How Keir Starmer risks repeat of Tories' catastrophe mistake about immigration

Under successive Conservative Prime Ministers, the UK Government talked a tough game on immigration. For many who voted for Brexit, leaving the European Union was supposed to solve the ‘immigration problem’ and yet, to their dismay, it actually got ‘worse’, hitting new record heights.

This was partly explained by an influx of refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s crackdown on human rights in Hong Kong. However, the government also allowed large numbers of people to move to the UK to work.

According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, more than 312,000 work visas were issued to non-EU citizens last year, compared to just 137,000 in 2019, before the Covid pandemic hit.

This was a sensible, pragmatic policy to enable employers to fill vacancies, help stave off recession, and shore up the government’s tax revenues. The ‘problem’ was that it was completely at odds with Conservative rhetoric.

The party of government was waging a campaign against its own policy. It proved hugely successful, convincing millions of voters. However, unfortunately, they were persuaded to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a new party which barely had to campaign at all because their work had been done for them.

Keir Starmer met Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome to talk about her approach to illegal migration (Picture: Phil Noble/WPA pool/Getty Images) | Getty Images

By meeting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – the populist leader of the ‘Brothers of Italy’, a party with neo-fascist roots – to talk about her approach to migration, Keir Starmer is burnishing his credentials on the immigration issue, continuing his predecessors’ tough stance.

The people-traffickers must indeed be stopped, but the conflation of illegal immigration with legal migration – the former a tiny fraction of the latter – and the failure to explain why large-scale immigration has been necessary helped bring about the Conservatives’ worst election result in 200 years.

If Starmer continues the same approach, Labour risks the same fate or, if it actually does choke off a much-needed supply of workers, causing serious damage to the economy. Both scenarios would create a fertile environment for the further rise of Reform. And if the UK’s current troubles continue, the last thing it needs is a government with little to offer but empty populism.