When future historians look back at this lamentable Labour government, they will identify it as the administration that presided over the obliteration of a British identity, culture and way of life that has existed on these islands for centuries.
For the greatest disaster of Sir Keir Starmer’s first year in office has been his catastrophic failure to curb mass uncontrolled immigration.
Not that there was any sign of the upcoming dereliction of duty during last year’s General Election campaign, of course.
Rewind to July 2024 and Slippery Starmer was saying whatever it took to gain power. He promised to ‘smash the gangs’ who controlled the migrant flows across the Channel, create a new Border Security Command with hundreds of staff and deal with asylum claims ‘swiftly, firmly and fairly’.
None of these fine words have been converted into effective action and, in the intervening 12 months, Starmer and his government have effectively imposed an open-border policy on the British people – a policy no one ever voted for.
And in the process they have lied to, misled and gaslit the British people over one of the most important issues we face as a nation.
American economist Thomas Sowell once said: ‘Immigration laws are the only laws that are ever discussed in terms of how to help people break them.’
And this is exactly what Starmer has been doing – prioritising the migrants who enter our country illegally over the decent, hardworking majority who uphold and respect our laws.
Under Labour, the number of small boat crossings has rocketed to unprecedented levels. As the Mail revealed yesterday, on Monday alone 879 migrants crossed the Channel, taking the number of asylum seekers entering our country in the first six months of the year to a record high. On Tuesday it was another 440.
Since Labour took office almost exactly a year ago, almost 50,000 migrants – mainly young men from Islamic nations – have entered Britain illegally, taking the total since 2018 to more than 170,000.
The greatest disaster of Sir Keir Starmer ’s first year in office has been his catastrophic failure to curb mass uncontrolled immigration, writes Matt Goodwin
Starmer and his government have effectively imposed an open-border policy on the British people, according to Matt Goodwin
It’s a spiralling crisis that is costing the British taxpayer £7-10 billion every year – money that should be going to support our collapsing National Health Service, our pensioners and our family farms, not people breaking our laws.
This crisis was obviously going to get worse the very moment Starmer and his hapless Cabinet decided to dump the Rwanda plan, decriminalise illegal migration, expand the use of hotels and private accommodation for illegal migrants and allow thousands more migrants to apply for asylum once they reached Britain.
By doing this, all Starmer did was provide a major incentive for other would-be migrants to head for the UK. He might as well have put a big, flashing, neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover that read: ‘Come on in – we will let you stay.’
So far this year, the number of small boat crossings is up nearly 50 per cent on the same point last year, and up nearly 80 per cent on the same point in 2023.
Starmer’s failure to deport these law-breakers, compounded by his decision to house many of them in the very heart of our communities, shows how he views the British people with contempt.
Spooked by his dismal polling, he made a speech in May saying that Britain was turning into an ‘island of strangers’ – only to repudiate it in a sympathetic interivew in the Left-wing Observer newspaper last weekend.
It gets worse. This Labour government is using taxpayers’ money to pay private contractors such as Serco, who offer private landlords more favourable terms to take in illegal migrants and asylum-seekers than they offer British residents.
Starmer’s Britain, in other words, is a place where the people’s own money is being used to outbid them in the private housing market. How is this right? How is this fair?
And while Starmer continues to claim he is ‘smashing the gangs’ – repeating the phrase like some kind of malfunctioning robot – even his own UK border chief came out last week and said his strategy is not working.
Far from smashing the gangs, he is effectively decriminalising them, by removing all deterrents to human trafficking and offering hotel accommodation and welfare benefits to illegal migrants.
This has left the UK taxpayer with another bill estimated to total £15 billion over the next decade.
The only things Starmer has ‘smashed’ this past year is the security of our borders, the integrity of our territory and the right of the law-abiding majority to live in a secure country where they feel safe. And these unlawful arrivals are the ones we know about. It’s likely there are thousands more coming in below the radar – hidden in lorries, using fake travel documents etc.
Meanwhile, Starmer and his incompetent ministers are doing little or nothing to deport the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who are already living and working among us.
Equally absurd is watching Starmer say he wants to invest in defence and bolster Britain’s security – while at the very same time refusing to tackle a border crisis that is bringing any number of people with criminal and sexual convictions into our country.
The broadcaster GB News this week reported that one of the people smugglers it had been tracking online was sharing Isis videos – identifiable as posted by the Islamist terror group by the black flag in the top right corner of the screen – including one that showed people being shot in the head at point-blank range.
It is Starmer’s rudderless and shambolic leadership, more than any foreign regime, that currently poses the most pressing threat to our security.
And it isn’t only what’s happening at the borders.
Across the country, not just in the big and visibly failing cities such as London, Birmingham and Leicester, but in the smaller market towns and seaside villages, Britain is now rapidly becoming unrecognisable.
Millions of Brits now, understandably, feel like strangers in their own country.
