In all the photographs I have seen of Sir Keir Starmer he has an abstracted gaze - 'puzzled' was Lytton Strachey's word for Dr Arnold. It is the inward look of a man serving some greater cause.
And so he is. Starmer is an ideologue, not a democrat.
Idealists build an internal model of the world that is distorted, like Minecraft or Lego, and use it to impose a simplistic narrative on reality. For Marxists it is about social equality, whatever the cost. Informed that a nuclear war would destroy a third of humanity, Chairman Mao replied 'Good, then there will be no more classes.'
For Starmer also, principle trumps pragmatism: he said recently that he would have a sick relation wait for treatment by the NHS rather than jump the queue by going privately.
More widely, British socialists like to think not just that all people should be treated equally but that they are all fundamentally the same and all cultures equally valid. Even gender is an arbitrary construct, so that Sir Keir is unable to define a woman.
To the Left diversity is an unmixed good and multiculturalism a tool to destroy the Right and their wicked prejudices as Andrew Neather revealed in his 2012 article about the Labour immigration policy drafted a dozen years earlier.
This view, that humans are blank slates and exist before they take on any meaning, is that of Jean-Paul Sartre, the 'existentialist' who also turned to Marxism. However there are many who reject it, basing their identity on race or religion; this applies to some of Labour's client groups as well as the white British or Christians that modern socialists seem to despise.
It is perfectly possible for our society to accommodate minorities who are willing to 'live and let live.' Some do more and set us an example: one of my wife's friends is a Sikh who in keeping with her faith's culture of selfless service to others provides food for the homeless in the city centre on a Saturday night.
But not all have an open attitude to The Other. For example, when Blair's revolutionaries planned to boost immigration partly 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity' where was the civil servant giving a Jeeves-like cough and asking the hotheads if any of them understood Islam's guidance on what to do with unbelievers? We are fortunate that most of the four million Muslims here have a pragmatic mindset, so far. They came for a better life for themselves and their children.
However in times of stress they may look more closely at their religion's teachings, which contain clearly expressed exhortations incompatible with easygoing multiculturalism. Our peace and prosperity depend on debates deferred rather than vigorously pursued to a conclusion.
One of those dangerous stresses is the foreign warmongering on which our Establishment is so keen. The Gordon Riots of 1780 were a response to the lifting of restrictions on Roman Catholics, whose transnational religious allegiance it was feared might matter more than their patriotism in an era when France and Spain were our enemies. Likewise Muslims are an international brotherhood and we have seen what happens in London when our government takes sides in the Middle East.
Did nobody assess these potentialities in their haste to sock their political opponents?
There was a time when immigration was used to control and oppress, as in the Irish 'plantations' of the Tudors and Oliver Cromwell, with permanently built-in tensions that have lasted to this day.
Even without malice aforethought - even with goodwill - grafting an unfamiliar cultural group onto indigenous rootstock does not always 'take.'
Fiji is an example. When Britain colonised the island the first governor, seeing how other acquisitions had resulted in the marginalisation of the original inhabitants, protected the territorial rights of Fijians. This succeeded so well that their successors still own 83% of the land.
But the colony had to pay its way and sugar cane was introduced. Harvesting it is very hard work and the Fijians were content to manage with their traditional fishing and farming, so a scheme was set up to bring in indentured labourers from India, with the option after five years to go home or stay for another term. Naturally many chose to settle and their hardworking and entrepreneurial descendants have become a powerful business class and outnumber the (shall we say) 'ethnic' Fijians. Consequently in the last four decades the island has seen four coups d'état and a constitutional crisis.
In Britain, the failure by both major political parties to consider consequences or to slow the pace of immigration has continued to build the underbrush that constitutes the fuel for potential conflagrations. Like his predecessors, Starmer is better understood as a colonial administrator than as a democrat: he has a plan and by George he will see it through, on behalf of the process going on behind his slightly clouded eyes.
Yet it is not only the (shall we say) indigenous British who have to make adjustments, given time. The ideological foundation of Islam in Britain must be addressed if peace is to last; there is more than one way to interpret the Koran and Hadiths. Otherwise we have another plantation to deal with.
We have been through this before, with Catholic and Protestant zealotry. Let us hope that a resolution can be found without the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
