JMW Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhoon Coming On
by Nick Moss
2024, Keir Scammer railed against those populists who were “smashing up communities and terrifying minorities.” (1)
Scammer set himself dead against a politics “infected by a spiral of populism…the politics of the easy answer that solves nothing. “
2025, Keir Scammer has changed his mind. Ditched the posture of inclusivity. Now he intends to “finally honour what “take back control” meant and begin to choose who comes here so that migration works for our national interest.” (2)
Without Scammer’s efforts to “reduce immigration significantly …we risk becoming an island of strangers.”
What changed? It couldn’t be Runcorn, surely? Scammer didn’t bother to visit or campaign in the by-election there.
Although Nigel Falange did. And won. Andrea Jekyll became the Revanchists’ first elected mayor too. Happy days for all because “we’ve been working on some policies.” Make refugees sleep in tents. Like they do in Dublin. And like they do under the Westway. Single men and families, living in squatter camps, choking, raw-throated, on diesel fumes.
Falange and Lee-the-scab know where all this leads, cackling like Zippy and George turned malign, hysterical: red nosed, spider-veined, maroon -faced Monday Club relics who’ve gone from yesterday’s men to knowing tomorrow belongs to them. Falange congratulates Scammer on “learning a lot from us.” Scammer, significantly, doesn’t demur. But Falange gets the logic of this race.It’s not enough to be willing to put the foreigners into tents. The winner will be the one prepared to torch the tents.
At night, Falange, tumescent, dreams of Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhoon Coming On”, but recasts the scene to a sunset Channel and a Royal Navy frigate hosing small boats until they sink and their screaming cargo drowns.
Yet neglects to comprehend the logic of the scene. However, many scapegoats get forced under, no corpses in the water will conceal or rhetoric of emergency deflect – the ship itself is sinking, will soon enough be wrecked.
Notes
- Keir Starmer’s speech on fixing the foundations of our country: 27 August 2024
- PM remarks at Immigration White Paper press conference: 12 May 2025
