Labour’s Matt Damon problem

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war.

Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration at the moment. It knows that its voters are very upset about the issue – seven in ten Labour constituencies voted to leave the European Union in June – and it knows that Ukip is now in a much better position to tempt these voters away with the election of Paul Nuttall as leader.