Starmer apologises for ‘island of strangers’ remark

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Sir Kerr Starmer apologized for commenting that Britain had come to become a “island of strangers” due to excessive migration, saying that he “deeper” regretted the use of the language that the controversial conservative minister, Enok Powell, repeated.
The Prime Minister said that he was “not true” in using this phrase in the speech last month, as he promised his government of work that would delay immigration figures.
He said that he or his book was aware that the phrase endured a similarity from a line of Powell in the famous “Day of Blood” speech in 1968, when the Conservative Party said that the British are risking to become “strangers in their country.”
In the speech received on May 12, the Prime Minister said that the countries depend on fair rules, values, rights, responsibilities and mutual obligations: “In a diverse country like us … we risk to become an island of strangers, not the nation that walks together.”
The use of this phrase in particular has attracted anger from left -wing critics, who believe that Starmer turns away to the right in order to neutralize the threat of reform in the United Kingdom, the popular Nigel Farraj Party, which is currently leading opinion polls and taking the council seats from the Labor Party in North Hartlands in the local elections for this year.
“I would not have used these words if I knew that it was, or even would be interpreted as an echo of a height. I had no idea – and my speech book was not known either.”
“But this particular phrase – no, was not correct. I will give you the sincere truth – I am very regretted using it.”
Changing the position-after the ministers have spent days in defending the language-is the newest turn by Starmer in recent weeks.
The Prime Minister cleared plans to decipher winter fuel payments for most retirees, and bent over to launch a national investigation into the gangs of gangs after the resistance for several months, and this week took over the luxury bill to avoid the huge rebellion.
Earlier this month, the New State Statsman magazine told him that he would wish to be more clear in his immigration letter and that in the past he did not seem “progressive” enough.
In the observer’s interview on Friday with Tom Baldwin-the former journalist and head of journalism for one time in the Labor Party, who wrote a biography of Starmer’s biography-the Prime Minister also that there were “problems with language” at the forefront of the government’s policy document in June.
And that paper said that the record number of large numbers of immigrants entering the United Kingdom under the recent government had caused “countless damage” to the country.
Starmer told the observer that the case needs to be addressed because the party “has become very far from people working on things like immigration.” But he admitted that “this was not the way to do this in this current environment.”
2025-06-27 12:04:00