Keir Starmer’s admission that Labour has “shied away” from confronting immigration issues is one of those political developments which will, by itself, please almost nobody. To those animated by immigration, it sounds like the Prime Minister is conceding only the bleeding obvious; to those in Labour discomfited by the whole debate, it offers comfort to the enemy.

Politicians are sufficiently able to deny the obvious — to all of our detriment — that we should give fair credit when one of them shows any willingness, however fleeting, to confront a hard truth. After all, the most obvious example of a Labour politician “shying away” from the awkward subject of immigration is Starmer himself, when he first issued his stark warning about Britain becoming an “island of strangers” and then, extraordinarily, disowned it by claiming the words were not his.

That example should remind us to offer him only qualified praise. Saying the right thing in the moment is easy; delivering real change is much harder.

This is not just Starmer’s fault. Britain’s immigration problem has festered for decades because politicians have judged the long-term costs of inaction to be outweighed by the short-term costs of fixing it. Just look at the past Tory governments: every Conservative leader from David Cameron onwards recognised that immigration was an issue of public concern and a cudgel with which to beat Labour — hence his repeated pledge to cut net immigration to the “tens of thousands”.

But once in office, the party never tried to keep that promise. The pattern was always the same: install a Right-winger at the Home Office to talk tough on immigration, while Business, Education, and the Treasury worked to keep numbers high.

For decades, mass immigration served as a palliative, allowing the UK to ignore serious challenges. Foreign students sustained fragile universities, while many “left-behind” towns benefitted from the short-term boost. Growing numbers of working-age migrants kept GDP looking healthy and hid the pressures of an ageing population.

We’ll be able to tell that a politician is really serious about tackling immigration when they show they are prepared to take on the vested interests, both industrial and electoral, which benefit from the status quo. The Tories proved incapable of that, even though border control ought to have been firmly in their ideological wheelhouse. For Starmer, an instinctive progressive leading a progressive party, real change would be that much harder. What looked like economic growth and demographic stability was largely a veneer, masking deeper structural strains that remain unaddressed. Who wants to admit that?

A prime minister who can’t get even fairly mild welfare cuts past his backbenchers is in no position to win the sort of battles required to wean Britain off mass immigration. Is Starmer going to preside over the closure of lots of second- and third-order universities, many of which are barely-disguised ways of subsidising local economies? Is he going to raise taxes on older people, or abolish the pension triple lock? Or make it easier and cheaper for families to have children, despite it being much cheaper, from the Treasury’s perspective, to import workers ready-made in their 20s?

Probably not. But if he doesn’t, public anger is only going to mount, and the pressure is reaching critical levels. Our two-party system is failing because both Labour and the Conservatives failed to do their job. Trying to ignore immigration may have already killed the Tories — and it could yet be the doom of Labour too.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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