A little-noticed UK footnote to President Trump’s meeting with his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa last month highlighted Keir Starmer’s far-left foreign policy. Trump challenged Ramaphosa about why opposition MP Julius Malema gets away with his public chants of ‘Kill the Boer’. It then turned out that Britain had recently been prepared to welcome this inciter of anti-white violence – for a second time. The only reason he didn’t go was the incompetence of UK bureaucracy: Malema’s visa wasn’t issued in time for the conference he planned to attend – for which the British High Commissioner to South Africa wrote a letter of grovelling apology.

The case shows that on top of two-tier-Keir policing and justice, Britain now also has two-tier foreign visitor rules – one set for those associated with non-white, ‘progressive’ and woke causes and another for everyone else. So it was that French writer Renaud Camus, who also recently planned to visit Britain, was banned, his visit deemed ‘not conducive to the public good’. His crime was to be the originator of the ‘great replacement’ theory, which claims that Western populations are being systematically replaced by non-Europeans. So rabble-rousing racist extremists: welcome; the elderly author of debatable demographic theories: visa denied.

The latest opinion polls have Labour on 22 per cent, nine points behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and 12 points behind where they were when they won the general election a year ago. And while on 5 June Labour managed to win a Scottish by-election, this was only because its support had collapsed less drastically than the Scottish National Party which previously held the seat. The big story of the day was confirmation that Reform UK has eclipsed the Tories as the main right-wing opposition in Scotland as well as in England: it won 26 per cent of votes in a left-leaning, working-class part of greater Glasgow, compared to 7.8 per cent in the constituency in the general election. It came within 1,500 votes of winning and secured four times the Tory vote. Reform UK’s latest internal drama, which saw chairman Zia Yusuf resign and then change his mind, is only a hiccup. It will keep surging while Farage remains at the helm.

Starmer has hit the panic button, trying to convince voters he’s moderate and sensitive to public concerns. So he’s doing a U-turn on cutting winter fuel assistance for pensioners, has claimed ‘my first priority is the safety and security of the British people’ and that he will ‘take back control of our borders’. There’s even been a nod to Labour’s hate-figure par excellence, Enoch Powell, in his claim that immigration risks turning Britain into ‘an island of strangers’. Most conservative-sounding of all has been Starmer’s announcement that he will oversee ‘the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War’. The budget will rise from the current 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent by 2027, with an ‘ambition’ to reach three per cent by 2034, funded by reducing foreign aid from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 0.3. ‘Ambition’ is bureaucratese for ‘it’ll never happen’, underlined by no explanation of how three per cent would be reached. A few days after his announcements, Starmer airily accepted Nato’s new target of 3.5 per cent, again without explaining how this would be achieved.

Starmer’s claims to be taken seriously on national security descend even more deeply into farce with his determination to hand Britain’s Indian Ocean Territory, containing one of the West’s most strategically important bases, Diego Garcia, plus £30 billion, to China-friendly Mauritius. No other country would do such a mad thing. Trying to defend the deal, Starmer claimed China opposed it. China promptly welcomed it. Britain faces no legal obligation to give up the territory. It’s all about the British left’s embarrassment about Empire and consequent desperation to ‘decolonise’ the remaining overseas territories.

Starmer of course also won’t be taken seriously on national security while presiding over the daily invasion of the Kent coast. He keeps claiming he’s ‘smashing the gangs’ while illegal immigrants continue arriving in record numbers – 15,000 so far this year. Proof has emerged, unsurprisingly, that among those who have arrived are terrorists. Embarrassingly for Starmer, an 85th-anniversary flotilla of ships re-enacting the Dunkirk evacuation was disrupted by a boat carrying illegal immigrants.

Starmer’s rhetoric has shifted, but his actions remain those of an uncompromising leftist. Climate high priest Ed Miliband continues to have the green light to wreck the economy and to make Britons poorer and colder. And there’s no sign of Starmer climbing down on outrageous cases of two-tier justice, such as the 31-month custodial sentence for Lucy Connolly, who posted an inflammatory but soon deleted post on X about asylum seekers, a much longer sentence than for many violent crimes – even though such cases have prompted US concerns. Similarly, don’t expect Starmer to press the BBC – singled out by White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt for repeating Hamas lies – to correct its anti-Israel bias.

And despite immigration clearly being the key issue behind Reform UK’s success at the 1 May local elections, Starmer’s ‘reset’ of relations with the EU will include a ‘youth mobility scheme’ allowing tens of thousands of Europeans to work in Britain. He’s also taken a major step in reversing Brexit by rejoining the Single Market for agricultural and energy products, apparently not caring about the complications this will cause for Britain’s recent trade deals (including with Australia). Starmer’s desperation to please Brussels is highlighted by his caving in to EU pressure for a further twelve years of access to UK fishing waters.

Starmer wants to turn around declining voter support, but won’t change unpopular leftist policies. So he’s challenged Farage to a debate, a move which Sir Humphrey would describe as ‘courageous’. Not only would Farage make mincemeat of his appalling record, the contrast between the charmless, robotic chameleon Starmer and the clubbable, authentic Farage would loom large. As Sunday Times columnist Robert Colville has noted about Starmer, he is ‘the purest example of the buttoned-up politician… Even when he’s talking about football, a sport he genuinely loves, he somehow makes it sound like something he’s read about in his briefing notes’.