressuring allies, manipulating narratives, and working through party networks to defund and delegitimise The Canary, whilst kissing up to the Guardian, who of course became one of the main drivers of antisemitism attack stories on Corbyn at the time.
This goes far beyond political strategy, this was an all-out assault on press freedom and democracy itself, by confecting a crisis beyond the scale of true anti Jewish racism, weaponising it for political ends. It reveals McSweeney’s desire for absolute control, and his capacity to carry out ideological purges from behind the scenes, with others providing the front from politicians to the mainstream media. You can almost imagine he wrote Beth Rigby’s article for her by this point can’t you?
That a man like McSweeney can wield this much unchecked power is a real political and democratic crisis. He is unelected, unaccountable, and unchallenged. The comparison to Dominic Cummings is inevitable — and apt. But even Cummings, for all his power, was known, scrutinised, and eventually driven out by public exposure.
McSweeney has faced no such reckoning. He is a ghost in the machine, shaping our politics while avoiding the responsibility that should come with power, so this has to end if democracy truly means anything. Power must be visible, knowable, and accountable. McSweeney needs to be dragged into the light.
What Starmer and McSweeney have constructed is not a movement, but a machine. It does not offer hope, it merely avoids risk. It does not build coalitions, it calculates them. This machine sees immigration not as a human story, but as a polling problem. It sees public services not as rights, but as liabilities. It sees voters not as people, but as demographics.
It is a machine that purged Corbyn, crushed internal dissent, and now betrays its own supporters with xenophobic pandering. McSweeney may have engineered a short-term victory in terms of political centralisation, if as Zarah Sultana suggests he is behind all of this— but at the cost of everything the Labour Party was built on and represented.
We are allowing our politics, our government even it would seem, to be dictated by a man hiding behind a curtain. Just as Cummings was exposed, so too must McSweeney be made to answer. Parliament, the press, and the public must demand transparency on this. Zarah Sultana’s bravery must be a beginning, not an isolated act.
If we believe in democracy, then Morgan McSweeney must be scrutinised, and held accountable. For the migrant families insulted by Starmer’s speech. For the journalists and MPs who have been silenced. For the voters betrayed by a party they once believed in.
Morgan McSweeney is not part of the problem, he is the problem and it needs to be resolved.
Meanwhile, Starmer’s speech looks like it is having far-reaching electoral consequences too, his determination that if you live in the UK you must speak English has had Welsh and Scottish voters up in arms and all ahead of Holyrood and Senedd elections to coincide with next years locals. Not smart, not funny, what was Morgan McSweeney thinking? Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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