“Take back control!” Keir Starmer declared, co-opting Dominic Cummings’ most famous slogan. What a time to be alive. Press had been summoned to Downing Street early on a Monday morning to be told that Labour has had enough of foreigners.
And who can blame the prime minister? If you had to deal with both Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron on a daily basis, you’d probably take a pretty dim view of Abroad too. But it turns out that it’s not just people Over There he has his doubts about: it’s people Over Here, too. Specifically, people Over Here who used to be Over There.
This was not simply about people crossing the Channel in small boats, but about the far higher numbers who had come entirely legally, on visas. They too were a bad thing, it turns out.
Starmer’s statement must be one of the most hostile to immigration made by a British prime minister in decades. Tony Blair thought immigration was a good thing. Gordon Brown knew this wasn’t a popular position but couldn’t quite work out what to do about it. It’s true that Conservative leaders all talked about getting immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. But fearful of looking a bit, y’know, Farage-y, they always felt obliged to open with throat-clearing remarks about what wonderful chaps immigrants were, with their funny ways and interesting foodstuffs.
Starmer wasn’t having any of that soft nonsense. The “broken system” of immigration of recent years was an “experiment” that had collapsed into “chaos”. It had been “a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country.”
How had the Tories, who spent so much time talking about immigration, let it rise so much?
The language was deliberate. At the start of the government’s white paper on immigration, published on Monday morning, the prime minister talked about immigration having “exploded” at the start of the decade. “The damage this has done to our country is incalculable,” he wrote. It had opened a “wound” in public trust.
(Is it really “incalculable”? Economists spend quite a lot of time thinking about these things, and there are plenty of numbers floating around about the costs and benefits of immigration. So “incalculable” here may mean “we calculated it, but we didn’t like the answer”.)
How had the Tories, who spent so much time talking about immigration, let it rise so much? “It was a choice,” the prime minister went on, as if it was impossible to imagine that Boris Johnson might have set a policy in train without really understanding it.
Was Starmer’s hostility to people with accents in any way related to the triumph of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party at the local elections? Shame on you for even reading that sentence! “On a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics,” the prime minister said, “about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party.” The very idea that Starmer’s Number 10 might have ever indulged in something as base and corrupt as targeting voters! What a thought! Though to be fair, I believed the bit about him not having any strategy.
So why was he doing this? “Because it is what I believe in,” he said, somehow managing not to add “It says here”. If that’s true then you have to wonder how he ended up as leader of the Labour Party, because it’s certainly not what the average Labour activist talks about.
When it came to the incalculable damage that had been done by all these people who came — entirely legally — to work in our care homes and hospitals, and to study at great expense in our universities, the prime minister felt that it was too obvious to explain. “Nations depend on rule — fair rules,” he said. Had the people who came here on visas issued by the government broken those rules? Starmer didn’t say, but without the rules, he went on, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. What did that even mean? The biggest group of strangers to the average Englishman is All The Other Englishmen. That’s why people keep publishing books explaining us to each other.
It was time for questions, and Christopher Hope of GB News, the broadcast wing of Reform, had his hand up. “Why on earth should GB News viewers think — ” Hope stopped for a moment, an example of a Freudian pause — “you’re gonna succeed?” Those viewers, Hope said, wanted him to set a target. “The Tories at least did that,” he said, before adding, poignantly, “though they failed.”
At the risk of being a person trying to make this all about politics, Starmer is trying to stop the march of Farage by talking a lot about the stuff Farage talks about. Prime Ministers have tried this before. Did it work for those prime ministers? No, it never does. Prime ministers somehow delude themselves into thinking it might. But, Starmer appears to be hoping, it might work for him.
