Will Starmer's gamble on immigration backfire? | Ben Sixsmith

KStarmer's condemnation of the Conservatives' immigration policies made a lot of political sense in the short term.

A few days earlier, Kemi Badenoch had released a stilted video full of clichés like “the system is broken”. “All governments” have failed on immigration, she said, because of images of Tony Blair and David Cameron, but not Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak. (If I were David Cameron, whose rate of non-EU immigration was lower than any other prime minister over the past three decades, I would be annoyed.)

Directly attacking the Conservatives' “experience of opening borders”, then their plan to “deliberately liberalize immigration” in the aftermath of Brexit, the Prime Minister placed the blame on his opponents with enthusiastic frankness. For once, Starmer was at the forefront, and you could tell he loved being there.

It will be difficult for Ms Badenoch to answer. Starmer is absolutely right: the Conservatives have driven immigration to unprecedented levels. Badenoch's bland admission that his party had “got it wrong” – contrary to Robert Jenrick's words about “a day of shame for the Conservative Party“- was so inadequate as to be insulting, although perhaps she doesn't feel able to be tougher given that the Conservatives have relaxed immigration laws. celebrated by a certain Kemi Badenoch. (“In particular, I would like to thank the Home Secretary for removing the annual limits on work visas as well as international students,” she told Sajid Javid.)

So there is very little conservatives can say without incriminating themselves. But as much as I am a critic of Ms. BadenochShe was right about one thing: that’s not the case. just a post-Brexit problem, or a Tory problem, but one that has been acute for almost three decades. Promise after promise was made, and promise after promise was made broken. Prime Minister Starmer's attack was politically effective but not entirely honest.

It is Tony Blair, not Boris Johnson, who, in the words from Dr. Erica Consterdine to Labor immigration policy: the creation of the migratory state“transformed the British immigration system from a highly restrictive regime to one of the most extensive in Europe.” Looking a migration graph In the United Kingdom, we can observe a nice upward slope in 1997. This was also a deliberate liberalization plan – perhaps not on the scale of Johnson's, but also radical for the time.

Tony Blair has informed Prime Minister Starmer. He is something of an elder statesman of the “Labour moderates”. What, if anything, does Starmer think the Conservatives did differently to New Labor?

I wonder if the government has opened a box it won't be able to close

As effective as Starmer's attack on the Conservatives is, I wonder if the government has opened a box it cannot close. He obviously cannot ignore the immigration issue, but after condemning his predecessors so enthusiastically, he should now be forced to prove he is different.

He should anyway. Will he? Perhaps not, given the stagnant position of the British press. Perhaps net migration will drop from 700,000 to 650,000 and Times the chroniclers will declare the problem solved. But the annoying cough The “unsustainable” numbers from regime attack dogs like Matthew Stadlen illustrate a growing sense that something must be done, if not because of a problem with the object, then at least because of the scale of the public discontent.

After all, the median British voter think that immigration levels are ten times lower than those net migration levels actually are. It will be difficult to convince these people that hundreds of thousands are a big step in the right direction. (British voters also tend to prefer migration from first world states to migration from countries like India, Pakistan And Nigeria — the biggest beneficiaries of the Conservative immigration boom.)

Meaningful reform will not only require policy adjustments. This will require a healthy shift away from the reliance on cheap migrant labor that Tom Jones calls “human quantitative easing“. It will be necessary, as Luca Watson And Sam Bidwell recommended the rejection of attempts to prop up struggling universities. These are things, it seems to me, that a responsible government should do. But will Labor do it? And will anyone hold them to account?

Prime Minister Starmer should also be forced to explain what he plans to do to overturn Tory policies if he opposes them so fervently. Few people who have emigrated to Britain since 2020 will have obtained the right to apply for an indefinite residence permit. This is not to say that any of them should deserve this right, of course. But they don't to have this right and if Prime Minister Starmer is concerned about the effects of the Conservatives' “open borders experiment”, he has the power to change the means by which this experiment is received. Condemning conservatives, alas, could be a clever way of obscuring one's own responsibility.

Talk about this issue enough and you're bound to be labeled “anti-immigration” (in fact, it's one of the nicest things you end up being called). I guess some people are truly “anti-immigration”. Not me. I am an immigrant and not because I think I am the one glorious exception. But it has sadly become clear that the scale and nature of migration to the UK, over several decades, has created dramatic problems: economic problems, when it comes to less productive demographicscultural problems, when it comes to irreconcilable belief systemsand security issues, when it comes to terrorism and crime.

It is to be hoped that the kind of people who have dismissed such criticism as mindless bigotry will not get away with turning their political expediency into serious, informed concerns.