Despite the Conservatives having broken all their promises to bring down immigration volumes for 13 years in a row, conventional wisdom has it that migration is Labour’s Achilles’ heel. However high the Tories have allowed immigration to go, the public has generally suspected that Labour would push it still higher. Brits have long memories about the party ‘sending out the search parties’ for immigrants under Tony Blair – nor have they forgotten Gordon Brown’s dumbfounded reaction to the migration scepticism of the redoubtable Gillian Duffy on the campaign trail in 2010.
This week is likely to see the collapse of that popular prejudice – not because of anything active that Labour has done to allay it, but because of the mind-boggling levels to which the Tories have raised immigration.
Net migration in the year to December 2022 is expected to be confirmed at above 700,000, some 200,000 more than the record 504,000 that was recorded in the year to June 2022 – and seven times the upper target launched by David Cameron before the 2010 election of net migration being limited to the ‘tens of thousands’.
The Tories have left him a wide and undefended front to attack
Boris Johnson abandoned that ambition when he was prime minister. Now Rishi Sunak has effectively ditched Johnson’s 2019 manifesto target of getting the overall annual volume of net immigration down below the 214,000 it was running at when the last election was fought. Sunak will only say he wants to get legal immigration down from the astronomic level he has inherited from Johnson, while continuing to insist it is illegal immigration that bothers the public far more.
From Labour’s point of view, the temptation must be just to stand back and let the Conservatives face the full wrath of their core voters and of the Red Wall voters who defected to them in 2019. Labour strategists believe that their best approach is to lie low on immigration while continually trying to get other issues, such as the cost-of-living crisis and the state of the NHS, to the top of the political agenda.
This approach is, in turn, convenient for them, given that the idea has taken root among party activists that sounding sceptical about immigration is a contemptible and racist ‘dog whistle’ designed to appeal to the baser instincts of the British public. No doubt this belief is fundamentally shared by Keir Starmer himself.
But if he is as ruthlessly focused on winning the next election as he is reputed to be, then he will surely have noticed that the Conservative record on the issue is so astonishingly lax that it has opened up an easy outflanking opportunity for him. Starmer really doesn’t have to do much or to tread too heavily on any Labour activist’s toes in order to make the point that the Tories have lost control of immigration.
All he has to do on Thursday, when the figures come out, is to say the balance is wrong when it comes to importing workers versus training up homegrown ones. The thought will then surely occur to millions of floating voters that perhaps Labour would be less addicted to immigration than the Conservatives, rather than more.
Starmer need not get involved in the fundamental ways in which mass immigration is undermining social cohesion or the quality of life in Britain at all. He does not need to set his own restrictive target for immigration. And Starmer need not even mention the central role mass immigration has surely played in the housing costs crisis that is, in turn, undermining the living standards of so many youngish people.
The Tories have left him a wide and undefended front to attack. All he need do to make a mark is to accuse the government of not being willing to invest in equipping British workers with the skills they need to take up employment opportunities that exist and to have allowed immigration to go too high as a result.
Like an exhausted boxer with his hands down and leading with his chin, the Tories must simply hope that Labour and Starmer choose not to land the knockout blow: that they will conclude they are so far ahead on points that they can afford to stay in their comfort zone of not engaging with public concerns about high immigration. They are, after all, 15 points clear in the polls and will have observed a growing mood of defeatism on the Tory benches in the Commons.
The last Labour leader to have won a parliamentary majority from opposition, Tony Blair, would certainly have landed the blow – repeatedly. The one before that – Starmer’s professed hero Harold Wilson – would surely have been pragmatic enough to do the same.
If Starmer chooses to throw the punch and it connects then long-term sceptics about his basic electability, such as I am, will need to reassess him. But if he lets the Tories off the hook on Thursday then we won’t.
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