Labour’s immigration rhetoric has outflanked the Tories

Kemi Badenoch has no response – and her MPs are restless.

Photo by Justin Tallis - WPA Pool/Getty Images

It’s been eight and a half years since Theresa May declared “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” sign-posting the Conservatives’ post-Brexit priority of bringing down immigration levels.

Echoes of the citizens of nowhere rhetoric – turbocharged – could be heard in yesterday’s warning by Keir Starmer that “we risk becoming an island of strangers”, as the Prime Minister gave a speech setting out the measures his government will take to tackle a challenge that consumed and ultimately destroyed the Tories for almost a decade.

That line has proved a lightning rod for criticism of the government’s immigration agenda on the left. Zarah Sultana, who sits as an independent MP after having the Labour whip suspended in July, accused Starmer of “imitating Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech”. Left-wing Labour backbencher Nadia Whittome called it “shameful and dangerous”, arguing it “mimics the scaremongering of the far-right”. It seems perhaps Starmer (or his team) did not realise quite how that phrase would sound when the speech was written.

Yet less bombastically antagonistic but even more hardline is Starmer’s introduction to the White Paper itself. “Britain became a one-nation experiment in open borders” under the last government, he writes, repeating a line he has often used when taunting the Tories. But he continues: “The damage this has done to our country is incalculable.”

It’s hard to imagine Rishi Sunak categorising the damage done to the UK by uncontrolled immigration as “incalculable”. The furthest the former PM would go was to say legal immigration was “too high” and to try to change the subject to illegal immigration and Rwanda.

This is mostly down to the awkward fact that the huge spike in net migration – surpassing 900,000 in 2023 – came as a direct result of the post-Brexit shakeup overseen by a Conservative Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s points-based system was supposed to “take back control” of immigration. And arguably it did so, in the sense that the hundreds of thousands of visas granted as a result of that system were controlled by government departments. But if control was meant to also lead to a reduction in numbers, the points-based system was one of the most dramatic Conservative failures. Hence Sunak’s impossible tightrope, trying to signal how “tough” he was on the issue without drawing too much attention to the mess (in Tory terms) his predecessor had made.

This quandary does not just apply to rhetoric. When Sunak tried to show he was grasping the (legal) immigration nettle, the measures he came up with included increasing the earnings threshold for people wanting to bring overseas spouses and dependents to Britain and restricting the graduate visa route (which didn’t actually happen). Though they caused outrage at the time, they are nothing in comparison to the sweeping measures in this week’s 76-page White Paper – most notably, scrapping the social care visa altogether and increasing the length of time someone has to be a resident in Britain to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR).

The latter is particularly interesting. Back in February, I wrote about the Tories “Boriswave” problem: the panic in Conservative circles that the influx of people who came to the UK as a result of Johnson’s points-based system would soon be eligible for ILR. Kemi Badenoch’s first (and so far only) policy since becoming leader was to double residency requirements from five to ten years – as Starmer is now doing. Back then, Tories around Badenoch were hopeful that, if Labour adopted these changes too, they could use it as proof that, while Nigel Farage and Reform were wasting time grandstanding, they were getting actual results in opposition. But at the same time, other Conservative factions were grumbling about the missed opportunity. Why was Badenoch proposing something in opposition which Sunak could have enacted in government?

Those grumbles are back again this week. While the public message from the Conservative camp is that the government’s measures don’t go far enough and that Starmer should commit to a hard cap on numbers, and potentially leaving the ECHR as well, privately a sense of “why didn’t we do this?” prevails. It’s not the first time Tories – both MPs relegated to opposition and those who lost their seats in July – have been caught off-guard by the Labour government’s willingness to take radical steps many Conservatives supported but considered impossible when they were in office. See also: scrapping NHS England and slashing the international aid budget to bolster defence spending.

There are, of course, good reasons the Tories were wary on immigration reform that have nothing to do with Boris Johnson – and more to do with the Treasury. The measures Starmer announced on Monday come with trade-offs: in terms of economic stability (already the CBI and other business groups are issuing dire warnings, especially regarding universities), public services (it’s difficult to see how the care sector can survive the changes without significantly increasing salaries, which risks bankrupting local councils), and political capital. The tough truth is that public perception on immigration levels doesn’t necessarily match up with reality. Immigration is already down by a third in 2024, but you wouldn’t know it from the intel coming out of focus groups and polls. There is a risk, as I wrote last month, that Starmer walks into the same trap Sunak did of increasing public awareness of something on which the government will never be able to satisfy voters.

But it’s interesting nonetheless to watch a Labour government go further than successive Tory ones ever felt able to. Perhaps it’s a matter of desperation, with Labour more afraid of the Farage threat than the costs of what it’s proposing. Perhaps Starmer has underestimated the potential backlash, as May failed to realise how the “citizens of nowhere” line would haunt her premiership. Regardless, there is willingness to be radical – some might even say reckless – in this government that was lacking from the last. And the Tories know it.

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