Starmer’s just the latest to be shaped by UK’s immigration debate
Immigration has shaped UK politics for the past 20 years, often in ways that surprised at the time but which appear in hindsight to make perfect sense. David Cameron’s 2010 pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands set the Tory party on a collision course first with Brexit and then the subsequent incarnation of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
Voters didn’t fail to notice that immigration reached a peak of around 900,000 in 2023, largely on the watch of Brexit’s poster boy, Boris Johnson.
For Labour, the issue has shaped the party in a different way; yes, helping it return to power after Brits stopped trusting anything the Conservatives said, but also revealing a tension at the heart of the left-wing or centre-left approach to governing. As Leader of the Opposition at the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband knew the issue was potent, and so his party produced mugs with the phrase “Controls on immigration” printed on them. They didn’t fly off the shelves, and voters rejected the party. Those same voters felt, rightly, that Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t the man to trust with regaining control of our borders and they rejected him, too.
When Keir Starmer was seeking the Labour leadership, he told party members (by now a fairly middle class and progressive bunch) that “we have to make the case for the benefits of migration.” He said “We welcome migrants, we don’t scapegoat them.” Having won the leadership and last year’s election, he’s changed his tune.
Yesterday he said that the record levels of immigration seen in the UK in recent years was “a squalid chapter” in British politics that risks turning the UK into an “island of strangers.” This language will make many of Starmer’s colleagues uncomfortable, but it is not accidental.
Starmer isn’t wrong to slam the previous government for presiding over a chaotic system, and he isn’t wrong to want to do something about it. The fact that there is an obvious political prize up for grabs doesn’t detract from this and the PM rightly observed that current immigration policy has damaged trust so much that it risks “pulling the country apart.”
The enormous risk for Starmer is that if his reforms fail to bring numbers down to a more acceptable and manageable level, he will have further eroded that trust – and there will be only one winner from that.