There are two essential accoutrements whenever a British prime minister makes a big announcement from Downing Street, as Keir Starmer did on immigration on Monday morning: a lectern with a snappy three-word slogan and a front-row hype gang of nodding cabinet members.
Ten days after Labour was routed by Nigel Farage‘s Reform UK in local elections, Starmer walked into an oak-panelled Downing Street briefing room to solemnly declare that Britain‘s “experiment is over” with mass immigration. He stood behind a lectern plastered with a slogan suggesting he was “securing Britain’s future”, as he revealed a White Paper was on its way filled with tough new measures to cut the number of foreigners who would be allowed into the country to work legally.
The plan includes making it harder for migrants to claim citizenship, banning work visas for overseas workers in care homes, prioritising migrants with degrees over unskilled workers, and making it harder for foreign students to stay in Britain after their courses end.
The announcement’s significance, as far as the government would have wanted it to be perceived, was signalled in part by the calibre of Monday’s hype gang. These were no journeymen or women. It included the most powerful members of Starmer’s government, such as health secretary Wes Streeting, seen as a potential future prime minister, and Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer.
Reeves sat next to home secretary Yvette Cooper, which meant that along with the prime minister, three of the UK government’s four great officers of state (only the foreign secretary was missing) were there for the big announcement. Lofty as some members were, the hype gang gamely did its backup job, nodding along enthusiastically at seemingly random moments during Starmer’s speech.
Their heads bobbed up and down even when it appeared to some of the rest of us in the room that Starmer was probably fibbing, most notably his weak insistence that making a hullabaloo out of Labour’s rightwards lurch on immigration had nothing to do with the political threat from Reform.
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“No,” he said, a little unconvincingly. “I am doing this because . . . it’s what I believe in.” Meanwhile, his political enemies were already clipping old speeches from his time in opposition, when a softer, more accommodative approach to immigration seemed to be what Starmer believed in.
Many voters in the pro-Brexit Red Wall constituencies of the northern half of England, where Reform now threatens to overwhelm Starmer’s party, certainly now believe in staunching the flow of foreigners to Britain. It was these voters Starmer seemed to address when, in his speech on Monday morning, he repeatedly cited the old Brexit slogan about “taking back control” of Britain’s borders.
Yet after Brexit, Starmer complained, net legal migration (the number of legal immigrants minus the number of emigrants) quadrupled to almost one million under the Tories in 2023.
“That’s not control – it’s chaos,” said the prime minister. “Well, no more. Today, this Labour government . . . will deliver what you have asked for, and we will take back control of our borders.”
In the once-unthinkable event that Farage ever replaces Starmer in Downing Street, you could easily imagine the Reform UK leader giving a similar speech on migration. That alone illustrates just how far Labour has shifted to the right on this issue during Starmer’s short time so far in Number 10.
The prime minister’s tough language will have pricked the ears of many voters who backed Brexit and are now inclined to support Reform. He warned Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” if immigrants weren’t forced to better integrate by, for example, being forced to learn English.
Starmer admonished employers in certain sectors of the economy who, he said, were “addicted to importing cheap labour”. He singled out the engineering sector for the naughty step because the number of visas for foreign workers sought by the industry’s employers had, he said, “rocketed” while the number of apprenticeships for British youth had fallen. “Is that fair?” Starmer implored.
The prime minister also directly challenged the idea, previously accepted as gospel by mandarins at the UK’s treasury, that higher levels of immigration automatically boost a nation’s economic performance. Starmer said recent experience in Britain suggested otherwise. When he was challenged to clarify this afterwards, Reeves’s nodding paused and she smiled awkwardly for a moment when the prime minister insisted that her department now agrees with his view.
Net migration to Britain, the yardstick upon which governments are assessed on their ability to control the issue, fell last year to a little more than 720,000. Official estimates suggested it was already projected to fall further to roughly half that level over the next few years ahead of the next election, as distortions caused by pandemic measures ended and old Tory migration clampdowns took hold.
Now, as it is understood by many in Westminster, Starmer and his handlers seem to believe that number will have be halved yet again, if Labour is to avoid a calamity in the Red Wall and win the next election.
Starmer must achieve that while also protecting his left flank from the Greens and Liberal Democrats – both parties are softer on immigration and will chase disaffected middle-class Labour voters who may be uncomfortable with its tougher line on migration.
There are perils ahead for Starmer on the migration issue, and he knows it.
