Is Labour using its annual conference in Liverpool to change its political strategy? Up until a few days ago the party’s messaging wasn’t exactly warm towards Reform UK — but it was clearly intended to win back the trust of Reform voters, especially those who used to support Labour. That’s why Keir Starmer awkwardly declared his fondness for flag-waving — and promised to close down the migrant hotels on this “island of strangers”. Tellingly, the line that Morgan McSweeney crafted against Nigel Farage wasn’t that the Reform leader was an extremist, but, rather, a Tory in disguise.

But, over the weekend, a radically different line of attack has emerged. Interviewed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Starmer condemned Reform’s policy on canceling Indefinite Leave to Remain for foreign residents as “racist” and “immoral”.

So why the sudden change of tack? The most obvious explanation is that Labour strategists have spotted an opportunity. As I argued last week, Reform badly bungled its big policy announcement on immigration, resulting in concerns about just how far they were intending to go. YouGov polling shows that a clear majority of voters — including a substantial minority of Reform voters — do not support withdrawing ILR from people that have already been granted it.

However, on closer examination, opposition to the ILR crackdown is focused on migrants who have been resident for 10 or more years, who are in full-time work or who have set up businesses in the UK. Assuming Reform is capable of learning from its mistakes, they now have a chance to re-center the debate on the question of access to the British welfare state, especially among non-working migrants who arrived here after 2021. Labour may regret turning this issue into a major battleground.

Unless, that is, a decision has been made to abandon the attempt to win back defectors to Reform. With Labour’s support now in the low twenties or even lower in the polls, there’s a case for prioritizing the party’s core vote, which these days most certainly isn’t the traditional working class, but younger, woker, more privileged voters.

The previous McSweeney strategy always relied on Labour not needing to defend its Leftward flank, thereby allowing Starmer to forge ahead with his pantomime patriotism. However, in recent months, Your Party has pre-launched and the Green Party has shifted to the Left under Zack Polanski.

The fact that this new Left opposition is deeply divided and far from fully operational should be of zero comfort to Starmer. If Labour poll ratings are hitting record lows despite the Corbyn-Sultana chaos, just think how much damage a united radical front could do. That’s especially true if the smaller Left-of-center parties establish themselves as the clearest way of voting against Reform. As Zarah Sultana put it when she resigned from the Labour Party: “in 2029, the choice will be stark: socialism or barbarism.”

Clearly, Labour has decided that competing for the anti-Reform vote is more important right now than trying to win back Reform voters. When the most basic task at the next election is not winning, but surviving as a major political party, a core vote strategy makes sense.

Of course, for the new approach to succeed, Labour must be fully committed to it. One of the problems with the previous strategy is that though McSweeney controlled the messaging he didn’t control the policy agenda. That mismatch appears to continue. While Starmer was busy condemning Reform this weekend, his Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was ramping up her tough talk on immigration — including tighter restrictions on Indefinite Leave to Remain.

And that’s the trouble with Starmer’s grandstanding. How can he credibly use words like immoral and racist to describe the populist Right, when the difference that Labour policy offers is one of degree, not of kind?

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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