To turn Keir Starmer, of all people, into someone who can credibly promise to bring immigration down is an act of perverse genius by the Tory party that is unparalleled in the modern political era. Presented with an open goal, the Labour leader has today stuck the ball in the net by telling readers of the Sun that his changed party will prove it is back in the service of working people by ‘not just talking about sky-high migration but acting on it’.
A pledge by Starmer to cut the immigration levels seen under the Tories has got past Labour’s activist base on the grounds of being pitched as a policy to protect British workers from being undercut by unscrupulous bosses. A party that increased net migration five-fold when it last got into power by ‘sending out search parties’ for immigrants (in the words of Peter Mandelson) and is now led by a man who once declared that all immigration laws have a ‘racist undercurrent’, has just outflanked the Conservative party to the right.
Playing with fire doesn’t even begin to describe the social recklessness and electoral stupidity of what the Tories have done
This is not down to any great skill on behalf of Starmer but because the Tories have made it so incredibly easy for him. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak took Labour’s quintupling of net immigration and then – amazingly – trebled it again via a deliberate further easing of entry requirements. Instead of continuing to cause angst in its post-Blair range of 200,000 to a quarter of a million, the net annual inflow of migrants now ranges between 600,000 and three-quarters of a million. Playing with fire doesn’t even begin to describe the social recklessness and electoral stupidity of what the Tories have done – in total defiance of repeated manifesto promises to bring numbers down.
Those of us who were active long-term Brexit campaigners (unlike the Johnny-come-lately Tory MPs like Johnson and Sunak who we dragooned into our ranks in the run-up to the referendum) always understood the electoral power of mass migration scepticism among the British public. More than anything, it was Tony Blair’s failure to impose transitional controls on migration that even the European Commission felt were advisable following the enlargement of the EU that opened up the road to Brexit. Only Blair and his fellow denizens of the Westminster village were surprised by the scale of the influx of cheap Eastern European labour that led to downward pressure on wages for working class jobs.
On the election trail in 2010, Gordon Brown got skewered by a question from salt-of-the-earth working class voter Mrs Gillian Duffy that was as much tautological as rhetorical: ‘All these Eastern Europeans – where are they flocking from?’ Afterwards he was caught referring to her as ‘a bigoted woman’, effectively sacking a huge chunk of Labour’s electoral coalition in the process.
So it was immigration policy more than any other issue that rendered Labour unelectable and caused a majority of the British voting public to think the unthinkable with regard to EU membership. It is, then, oddly fitting that it is immigration policy which is bringing Labour back to power – although not, in truth, their own, but that of the Conservatives.
Both Johnson and Sunak convinced themselves of the lie that the public was not really bothered about legal immigration volumes so long as the system provided theoretical control. But it was not just ‘taking back control’ that people voted for in the referendum, it was also a fervent desire to use that control to bring numbers back down to 20th century levels.
Perhaps they could have got away with holding steady immigration numbers at 250,000 or so – failing to reduce numbers as David Cameron and Theresa May failed before them, in a relatively unspectacular way. Nobody would think Starmer capable of reducing net migration below that or even being willing to try. More likely the public could have been whipped into a frenzy of worry that he’d take things far higher.
Instead, our Tory premiers of this parliamentary term opted for trebles all round in the last-chance saloon. Today, in response to Starmer’s pledge, a Conservative spokesman told the BBC: ‘No one believes Keir Starmer is serious about tackling immigration.’
On the contrary, a Labour leader who finds the very idea of border control distasteful is indeed likely to be able to reduce immigration from the stratospheric levels that the Tories have brought us. The Conservative party has wilfully thrown away an electoral superpower that it never properly understood. Samson went to the barber for a number one buzz cut, Achilles stabbed his own tendon and the goose that laid the golden eggs has just been cooked.
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