December 6, 2024 - 1:00pm
Something interesting is happening to Labour. For the past few months, Keir Starmer has sought to outflank the Conservatives on the question of immigration — and almost no one inside his party has criticised him.
Outlining his “plan for change” yesterday, Starmer began by arguing that the previous Conservative government had “opened up the borders, deliberately, to cover up the extent of their economic stagnation”. This, he said, was “absolutely unforgivable”.
Starmer’s line of attack is part of a wider strategy to shift the Labour Party’s attitude on immigration. After the latest migration figures showed the annual net flow into the country had reached more than 900,000 a year, he attacked the Conservatives’ “open borders experiment” on the country. Labour then followed this up with a video posted on X earlier this week accusing Kemi Badenoch of personally lobbying for open borders, based on footage of her thanking then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid for listening to her pleas to remove the annual limits on work visas.
What is so striking about Starmer’s strategy is not so much the tone or even the content, but how little criticism it has encountered from a Labour Party which has spent decades making the opposite case, championing the benefits of immigration socially and economically. Migration was not a way to “cover up economic failure”, as Labour now argues, but a lever to improve economic growth for everyone.
Yes, Diane Abbot has been critical. “Macron built up the far right and attacked the left,” she wrote on X yesterday. “He pursued austerity and copied Le Pen’s anti-migrant rubbish. It has ended in disaster for him and chaos for France. Lessons to be learnt.” Kim Johnson, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, also described Starmer’s decision to hold talks over immigration with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as “disturbing”, while another Labour MP anonymously told the Guardian that the party leader’s relationship with Meloni was “shameful”. Yet the criticism was neither widespread nor substantive.
Part of the reason for this is that Starmer first cleared the ground for these attacks with his speech to the Labour Party conference earlier this year, when he made the traditional social democratic argument for controlled migration. The Tories, Starmer declared, could not reduce immigration, because they were “the party of the uncontrolled market”. As such, only Labour could ever really “take back control”.
It was a neat argument, with some merit. At heart, European social democracy is really just a political project to impose constraints on the market economy in order to protect the poor from unfair competition and being forced to work for less. That is the theory, anyway. It’s not hard to see why the trade union movement, for example, would oppose sudden increases in competition, but for much of the past 25 years the Labour Party has actively dissented from this kind of statism in favour of a “flexible” labour market. Starmer’s shift is not “to the Right”, but instead against the old Blairite consensus.
The problem he now faces, however, is that the level of migration today is 10 times higher than in 1997. In response, opposition has also become more radical, with Reform UK demanding “net zero” immigration, and some of its supporters now talking openly of “remigration”.
The irony of all this is that Reform is now so confident on the issue of migration that it plans to actively avoid talking about it over the next few months in a deliberate attempt to attract new voters. As a result, we should prepare for the strange reality that in the coming months the party banging the drum for the benefits of cutting migration may not be Reform or the Tories, but Labour.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.
TomMcTague
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SubscribeOh come on! You don’t seriously believe that Davos Keith has had a Damascene conversion to the politics of national interest? Not a chance. He’s not going to do effective at all about immigration – legal or otherwise. He’s just trying to change the news agenda away from the corruption of his own colleagues.
Didn’t you hear? Everyone is at it. Ursula von der Leyen has joined the AfD and AOC has joined the Catholic Women’s League.
Pretty naive argument from someone who is political editor of this website.
Is Keir Starmer really shifting Right on immigration?
No, he’s not.
The idea that Starmer could shift anywhere out of his own I am Legend fantasy is risible.
No, like many other politicians he ‘talks up’ one policy but actually does nothing. Think Theresa May talking up Brexit or George Osborne talking up austerity.
2TK’s problem is that nobody is believes him.
“strange reality”? Strange certainly…reality…not a chance!
Why is recognizing that a border is real and that ILLEGAL immigration is not beneficial automatically a shift to the right? Is the left incapable of reaching this conclusion or do its leaders find it inconvenient?
Personally I think there has been a shift recently in the UK. The numbers have become so large that even people who previously thought any sentiment opposed to immigration was racist are much quieter now.
Possibly it helps the the huge numbers in recent years were under the Tories, which might have helped them realise large scale immigration is not for the benefit of the general population.
It is a Ponzi scheme – uncontrolled immigration is the Economic Libertarian wet dream, no idea why left of centre folk took it to their bosom and are only just letting go.
A Ponzi scheme cannot be tapered. It cannot be wound down to a soft landing.
That’s the simple reason, among others, why immigration will not be reduced by any amount that will alter the purpose or trajectory of why it is pursued as policy. Global welfare.
