Photo by Niklas Halle’n – WPA Pool / Getty Images

The Prime Minister delivered a two-in-one speech this morning (26 September) at the Global Progressive Action Summit in London.

In part one he defended what he called “a multi-ethnic modern nation” under siege from a “politics of predatory grievance”. In part two, he announced a mandatory digital ID policy to tackle illegal migration and fired the starting gun on the biggest civil liberties debate in Britain since the Covid-19 lockdowns.

First to part one. It marks his most explicit statement of his centre-left beliefs after months in which the Government fought Reform on the basis of practicality rather than principle (much to the annoyance of Labour MPs).

In a week in which President Trump claimed that Mayor Sadiq Khan was trying to introduce “Sharia Law” in London, the PM took some time to defend the capital. He told delegates: “This city isn’t the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe.”

He said that right-wing caricatures of Britain’s towns and cities “simply do not match the reality we see around us” and are “a million miles away from reality”.

But he undertook a careful balancing act, saying “the worst thing that we can do is defend the status quo” because working-class towns are “losing trust in our ability to deliver the change they want to see”.

In the speech Starmer did not name any opponents or opposition parties by name. Instead he alluded to “the politics of predatory grievance, preying on the problems of working people… against the politics of patriotic renewal”. (In the Q&A that followed, he called Reform a “different proposition” and said the stakes at the next election would be “bigger than Labour”.)

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And he directly addressed the Unite the Kingdom rally of two weeks ago, which saw supporters of the far-right leader and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson march through London. He said Britain should celebrate “difference under the same flag” and then ominously warned, “you don’t have to be a historian to know where it ends up”.

In the Q&A he said the march “sent shivers through the spines of many of our communities not just in London”.

Then came part two, as Starmer segued into immigration policy and announced the mandatory digital ID policy that was trailed in the media yesterday.

In an attempt to knit the two parts of the speech together, Starmer said that allowing irregular migrants to work in the “shadow economy” was “not compassionate left-wing politics” because such people are exploited. He added: “we do need to know who is in our country”.

The sudden pivot to a border control policy summed up the strange atmosphere of this event, a conference of the left in which everyone was talking about the right. There was much else they could have spoken about. For example, the fact that the four leaders Starmer assembled with for a Q&A after the speech – Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese – have also just recognised a state of Palestine. It went unmentioned. Instead they all spoke of their struggles with rising immigration and shared tales of the right-wing bogeymen.

[Further reading: Exclusive polling: How Burnham beats Reform]

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