Nigel Farage must not be allowed to slander Britain as broken – UK Times

It was unwise of Sir Keir Starmer to describe Britain as “broke and broken” in the weeks that followed last year’s election. Since then, he and his ministers have described the NHS, the railways, the welfare system, the water industry and the asylum system as broken.

They were entitled to criticise the Conservatives’ management of each of those services, and to point out that the state of the public finances that they inherited from the previous administration was deplorable.

But by using such exaggerated language, not only did Sir Keir depress people unnecessarily, he also fed the nihilists who want to tear everything down and the rabble-rousers who want to stoke fear in order to promote their extremist politics.

The Labour government now faces a concerted attempt by the two right-wing parties, the Conservatives and Reform, to portray the country as going to hell in a handcart while locked in competition to outdo each other in publicity stunts, and backed by the right-wing media, including GB News, the country’s first overtly political TV station.

One of the government’s early tests was the rioting that broke out a year ago in reaction to the murder of three girls in Southport, on the mistaken assumption that the assailant was an asylum seeker. Sir Keir handled that difficult moment well, drawing on his experience as a former director of public prosecutions to warn people of the possible consequences of inciting violence or taking part in it.

One of those charged with inciting racial hatred was Lucy Connolly, a childminder who, on the day of the murders, called for mass deportations and for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to jail for 31 months. She appealed against her sentence, claiming that she had been wrongly advised to plead guilty and was unaware of the implications of doing so. Her claim was rejected by the Court of Appeal, which found that she had been “well aware of what she was admitting”.

Now that she has been released on licence, she is being proclaimed by The Daily Telegraph, which interviewed her, to have been “Sir Keir Starmer’s political prisoner”. This is a disgraceful slur on the integrity of our judicial system. Opinions may differ as to whether a custodial sentence was appropriate in her case. The Independent, for example, takes the view that there are too many people in prison, a punishment that should be reserved for those who are a direct physical threat to others.

But Connolly pleaded guilty to an offence that carries the sentence that she served; she cannot be presented as a martyr for a political cause. That supposed cause is now trying to present asylum hotels as a conspiracy against the British people, as opposed to an expedient to try to deal with the British manifestation of the global problem of irregular migration.

People may, by all means, criticise this government and its predecessor for failing to get to grips with the difficult problem of migrants coming across the Channel in small boats. But we should not allow rabble-rousers to exploit the situation.

Nigel Farage has echoed Connolly’s language in her inflammatory tweet by setting out this weekend a policy for “mass deportations”. He knows what he is doing, just as he knew what he was doing when he adopted “Broken Britain” as his slogan. He wants to scare people into thinking that Sir Keir has lost control, allowing the country to sink into a state of lawless disorder.

Difficult as many people’s lives may be, it is simply untrue that this country is “broken”. It has a number of problems, but they are fixable. The best answer that Sir Keir can give to Mr Farage, however, is to fix them, and to be seen to be doing so.