Agreed. Immigration control is an inherently left wing policy, and the left’s embrace of free movement has been a complete mystery. It certainly wasn’t always thus. Keir Hardie’s opinion of Lithuanian miners in Lanarkshire was memorably xenophobic:-
“For the second time in their history Messrs. Merry and Cunninghame have introduced a number of Russian Poles [sic] to Glengarnock Ironworks. What object they have in doing so is beyond human ken unless it is, as stated by a speaker at Irvine, to teach men how to live on garlic and oil, or introduce the Black Death, so as to get rid of the surplus labourers.”
It was left policy, but stopped being so many decades ago.
My theory is that people on the left, in the UK at least, were thinking of immigration in the 50s – 70s when there clearly was a lot of racism involved, and collectively assumed that the current anti-immigration sentiment was the same. This is despite that this phase of immigration was from the EU and was largely white – just think of the cognitive dissonance involved in thinking white people opposing white immigration was based on race.
So combine that lack of thought with a mainstream media telling them it was good for the economy (which is true if you only look at national GDP), groupthink, and not listening to any debate because you believe the person arguing with you is only doing so because they’re racist and you end up requiring overwhelming evidence to change your mind.
Yes the left wing became pro White Immigration as that is what FoM is
Because Left lost its working class roots long ago and became party of woke, green, virtue signallers who hate the West.
What else do you expect from Neo-Marxists?
Yes, but it is to the benefit of Labour.
Without migrant vote, Labour would be nowhere.
There are not enough employees in public sector to keep Labour in power.
The cooks in the establishment kitchen can afford to take their hand off the immigration dial as they’ve already got the West on a steady rolling boil. It’s about maintaining now, and we are seeing the narrative shift across the board, as though they are all reading from the same Davos-derived power point presentation on how to avoid the populist reckoning that recently bestowed the good old US of A.
Even in Canada, where we are faced with choosing the best worst federal candidate next election, JT is having a vomit-inducing Starmer-like about-face in an effort to turn his dismal popularity ratings around. Our guy Pollievre has neither the spine nor the stomach to take the ‘un-Canadian’ approach that is needed – Right-Lite indeed. And our Maserati-driving, turban-sporting working man’s man Singh demonstrates time and again that he would sell his own mother for a dollar and send her COD to boot. So, we can eat, as long as it is one of these three logs of fecal matter. It’s the illusion of choice – best pick the one that stinks least!
You’ve just put me off buying a yule log.
There’s a big difference between banging a drum and taking effective action. Since Blair recklessly opened our borders all governments have talked big and acted indecisively.
When Starmer starts talking about illegal immigration rather than irregular migration … no, I still won’t believe a word he says on this even then.
If Reform have been able to bank immigration, it’s because nothing the other parties say on it has any credibility.
Even if it impresses credulous Westminster hacks.
But major problem is legal immigration.
Illegal just adds maybe 20% to the total.
SNAFU
Odd article. Is there a single person who believes a Conservative or a Labour politician when they talk about ‘controlling immigration?
Journalists, just like Conservative and Labour politicians, take us all for fools.
Are journailsts so tied up by fear of hate non-crime laws that they cannot write about immigration so instead they write non-articles like this?
Economically I would consider myself nearer the Social Democratic side with a good dose of well placed state intervention / planning, although where we get those bods from after 40 years of little practice is another matter.
Underlying GDP per capita has been reducing for more and more people since the disastrous decision to open the doors to A10. Low productive, low wage, (I’ll never say low skilled as that is insulting), low value jobs expanded and expanded preventing any incentive to automate and increase productivity.
I was served my food at my table by a robot on my last visit to East Asia.
The prior large waves to UK after WW2 were from Commonwealth countries who were going to the Mother Country – think of the cultural positive effect of that thinking, despite many being subject to racism/discrimination for the first 20 years or so.
Open door immigration is not good economically and has never been. Controlled immigration is. It is socially a disaster waiting to happen. A Ponzi scheme and we are in a death spiral.
No.
We live in strange times. It is a time of great political change, the old socialism/liberalism left/right paradigm has been replaced, at least for now, with nationalism vs. globalism. Both poles of the old paradigm had become globalist/internationalist, and it prompted a popular backlash among the people who demanded what should be simple and obvious, the government of a nation hould adopt policies that benefit the current citizens of that nation. Because most of the established parties were unprepared for this backlash and the leaders of most political factions in most nations were wholly committed to globalist philosophy, the opposition has had to find it’s own way through insurgent movements within both the old right and the old left. It has riven the political landscape and greatly expanded the possibilities. Within that expanded realm of possibility the potential for change is great, and so is the danger.
