At yesterday Prime Minister’s Questions, for the second week running, Kemi Badenoch was savaged by Sir Keir Starmer on the key issue of immigration.
A fortnight ago, eye-watering ONS figures showed that we have added a city the size of Birmingham to our population, with most of the influx coming from outside Europe. This is down to Boris Johnson’s significant relaxation of visa requirements as part of his points-based ‘Global Britain’ immigration system. The numbers are so large they have even prompted Keir Starmer to deride the Tories for their ‘one-nation open border experiment’.
When Starmer made this barb at last week’s PMQs Badenoch lamely attempted to deflect – ‘I am not asking about immigration’. This week, apparently stung, she went on the attack. She asked Starmer why, if he claims to be so serious about this issue, immigration wasn’t a priority in his ‘relaunch’ last week. Ordinarily, this would be a decent question: the conspicuous absence of immigration does suggest Starmer’s rhetoric on the issue is more guff than substance. But given the Tories’ record – and Badenoch’s own personal lobbying for the removal of annual limits on student and work visas – the Tory leader was fighting with a rubber sword.
Starmer is often accused of being tone-deaf, but Kemi Badenoch was even more wooden than the Labour leader yesterday. Try as she might to nail him as an open-borders enthusiast, her criticisms of Starmer apply far more to her own party.
He will never take responsibility’, fumed the leader of a party that issued over a million visas in a year. ‘The numbers are going up under his watch’, she warned. Far from ‘smashing the gangs’, it was Starmer’s own reputation on immigration that had been ‘smashed’, she said.
She even tried to interrogate Starmer about his ‘record’ on the issue, citing a letter against deporting foreign offenders he had signed while in opposition. This is not nothing – but it pales in comparison to deliberately throwing open the border while in government, a policy Badenoch supported as business secretary.
Indeed, Badenoch’s ill-judged attempts to claim the moral high ground only lent further weight to Starmer’s final response (always the incumbent’s advantage in this contest). ‘Not a sliver of remorse, not a hint of contrition’, he intoned. Starmer’s holier-than-thou smarm rubs me up the wrong way, but I have to admit that he has a point here. ‘It is like the arsonist complaining about the people who are trying to put the fire out’, he concluded. Well, is he wrong?
It’s a real possibility that the Tories’ reputation on immigration, especially with Reform going from strength to strength, is now a flush that can’t be unbusted. Certainly, it will take more than a cursory apology and some sniping about Starmer’s scrapping the Rwanda plan for Badenoch to prove her party has changed.
If she were properly serious about this issue, Badenoch could look at another looming crisis. Soon the latest wave of migrants – the ‘Tory flood’, as Patrick O’Flynn puts it – are set to receive a permanent right to remain in the country. With only around 17 per cent of recent arrivals coming on work visas, and the vast majority of low-wage migrants not being net contributors to the state, the fiscal cost of this influx, while difficult to calculate exactly, is likely to be enormous. Add to that the pressure a large population rise puts on public services, housing, and social cohesion. After five years of work here these new arrivals will become eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – and the lifetime of support from the British state this entails, including the ability to bring dependents. In other words, we are at risk of allowing this extraordinary mistake to become close to irreversible.
Yet as those with their eye on the ball have been pointing out, this doesn’t have to happen. It’s within the gift of the Home Secretary to suspend automatic Indefinite Leave to Remain, or to increase the residence requirement for eligibility to, say, ten or 20 years. Such a move would be far from unheard of: the ILR rules have been amended before under a Labour government, with Charles Clarke extending the waiting period from four years to five back in 2006. Nor would it necessarily be difficult – Sam Bidwell of the Adam Smith Institute has already drafted ‘oven-ready’ legislation. As Bidwell set out recently on the Daily Sceptic podcast, the rationale for this flows directly from Starmer’s own comments: ‘The prime minister says the past three years of migration were a mistake. If I make a mistake and I’m in a position to reverse it, I do.’
If Badenoch has found herself well and truly on the back foot here, why not seize the initiative and call on Starmer to suspend ILR for the latest wave? Of course, admitting how wrong her party was to open the floodgates would entail eating a ‘complete concrete mixer full of humble pie’, to quote The Thick of It’s Malcom Tucker. But it would be the best thing for the country. And ultimately, it would also serve to put the Conservatives back on the right side of this issue. Indeed, were they to table a motion to this effect at the next Opposition Day debate, Starmer would be forced to decide to whip for or against, and face either upsetting his base or looking like a wet to voters.
As it is, however, Badenoch doesn’t sound like someone who cares about immigration. She sounds like someone who’s trying to look like she cares about immigration. At the last election, the Tories found themselves out on their ear because conservative-minded voters had heard 14 years of this guff while immigration only ever went up. They are not going to forget it in a hurry.
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