Keir Starmer's racial politics are foolish – it's about to blow up in his face

Is the Prime Minister’s memory really so short that he has forgotten Hillary Clinton’s mistake?

I come from a family of immigrants myself, though our journey went in a slightly unusual direction. When I was a toddler, my parents moved our family from Britain to the United States. My father worked at the University of Illinois, so my sister Caroline and I spent our early childhood in Chicago.

The plan had been to stay permanently, but about a decade later, after a lot of family discussion, we moved back across the Atlantic to the UK where we’ve remained ever since.

Because of this, I know first-hand what it feels like to move between cultures. We weren’t confronted with issues of race or language, but we were expected to adapt to American values and lifestyles. And we did.

Every day at school, I pledged allegiance to the flag. Every Fourth of July, we joined Independence Day parades. I grew up sounding American much to the surprise of my British relatives and feeling American too. In fact, I remember once visiting a friend’s home and being astonished to discover their parents were from Glasgow. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of them as anything other than “American,” which says a lot about how naturally we had embraced the culture.

My father even had to sign a document on arrival in the U.S. declaring he wasn’t bringing his daughters there for the purposes of prostitution despite the fact that I was three and my sister was six months old! He laughed at the absurdity, but he signed. He also accepted that, as a professor at a state university, his salary was public record something completely alien to the UK at the time.

My mother, who was kind, liberal, and deeply principled (she sometimes read The Guardian), firmly believed that just as we were expected to live by American values when we moved there, those who come to Britain should respect and adopt British values. To her, that wasn’t racist it was simply part of being fair and respectful.

And here’s the point: calling people racist or extreme simply for expressing concerns about borders or integration is not only wrong, it’s politically foolish. I’ve even heard people on the left go so far as to compare Nigel Farage to Nazi supporters, which is grotesque and offensive.

Politicians should take a lesson from history. Remember when Hillary Clinton dismissed her opponents as “a basket of deplorables”? That single phrase did enormous damage to her campaign. People don’t forget being insulted for holding views that, whether you agree with them or not, are sincerely felt.

Keir Starmer should remember that. Labeling ordinary voters with harsh words might win applause in certain circles, but it risks alienating the very people he claims to want to represent.