And illegal migration is not the only issue. The rate of net legal migration into the country remains at historically unsurpassed levels.
Hundreds of thousands of low-skill, low-wage migrants, more than 80 per cent of whom originate from outside Europe, from nations that have radically different cultures and ways of life.
Nearly 1 million people migrated to the UK between April 2024 and March 2025 – about 20 times more than the number on small boats.
And while the numbers have since fallen a little, to nearly half a million net each year, this is still equivalent to adding a city the size of Nottingham to the UK every year. It is sheer madness.
The inevitable effect of all this has been to further drive up rents. Home ownership in London, for instance, is down 20 per cent since the 1990s – while rents are up 85 per cent over the past 15 years.
Meanwhile, nearly half of all social housing in the capital has gone to households headed by people who were not born in Britain, while in some parts of Birmingham, Leicester and elsewhere, the figure is much higher.
How can we ever hope to solve the housing crisis when we are only building around 200,000 homes annually in England and Wales but adding close to half a million people to the population every year?
Millions of Brits now, understandably, feel like strangers in their own country. And illegal migration is not the only issue, writes Matt Goodwin. The rate of net legal migration into the country remains at historically unsurpassed levels
The Mail revealed yesterday that Monday alone 879 migrants crossed the Channel, taking the number of asylum seekers entering our country in the first six months of the year to a record high
And how can we ever hope to save Britain’s collapsing public services, from the National Health Service to policing, while adding exponentially to the burden they carry?
Look too at how, over the last year, the more insidious effects of this very deliberate policy of mass immigration and a visibly failing policy of multiculturalism have bubbled to the surface, becoming unavoidable to millions.
One recent study found that foreign nationals are 3.5 times more likely than British citizens to be arrested for sexual crimes.
Indeed, perhaps the most shocking consequence of the mass immigration experiment was the return of the grooming gangs scandal, which was forced back onto the agenda in January when much of the ruling class (especially Labour MPs who depend on Muslim votes) was hoping it had gone away for good.
In upwards of 50 towns and cities, organised gangs of Muslim men of Pakistani origin have been systemically raping, sexually assaulting and abusing white working-class girls precisely because they are white and non-Muslim.
And what did Starmer do when people demanded to know the truth and get justice for those poor girls by asking for a national inquiry?
He accused them of ‘jumping on a far-Right bandwagon’, while one Labour MP, Lucy Powell, went on a flagship BBC show to deride people who talked about it as ‘blowing a little trumpet’ and engaging in ‘dog whistle’ politics.
Has there ever been a Prime Minister and a government so out of touch with the concerns of millions of ordinary people? Labour’s decision to expand the range of Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incidents’ has been another example of how this government has zero respect for free speech and is deeply intolerant of anybody who questions their pro-immigration, open-border fanaticism.
The reality is that mass immigration is changing our country for the worse, not the better.
The influx of people with minimal skills, coming here to earn very low wages, is taking more out of the economy than it’s putting in. That’s not just my view; it’s also an admission from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which has shown how Labour’s immigration policy makes little if any economic sense.
One year into a Labour government, it has become inescapably obvious that mass uncontrolled immigration is dividing our country and undermining our economy and our security.
And Labour doesn’t have the first clue what to do about it.
Yes, Starmer released a White Paper on immigration yesterday, which promised to ‘tighten up’ every part of the immigration system, with English tests for all visa applicants and an extended route to settled status, from five to ten years, for example.
But the Prime Minister refused to put a number on the overall level of net migration he wants to see and his track record suggests nothing will change.
Policy statements on immigration have all too often proved to have been cynical exercises in giving the impression that progress is being made when nothing could be further from the truth.
After overturning the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, which Starmer labelled a ‘desperate gimmick’, the Prime Minister claimed to be a fan of ‘return hubs’, where illegal migrants could be processed.
First he signalled an interest in sending people to foreign detention centres in Albania.
But, in a moment of toe-curling embarrassment, the Albanian prime minister Edi Rama revealed, during a joint press conference with Starmer in May, that his country had no intention of even talking about this idea until a similar plan has been hashed out with Italy.
For her part, Yvette Cooper, who – as Home Secretary – is the Cabinet minister responsible for controlling our borders, says she wants to reform Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which governs the rights to family and private life.
But that’s not going to make a blind bit of difference without prior reform of the much more significant Article 3, the safeguard against torture and inhuman treatment, which is routinely manipulated and abused by asylum seekers.
During its first year in power, Labour has overseen an extreme experiment in immigration, one that is already a dangerous failure.
A nation that cannot control its own borders is not a serious nation, and a country that cannot keep its own people safe will simply not survive.
But this is precisely what Britain, our home, has been reduced to under Starmer’s watch.
Matt Goodwin is Senior Visiting Fellow at Buckingham University and writes at mattgoodwin.org
