No one believes you, Keir
The PM’s plan to cut immigration rings even more hollow than those of his predecessors.
No other issue divides the political class from the electorate quite like immigration. For ordinary voters, the mass migration of recent decades – both legal and illegal – is the most direct expression of their powerlessness over politics. Politicians routinely promise to slash migration numbers – and then routinely do the opposite. In a major speech earlier today, UK prime minister Keir Starmer promised a ‘clean break’ from these past failures, and to ‘finally take back control of our borders and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country’. He warned that Britain is in danger of becoming an ‘island of strangers’ unless more radical action is taken to bring down arrivals and boost integration. But does anyone, anywhere, actually believe him?
There is an undeniable shamelessness to Starmer’s intervention. As he unveiled the Labour government’s new immigration white paper, he tried to assure us this had nothing to do with his party’s bruising losses in the recent local elections. ‘People… will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party’, he said, refusing to actually name the Reform UK elephant in the room. The real reason for the crackdown, he claimed, is that reducing migration ‘is what I believe in’. Migration control, he insisted, is one of Labour’s ‘core values’. Which will have come as a surprise to most of his front bench, let alone the Labour Party membership. He might as well have said: ‘We have always been at war with Eastasia.’
Starmer’s unconvincing insistence that he has ‘always’ believed in migration control is directly contradicted not only by his past statements (he ran for the Labour leadership in 2020 promising to ‘make the case for freedom of movement’), but also by his government’s current actions. Small-boats crossings have reached record highs this year, with 10,000 people having already arrived by April. The rate of illegal arrivals has jumped by 40 per cent compared with this time last year, when the Tories were still in office. Starmer is also in the process of negotiating a ‘youth mobility scheme’ with Brussels, which critics have slammed as another potential boost to migration. What’s more, the former human-rights lawyer remains committed to the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, which makes it nigh-on impossible to deport not only migrants who arrive illegally but also those who have committed serious crimes here. These are not the actions of a leader who wants to take back control of the UK’s borders.
Starmer is on the strongest ground when he attacks the Tories’ failures and duplicity on migration. Each Conservative leader of the past decade promised cuts in migration and delivered the opposite in government. David Cameron vowed to get net migration down into the tens of thousands, knowing full well this was impossible while the UK was in the EU. More dishonest still, Boris Johnson, who promised to use Brexit to reestablish control of Britain’s borders, ushered in a new migration regime that led to record numbers of arrivals. Net migration in 2023 alone hit over 900,000. Whatever one’s view on immigration, this was clearly a democratic outrage – a political fraud on the nation.
Labour’s new white paper aims to curb some of the excesses of the ‘Boriswave’ period, restricting visas for careworkers, doubling the time migrants will have to wait for settled status and tightening English-language requirements, among other things. Yet this ‘clean break’ with the old system is only expected to lower the number of visas issued by 50,000 per year, according to home secretary Yvette Cooper. This still implies net migration in the hundreds of thousands – a long way away from what Starmer’s bombast suggests.
Still, that Labour is even paying lip service to concerns about migration is in itself notable. It is 15 years since then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown described Gillian Duffy, a lifelong Labour voter from Rochdale, as a ‘bigoted woman’ for taking him to task over migration. It has been 10 years since a Labour-branded mug with the slogan ‘Controls on immigration’ sent Labour’s activist set into meltdown. Although Starmer has offered little beyond some soundbites, it is nonetheless telling that Labour feels the need to respond to public anger, rather than denigrate it.
Saying one thing and doing another has been a shameful feature of the migration debate in recent decades. Yet there are few reasons to believe that Keir Starmer will do anything different. He is setting the British public up for yet another betrayal.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.