Keir Starmer goes big on immigration
And why it won’t change anything at all
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Today, Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and the Labour government will try to get their arms around the one issue that is now rapidly reshaping British politics —mass immigration.
After Brexit, immigration is quickly becoming the main fault line in the country, separating the forgotten majority that strongly favours restrictions and reductions from the elite minority that only really want to tinker with the status-quo.
It is also reshaping political battle lines. Only last week, because of people’s intense and legitimate concerns about this issue, Nigel Farage and Reform were powered to a stunning victory at the local elections.
And inside the Labour Party, as even Labour MPs tell me, there is now an acceptance that unless they get serious about this issue many more of their traditional heartlands, from north-east England to Wales, could soon fall to Reform.
Which is why, today, Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper will rush around Westminster trying to look like they are doing something about immigration.
There will be a new white paper. There will be a string of new policy changes. And there will, inevitably, be endless talk about ministers taking “bold action”, making “tough decisions”, “getting a grip”, and “regaining control”.
Only, in the end, there will be no such thing. All we will get today, I predict, will be more hot air. There will be talk about trying to bring in fewer low-skilled workers for social care. There will be something about raising the educational requirements for a skilled worker visa. There will be talk about the importance of migrants speaking language. There will be talk about encouraging companies to invest in hiring British workers (while giving them real incentives to hire Indians). Keir Starmer will also mention about slashing 50,000 visas, which sounds big but is only 6% of the latest total. And there will be discussion about trying to better monitor who is coming in and out of Britain.
But that will be it. A little bit of tinkering around the edges here and there. A few minor changes. Nothing more.
There will be no fundamental change to the system. There will be no end to the policy of mass uncontrolled immigration. There will be no cap on the number of migrants. There will be no overhaul of a system that has been failing this country for years. And there will be no end to the status-quo.
All there will be, instead, is just more gaslighting, obfuscating, disillusionment and distrust. More people briefly tuning in to the news and then immediately tuning out because all they will see are the same politicians, the same political parties, who have let them down for years gaslighting them once again —promising change only to deliver more of the same.
And if you want a sense of why they are right to think and feel this way then just look, for example, at three things we have have learned in recent days about this issue, all of which reflect how absurd, outrageous, and unfair the entire system has become —and none of which will be addressed by Labour’s announcements today.
Firstly, for a start, we learn that contrary to what the vast majority of hardworking people in this country want, officials in the Home Office are now working on the assumption that the overall annual rate of net migration into Britain will settle at around the 525,000 mark for the foreseeable future —yes, 525,000. While Keir Starmer today will talk about the need “to bring the numbers down”, government officials are openly acknowledging that the key number will now remain nearly 200,000 higher than it was at the time of the Brexit vote, when politicians similarly promised to “lower the overall numbers”.
That’s more than half a million people, net, coming into the country year in, year out, forever. This is equivalent to adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population every year. A city the size of Edinburgh needing housing. A city the size of Edinburgh needing schools, GPs, and healthcare. A city the size of Edinburgh needing integrating. A city the size of Edinburgh needing roads, transport, and infrastructure. Sorry, but who voted for this? I ask again, who voted for this?
And why the higher figure? Because the so-called expert class —the same ones who told us only a few thousand people would migrate from Europe in 2004— have only just cottoned on to the fact, visible in the data for some time, that migrants from the likes of Afghanistan, Syria, and Nigeria are staying in Britain for a longer period than was previously thought. Huh —who would have thought?
None of this should surprise you. For decades, politicians on both the Left and Right, alongside the civil service and the expert class, have not only over-promised only to under-deliver, but also routinely got their estimates wildly wrong.
Almost every major forecast of immigration numbers in the last twenty years has gone on to be revised upwards because the number-crunchers who like to lecture everybody else about the importance of deferring to experts got it wrong.
So now, in a remarkable turn of events that will shock absolutely nobody, those at the very heart of this system are openly admitting that the era of mass uncontrolled immigration is here to stay —no matter what the tax-paying, voting and democratic citizens of these islands want to see and no matter what Keir Starmer says today.
Second, in recent days we also learned that one of the core arguments for this demographic and cultural change —that “it’s good for the economy”—is falling apart, so much so that even people in government are questioning it. Here’s what …
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