Keir Starmer loves a crackdown. Since the general election last July, knife crime, shoplifting, non-doms, benefit fraud — and now immigration — have all been the subject of that ubiquitous No. 10 term. Following Reform UK’s strong showing in the local elections this month, the Prime Minister has turned his ire on the immigration system, condemning the legacy of the previous government one final time before the political clock runs out on that line of attack.

“In 2023, under the previous government, inward migration exploded to over a million people a year,” Starmer wrote in the foreword to Labour’s new immigration white paper, warning of the “incalculable” damage done to the country. “Britain became a one-nation experiment in open borders.”

The damage, of course, is incalculable because Labour has no interest in calculating it. For all the bellicose rhetoric of the last few days, the party seems unconvinced by its own argument. The paper’s tone is less the product of ideology than of electoral necessity — a reaction to Reform’s rise and the longstanding belief that immigration is the issue where the gulf between a government’s promises and delivery is greatest.

Labour has long struggled to oppose immigration with conviction. In 2015, the party emblazoned the slogan “Controls on Immigration” on a mug, but few were persuaded by Ed Miliband’s pledge to “bear down” on arrivals by restricting benefits. The Brexit referendum the following year split the political class, placing most Labour MPs and members on the side that defended a more open system. The new generation of Labour MPs elected in 2024 were shaped not just by 14 years in Opposition, but also by time as councillors and professionals in sectors where the virtues of immigration were far more visible than the difficulties.

Starmer himself was once part of that cohort. His original political identity was defined by opposition to Brexit. “We welcome migrants, we don’t scapegoat them,” he declared during his Labour leadership campaign in 2020. “So we have to make the case for the benefits of migration, for the benefits of free movement.”

The open question, however, is whether Labour MPs will follow Starmer down this new anti-immigration path. The restrictionist wing of the party, Blue Labour, has attracted media interest, but it remains a marginal force within the party. Figures like Dan Carden — a former Corbynite shadow minister — could hardly be further from the Starmer project. The more consequential faction is the broad soft-Left bloc: MPs whose political instincts remain firmly pro-immigration, and who continue to believe that it is not a problem to be managed but a prerequisite for economic growth and social care provision.

The breaking point will come when the Government’s harsh policy clashes with the real imperatives in sectors reliant on immigration. Labour’s soft-Left MPs — many of whom spent years working in local government or the public sector — view the crisis in social care not as a question of rhetoric but of staffing. For them, the Government’s decision to end overseas recruitment for care workers lands less as a political gesture than as a practical blow to already overstretched services. The new white paper argues that Britain must “move away from an over-reliance on migration”, but offers no clear plan for how care homes will be staffed in the future. The industry depends on migrant labour not by accident but by economic design: low pay, long hours and chronic underfunding have made these jobs unattractive to domestic workers.

Labour MPs fear that closing the door to overseas workers, without first addressing the conditions that made the sector reliant on them, will only deepen the very crises that drove them into politics. Torn between their convictions, their loyalty to the Prime Minister, and their reading of the Reform threat, many Labour MPs now face a difficult decision: how far will they go along with a strategy in which they do not truly believe?

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Angus Reilly is Assistant Editor at Engelsberg Ideas. He is writing a book about Henry Kissinger in the Second World War and a biography of David Owen.

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