Posts on X, Facebook and TikTok suggest that Keir Starmer is trying to get rid of British citizens while welcoming illegal immigrants.
A video is circulating on social media which people claim shows Keir Starmer telling Brits to get out of the UK if they don’t like what his government is doing.
“If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave,” the Labour Prime Minister says in the video.
Captions that accompany the video on X, Facebook and TikTok suggest that Starmer is trying to get rid of British citizens while welcoming illegal immigrants.
Others appear to frame the video as Starmer’s response to an online petition calling for his resignation and a general election, which has amassed millions of signatures.
However, the video isn’t recent: the clip actually comes from a speech that Starmer gave in February 2023, before he ever became prime minister.
He was speaking in response to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which said that the Labour Party had made sufficient changes over the two years before to deal with allegations of discrimination and antisemitism.
The EHRC found in 2020 that the party had acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members while former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was in charge. Starmer suspended Corbyn and expelled hundreds of members from the party as part of an effort to address the EHRC’s findings.
Starmer’s comments telling people to leave if they didn’t like the changes were directed at members quitting the Labour Party, not Brits leaving the country.
They can also be found in a written press release on the Labour Party website, also dated February 2023 and containing the same wording as the video.
There’s no evidence he’s told anyone to get out of the UK, whether in response to the petition or in any other context.
A lot of misinformation has swirled about the internet regarding the petition calling for Starmer’s resignation and a general election.
While it has garnered just under 3 million signatures as of the time of this report, meaning MPs will debate it, there’s nothing stopping someone from falsely registering as a UK citizen, provided they provide a valid postcode and email address.
As such, anyone can theoretically sign the petition, including people from abroad. Indeed, thousands of signatures appear to come from countries like Australia, Spain, the US and France.
Merely being signed from abroad doesn’t necessarily mean the signatures are fake though — the petition system allows UK citizens to sign from overseas.
There have also been false claims that politicians themselves have signed the petition thousands of times.
This stems from the fact that, under the petition data, many MPs’ names, including Starmer’s, can be repeatedly seen alongside the list of people who have signed it.
The recurring names of MPs actually refer to people in their constituencies who have signed it, and do not suggest that the MP themselves, or people impersonating them, have done so.
Other posts on social media claim that Starmer has threatened to arrest anyone who signs the petition, but there is no evidence that he has ever made such a suggestion.
Regardless of the authenticity of names on the petition, it is very unlikely to lead to Starmer’s resignation and a general election.
Once a petition gets 10,000 signatures, the government issues a response, and once it hits 100,000, it will be considered for debate by parliament. Other than that, however, there is no obligation on the government’s part to take action.
Ultimately, the prime minister is the only one who can call a general election, and after Starmer’s landslide victory in July, it is hard to imagine he would call an early vote at this stage.
