“Your countries are going to hell,” Donald Trump tells European members of the UN general assembly, as he rages against what he calls “the failed experiment of open borders.” His disciple Nigel Farage looks ahead to mass deportations, and the end of indefinite leave to remain. Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is clearly gripped by panic, now identifying Reform UK as his “enemy” and opposing some of Farage’s most terrifying plans, but still sometimes getting dangerously close to a polite version of the same language. Recent immigration, he wrote in the Telegraph last week, was caused by “a hyper-liberal free-market viewpoint”. It has been “too easy” for people to enter the UK, and remain here illegally. Above all, he and his colleagues must use “every possible measure to deter migrants from entering British waters”.
Along with the digital ID the government seems set to call the “Brit card”, this is where we are: alarmingly close to the imaginings of all those dystopian films and TV shows – Children of Men, or the TV series Years and Years – but seemingly yet to fully comprehend it. And clearly, this is not just a matter of rhetoric and political noise. In the real world, you can see where we are heading, with sights that are deeply troubling, but that quickly settle into ordinariness.