In 2016, we had two populist insurgents here in the USA, Trump and Sanders. The former succeeded in defeating the establishment in his party, and at this point he has basically banished or silenced all that was left of said establishment. The other failed, to our collective loss. I rather think Bernie’s template for a populism of the left was viable in 2016 and would still be viable today if anyone were bold enough, independent enough, and dare I say nationalist enough to attempt it. It will be far easier for it to happen somewhere like the UK where the right has not turned populist to anywhere near the same extent and where the third party is still in a relatively undeveloped and vulnerable state than in a place like the US where the globalist establishment knows they have probably lost one party beyond all possible hope of recovery and will thus cling to the other with greater ferocity. Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t strike me as the man to accomplish such a feat, but I thought the same of Trump, and I’ve been forced to concede I was perhaps wrong in my assessments. If Starmer is serious about this and wants to make Labour into a serious left/socialist/populist party that challenges the right leaning populist parties that have sprung up in most other places, I would say in my best British accent, good luck old chap.
Most likely Starmer is just going to wait for migration to fall to it’s predicted level of 300k a year, far higher than it ever was before but call that a victory, even though it is nothing of the sort.
The Prime Minister made his and Labour’s position very clear in his somnambulant address at Pinewood Studios. Immigration is to be reduced because ‘working people want it’, he said.
Why they want it, and why other people who are not working people (people with substantial savings) want it, the PM did not say. Other than to add that ‘populism’ isn’t the answer (i.e. please don’t vote for Reform UK).
Framing it as a desire of working people was necessary to avoid looking ‘populist’. Without specifying why they want it makes the request look like an indulged child’s demand for a Christmas present. “If I don’t get a pony for Christmas, I’m calling Social Services.”
There was always a strong ‘lower immigration’ element within Labour. Blair got it wrong when misjudging the need for the post Lisbon treaty limits that were available. The modelling was clearly faulty but that can only be blamed so much. Within a couple of years though the Right was in power and the explosion happened much more under them, uncomfortable though that is for the Right. Badenoch is going to be repeatedly made to wear this.
Nonetheless Starmer knows if he doesn’t get on top of this he’s out in 29. More control without the demonisation language is clearly where he is. That’s where the Country is too. But there are economic sectors deeply reliant and the shift is going to take a bit of time. Interestingly Farmers were happy to protest about a few of their richest paying a bit more but stayed silent about how many rely on seasonal migrants. But probably my biggest Policy disappointment on Starmer to date is the silence on what are we going to do about Social Care which remains massively reliant. That said it will be interesting to see what the Welfare White paper says in early 25 as clearly they’ve grasped how untenable it is for us to continue with c8m economically inactive with an explosion in sickness benefit.
As regards Reform and the tactic to remain silent and try to present a nicer side – the strategy lacks substance as whilst they bond a constituency on immigration it falls apart when they have to engage with other policy areas and challenges. The silence is as much because they haven’t figured out what to do about this.
Is Keir Starmer really shifting Right on immigration? No, he’s not shifting anywhere, he’s being a consummate politician, Playing to the crowd, in this case the popular view including media in its various forms. This is really the new, corporate Politics, which no one can blame anyone for working with, it’s the way of the world. Some commentators are writing about this, for whether it is a good thing or not remains open to consideration. Probably it isn’t, it tends to not get anything done.Immigration and Brexit, the two elephants in the room. How does a government get the elephant out through the door? First of all, surely, by admitting that the elephant is in the room in the first place.
The legal automaton who dumped the Rwanda Plan within days of assuming his office as Prime Minister (and who did everything he could to discredit and defeat it in opposition) is not going to shift to the Right anytime soon! I predict that immigration will increase on his watch!
“Lord Mandelson, the former secretary of state for business, told a think-tank rally: ‘In 2004, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties.'”
I suspect that Labour gave away the keys back in 2004.
Every party tries to prove they are going to reduce immigration, but then side with treasury ie continued or even more immigration. The Tories increased immigration hugely for right wing reasons – keeping inflation under control and free (labour) markets. It is not on the left-right political continuum anymore. Labour could well reduce immigration by focusing on the things that call for it, eg large numbers of people signed off unable to work.
The more Labour tracks right on immigration, the more it plays into Farage’s hands, why Reform is content to let others do the arguing, whilst it turns its attentions to “Waitrose women” voters.
Always the undocumented are the scapegoats and will bear the brunt of violence like we saw in Southport this summer, so Labour’s ramped-up demonising is extremely ill-advised and downright dangerous.
The point people here and everywhere else conveniently ignore is that undocumented migrants make up barely 7 per cent of your referenced NET inward migration number, where the 93 per cent are overwhelmingly from nation states connected to Britain’s not-so-glorious days of empire!
So why is everyone constantly obsessing about dinghies and traffickers and offshoring asylum claims, it’s obscene and degrading and will lead to even greater loss of life.
These unseemly accusations of Starmer’s ultimately serves only to legitimise populist narratives, look at how that’s been undermining social democracy in one after another European national election, where anti-migrant parties tout slogans of “family, faith, fatherland” or its equivalent. Herbert Kickl’s FPO party and their banner “Fortress Austria” is a perfect example ..