OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | As Starmer, Finally, Decides To Go… Ill Burnham’s Rise Be UK’s Sign Of Hope? | Farrukh Dhondy

“Sleeping dogs never lie

So why do we say ‘let them’?

They never laugh, they never cry

Not even when you pet them…

The horse was proud to win the race

But as it won, it fell

These proverbs have to keep apace

With technology to sell.”

From Silly Cone Sally, by Bachchoo

After repeatedly asserting that he won’t jump ship, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had, as is the traditional practice, the lectern set outside the doors of No. 10 Downing Street on Monday. He stood behind it and announced his resignation.

With characteristic dignity he said he had taken note of the opinion of Labour MPs and of his Cabinet and concluded that the honourable course was to go.

The precipitating factor for his decision was the victory of the ex-mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, in the byelection in Makerfield. Mr Burnham resigned his mayoralty when Josh Simons, his supporter for the leadership of the Labour Party and consequently the country, stood down to make way for him. Mr Burnham has now entered Parliament as a Labour MP with almost guaranteed support from the majority of Labour MPs to project him into the leadership and thence into No. 10.

Mr Burnham won 55 per cent of the vote of the Makerfield constituency, beating the two far-right parties, Reform and Restore, whose surge in the public polls and victories in the local elections in May is categorically attributable to their “policies” of anti-immigration, deportations, surreptitious anti-Islam, anti-Europe and fervent, one might even say un-British, nationalism.

Mr Burnham’s vote exceeded that of the combined votes of Restore and Reform, which adds an optimistic twist to the country’s decades-long obsession with xenophobia of one sort or the other.

Reform, the “party” led by Nigel Farage, inherited it’s guiding directions from the fact that Mr Farage was one of the main advocates of Brexit, arguing to keep Johnny European out of the UK. (The name Farage means he is the descendant of Huguenot refugees from France!)

After Brexit, Mr Farage joined the Reform Party and formulated its strong anti-immigrant, anti-asylum-seeker and pro-deportation policies.

Yes, the world is divided into rich and poor, relatively peaceful and factionally, ideologically or war-torn territories. People inevitably try and move from the poor to the rich, from the troubled to the relatively peaceful. They perhaps rely on traditions of welcome.

Having watched American films through my teenaged years, I am convinced that the native inhabitants of America weren’t overjoyed when Europeans decided to flood in and claim their lands. These immigrants now claim to be “natives” and now their Orangebooby President and his Make-America-Gaga-Again supporters are anti-immigrant and even impertinently venture to voice support for anti-immigration parties and trends in countries which are none of their fandango-ing business!

I don’t know what Mrs J.D. Vance’s opinions are on immigration and deportation. We do know that she is the daughter of Indian immigrants to the United States and that her husband, the vice-president, supports Orangeboob’s policies, which are stridently for building walls along American borders and expelling people from the country on very feeble grounds.

Then in Britain there is a famous quintet (maybe more) of recent descendants of immigrants, formulating and advocating anti-immigrant and deportation policies. The parents of former Tory office-holders, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman are all immigrants to the UK. So too are the African and West Indian-origin Tories Kwasi Kwarteng and James Cleverly. They all supported a failed Tory policy to deport would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers to Rwanda.

Of these, Suella Braverman has defected from the Tories and joined Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. She was photographed in the newspapers hugging him and declaring that she felt she had “come home”. Where from? Not Rwanda!

Apart from these politicians there are the journalists with the same phobias -- xeno, Islamo, and other “isms”.

A lady called Lionel trilling regularly writes diatribes -- I expect she calls them columns -- against immigrants in a right-wing weekly called the Spectator edited now by the ex-Tory minister Michael Gove. These anti-immigrant diatribes sometimes descend into Islamophobia. This lady is an American and so an immigrant to the UK, though she recently said she has been compelled (by the imagined influx of immigrants?) to move to Portugal. I believe Ms Trilling is also a writer of fiction, though I don’t know her books. Now it has been my firm conviction that writers of fiction should be endowed with a strong sense of irony -- but alas!

There are others with perhaps more justification for being anti-immigrant. One such, in the same publication, is a person called Douglas Murray who is, from his name, Scottish.

Both Ms Trilling and Mr Murray quote in these diatribes the horrific crimes of non-white, or in some cases specifically Muslim, people. There have in the last months been three dreadful crimes I can recall.

One was a mad black young man stabbing to death three very young girls in a dancing class. The most recent incident was of a deranged Sikh stabbing to death a young white man he had encountered on the street.

Of course, using these acts of the mentally disturbed to demonise all black people, Muslims, Sikhs or immigrants is intellectually, maliciously dishonest.

Thousands of Christians commit all sorts of crimes each year in the UK. Does that justify the vilification of all Christians? (the Pope included?)

Will Ms Trilling demand that they all be sent to Rwanda?