Starmer apologises for ‘island of strangers’ remark

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Sir Keir Starmer has apologised for his comment that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” due to excessive immigration, saying he “deeply” regretted using language that echoed controversial Conservative minister Enoch Powell.

The prime minister said it “wasn’t right” to have used the phrase in last month’s speech, in which he promised his Labour government would crack down on immigration figures.

He said that neither he nor his speechwriters had been aware that the phrase bore similarity to a line from Powell in his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, in which the Tory said Britons risked becoming “strangers in their own country”.

In the speech on May 12 the prime minister said that nations depended on fair rules, values, rights, responsibilities and mutual obligations: “In a diverse nation like ours . . . we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”

The use of that particular phrase attracted fury from left-wing critics, who believe that Starmer is turning too far to the right in order to neutralise the threat from Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s populist party that currently leads the polls and took council seats from Labour in its northern heartlands in this year’s local election.

“I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell. I had no idea — and my speechwriters didn’t know either,” he told The Observer newspaper.

“But that particular phrase — no, it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth — I deeply regret using it.”

The change of stance — after ministers spent days defending the language — is the latest U-turn by Starmer in recent weeks.

The prime minister has watered down plans to axe winter fuel payments for most pensioners, bowed to pressure to launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs after resisting for months, and this week folded over his welfare bill to stave off a huge backbencher rebellion.

Earlier this month, Starmer told the New Statesman magazine that he wished he had been more articulate in his immigration speech and that in retrospect it had not sounded “progressive” enough.

In Friday’s Observer interview with Tom Baldwin — a former journalist and one-time head of press for Labour who has written a biography of Starmer — the prime minister also accepted that there were “problems with the language” in the foreword to the policy document released by the government in June.

That paper said the record high numbers of immigrants entering the UK under the last government had done “incalculable damage” to the country.

Starmer told The Observer that the issue needed addressing because the party “became too distant from working-class people on things like immigration”. But he conceded that “this wasn’t the way to do it in this current environment”.

In the same interview, the prime minister also revealed that his sister-in-law was living in his old London home when it was firebombed last month.

The prime minister said his wife’s sister and her partner were in the bedroom at his former abode in Tufnell Park when the attack happened at 1.30am.

“She happened to still be awake,” Starmer said. “So she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. But it could have been a different story.”

Three men have been charged in connection with arson attacks on properties linked to Starmer: the Kentish Town property, an Islington building connected to the PM and a vehicle he previously owned.

Elsewhere in the piece Starmer revealed that he made a deliberate point of embracing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine when he arrived in Downing Street soon after his public row with Donald Trump in the White House.

“Normally, I would wait on the step to greet him,” he said. “But I was really conscious that he’d left the White House on his own. That’s why I walked towards him and gave him a sort of hug.

“It’s also why I walked him out to the car at the end; I wanted him to know that you don’t leave my house on your own.”