How Keir Starmer could shape a credible message on immigration

Buenos dias. Violent riots that were expected in dozens of towns and cities across the UK last night failed to materialize. Instead, tens of thousands of peaceful anti-racist protesters showed up and packed the streets. More on how Keir Starmer could navigate the broad discussion about immigration below.

After Rwanda

Keir Starmer was right to say unequivocally that the vast majority of the disorder since July 30 was not “protest”, but instead violent disorder and thuggery that was littered with racially aggravated attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. He was also right to prioritize cracking down on the perpetrators with hundreds of arrests and rapid convictions.

It is in no way an attempt to legitimize violence and hooliganism to say that there are many reasons why people in many parts of the country feel disfranchised, including the cost of living crisis that has driven up prices of food and housing, and difficulties accessing basic public services.

Meanwhile, as my colleagues William Wallis and Lucy Fisher wrote yesterday, senior politicians argue that the “demonisation” of asylum seekers, immigrants and the legal profession by Conservative ministers and far-right figures has helped stoke and normalize anti-immigrant feeling.

Successive governments have also made a dizzying number of promises on immigration and then presided over the precise opposite. Brexit was touted as a means to regain control of Britain’s borders, with Theresa May pledging to reduce net migration to the UK to the “tens of thousands” in 2017, but was followed by a surge in non-EU migration to the UK to fill skills gaps in the labor market. More recently, Rishi Sunak allowed “stopping the boats” of migrants coming across the English channel to become the central test of his premiership and doubled down on a promise to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Neither objective came even close to reality.

As a result, for many people, Britain’s ills have been distilled into this one image: the migrant. A YouGov poll published yesterday found that for the first time since 2016 immigration was the “top issue” facing the country, selected by more than half of people surveyed.

In spite of this backdrop, the new Labor government has an opportunity to craft a narrative around migration that eschews the simple binaries of “bad” and “good” that have become so commonplace.

Labour’s policies for dealing with the asylum system are broadly quite sound. The party has vowed to hire 1,000 more caseworkers to process the backlog of more than 80,000 asylum cases in the system, and to end the use of costly asylum hotels that have become a lightning rod for people in deprived communities. If it can achieve this over the next 18 months, Labor will significantly reduce the cost of the asylum system and the salience of small boat crossings, without necessarily having to make large reductions in the number of people coming to the UK to claim asylum.

On legal migration, Labor is likely to reap the rewards of forces that preceded its time in power. Net migration reached record highs in 2022 of 764,000 and stayed vastly above historical records at 685,000 last year. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory estimates that these figures will begin to drop dramatically and continue to fall over the course of the next five years to about 350,000 by 2030, driven by more people leaving Britain, reductions in the number of overseas students, and some of the reforms to visa routes introduced by Sunak, including higher salary thresholds for skilled works and banning care workers from bringing in over dependents. Just like the Bank of England’s interest rate cut this month, Starmer will be able to claim things are moving in a more sustainable direction without having to put in any of the legwork.

The Labor administration is right to say that we should not be endlessly plugging skills gaps in the same sectors by pulling on the same levers of overseas labor. But so too should it be honest with the public about what state funding constraints mean for the need for migration in vital sectors of the economy in the coming years. In Britain today, the biggest drivers of net migration to the UK are professions funded by the state, such as nurses and care workers. There are more than 130,000 vacancies in the care sector, which will not be filled overnight even if Rachel Reeves finds enough Treasury headroom to offer workers in the sector an increase in pay. Meanwhile, overseas students play a crucial role in supporting the UK’s struggling university sector, which is also one of Britain’s most successful exports.

While Starmer has no doubt made the right move by refusing to set a target for net migration (see above on failed promises), he should use the breathing space afforded by the trajectory of falling net migration to articulate a credible and hopeful message about the role Migration will play in supporting the British economy at a time when the government’s fiscal belt is fastened tight.

Now try this

I’m heading to Norfolk tomorrow to go to Houghton Hall. But not to see the Palladian architecture or the sculpted gardens built for Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, in the 1720s. But instead for Britain’s only 24-hour dance music festival, which was curiously graced last year by the presence of Kate Middleton.

I hope that as I too sit by a lake, spicy margarita in hand, any thought of violent riots and immigration will be a long way from my mind.

Top stories today

• ‘Not operating in the national interest’ | Keir Starmer’s government has signaled it wants to curb overseas hiring by technology and engineering companies after he asked his independent advisers on migration to review the sectors’ reliance on skilled worker visas.

• Hard choices | Britain’s Ministry of Defense has asked all its major industry suppliers to identify opportunities for immediate budget cuts, in the latest sign of the financial pressures facing Labour.

• In sickness and in health | The UK economy emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic in a stronger state than previously thought, according to revised data that gives more weight to the healthcare and energy sectors.

• ‘Birth gap’ | Women are not having the number of children they would like because of the “motherhood penalty” that makes them worse off and less secure in their jobs, research by Onward and Mumsnet suggests. Oliver Wright writes up the findings in the Times.