You could be forgiven, as an Irish news consumer, for not knowing that earlier this week the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, gave a speech on immigration that was the most radically immigration restrictive since Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in April 1968.
The Irish Times managed one article on the subject, as did the Irish Independent. The rest of the media didn’t fare much better. Gript readers, on this subject, are better informed than their peers.
One reason that this should be a bigger story in Ireland than it currently is concerns the fact that it appears that the Starmer speech was authored – or at least substantially crafted – by an Irishman: Cork’s own Morgan McSweeney, pictured above.
McSweeney has had an interesting career. He is the son of Macroom-based accountant Tim McSweeney and his wife, Carmel. He comes from a family with political ties, and a strong allegiance to Fine Gael – his cousin Claire Mungovan served as an advisor to Ireland’s own Leo Varadkar. He studied politics at Middlesex University, and is a Labour Party “lifer”, having volunteered in University and been an activist and an organiser in the party ever since, for his entire career.
He first came to prominence as a centre-left organiser of the Labour Party in London against the brief heyday of the British National Party, during which he is credited with re-focusing Labour councillors on “bread and butter” issues of local delivery in order to fend off the (real, actual, not imagined) far right in London. A string of impressive local election campaigns followed, and he developed a reputation as a pragmatic and sensible, if solidly left-wing, political campaigner. His first attempt at serious influence at leadership level came when he managed the unsuccessful leadership campaign of one Liz Kendall, before she was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn. A sojourn in a think tank during the long winter of the Corbyn years followed, before he was recruited by Starmer after the 2020 election. He has worked for the Labour Leader ever since, and was widely credited with the “marginal seats only” strategy that saw Labour sweep to a landslide last year on just 34% of the vote.
One thing that has become a recent constant in UK politics is the role of “villainous advisor” – a job first pioneered by Alastair Campbell during the reign of Tony Blair, and carried into even greater notoriety by the role of Dominic Cummings during the turbulent premiership of Boris Johnson. Both men were constantly blamed by supporters and opponents alike, either as dark-arts wielding Svengalis, or as corrupting influences on the otherwise noble leader. McSweeney, it appears, is now being blamed as the latter.
In the days since Starmer’s speech, a torrent of left-wing criticism has been directed in the UK towards the Corkman. Alastair Campbell’s own publication, The New European, went all-out with a piece entitled “Will Morgan McSweeney wreck Labour”. The paper writes:
The strategy that won the general election appears to be in tatters, with Reform taking hold in the red wall and left wing Labour voters who do not like the McSweeney-driven tough talk on immigration and benefit cheats peeling off to the Greens and Liberal Democrats.
Note the timing here: This criticism, alongside a torrent of online criticism flowing his way from left-leaning UK twitter accounts, comes directly after Starmer’s speech. The UK’s left needs a head, and McSweeney is in their cross-eyes. Do a search for his name on twitter, or X, and you will find a torrent of accounts calling for his head.
Of course, they may have a point: The left’s criticism of McSweeney’s apparent strategy for Starmer has obvious merit as a matter of political strategy alone. By launching the most right-wing speech by a UK Prime Minister on immigration in living memory, Starmer has essentially conceded the ground. The only words missing from his big speech this week were the ones that were implied throughout the text: Nigel Farage was right all along.
The problem here is straightforward: Having essentially conceded that Farage is right about immigration and that numbers must come down dramatically, Starmer has now risked making the next general election about a simple question: Who do you trust more to get migrant numbers down – me or Nigel Farage? No wonder the UK’s left is up in arms.
Still, the interesting thing is that they are coming for McSweeney, not Starmer himself. The UK PM is not popular with the electorate in any opinion poll, but he retains the authority of having won the last election with a thumping majority just a few years after his party looked down and out. You may remember a similar dynamic with Boris Johnson: Having delivered a thumping win in 2020, it took two and a half years for his party to turn on him – and it was the allegedly fiendish Cummings who got the boot first.
Still, if the British left are correct and it is, in fact, McSweeney who has steered Starmer towards this tough-on-immigration, tough-on-the-causes-of-immigration approach, then there is irony here: Because both of their political futures are contingent on making it work.
Should Starmer and McSweeney fail to get immigration numbers under control, then they have all but handed Mr. Farage a cudgel to beat the Labour Party to electoral death with over the next five years. For them to remain in power and retain the trust of their party, their strategy will have to succeed, and be converted to votes.
Which means that in an amusing twist, it is a left wing Irishman from Cork who may be tasked with overseeing the most right-wing UK Government policy on immigration in (quite literally) living memories. I do wonder if that’s what he imagined himself doing, Mr. McSweeney, when he set out from Cork for the gold-paved streets of London twenty or more years ago.
Life has a funny way of making fools of us all.