A listener asks: will Keir Starmer and the Labour government attempt to change the conversation around immigration, or continue with a more hawkish stance in an attempt to win over reform voters?
Hannah Barnes and George Eaton discuss in our latest listener questions episode.
They also answer questions on how the electorate might change by the next election and whether voting reform will have an impact in future.
We publish a listener question episode every week. Submit your question for the team to answer in a future episode.
Read more: Sadiq Khan “politicians need to be braver on immigration”
Selected transcript
The following is a verbatim transcript taken from key moments in the episode. It has been lightly edited for clarity. Hear the full conversation by listening to the episode in the player at the top of the page, or in your favourite podcast app. Find links to the top podcast players in our guide, how to listen to the New Statesman podcast.
Will Keir Starmer change the conversation on immigration?
George Eaton: Two things define Keir Starmer’s approach on immigration. First, he doesn’t want this to become or remain a culture war with very emotive, charged, polarising language. He wants to engage with compassion and fairness, but he also wants a system that voters see as managed and as working.
Labour wants a grip on illegal migration. They want to control asylum. Keir Starmer has said repeatedly he wants to smash the gangs. He knows he’s going to be held to account on that. I think the hope in Labour is that dealing with some of those issues, particularly grievances around asylum seekers in hotels, might free up the space for a more mature conversation around other forms of migration and where there are gaps in the economy, where can you train up more local workers and where you rely on migrant labour.
Hannah Barnes: And in terms of the number, that net migration figure, is Labour committed to reducing that?
GE: Keir Starmer said he wants lower immigration. On net migration though, he’s in the happy position where it’s projected to fall quite significantly, possibly by hundreds of thousands, because the spike you got was a product of quite an array of factors.
Partly it was liberalization of visas for the rest of the world. Boris Johnson did that. Some describe him as the most pro-immigration prime minister in history. It was refugees from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Afghanistan. It was some people returning to the UK after COVID. Some of these factors are going to drop out of the numbers in the years ahead.
So Labour may be able to tell a story of reducing immigration without actually having to do very much. But I think it’s true to say that in many ways they’ll get a tougher time on immigration than the Conservatives did because the narrative is that past Labour governments did lose control of immigration.
Obviously Brexit was heavily linked to free movement from Eastern Europe that stimulated the rise of UKIP and Nigel Farage. So this is going to be a defining political issue for Labour. In my interview with Sadiq Khan, he calls for politicians to be braver and bolder in combating misinformation and disinformation over immigration. He says that people shouldn’t accept the premise that somehow all our problems are caused by immigration and boats from Calais, and says, when people say, can we please talk about immigration, it’s nonsense because we’ve been talking about it for decades.
HB: But it has been the case, hasn’t it, that if anyone voiced the view that perhaps immigration was too high, they would somehow be branded a racist or a bigot. So just to write that off, that we’ve talked about it for the last 20 years is a bit naughty.
GE: No, I think he says we need a different kind of conversation around immigration. I pressed him. I said, “do you disagree with Keir Starmer’s aim on reducing immigration?”
He actually said he recognizes that you do need to train up more local workers, and also said that high levels of migration can cause pressure on public services if you don’t have the public services there. And he said the last government failed on that because of austerity. This government won’t.
So I think that’s also the test for Labour: can they get public services back to a level where people do feel perhaps more comfortable with high levels of migration? Because the reality people say is with an aging population and with jobs that natives just don’t want to do, the UK is going to have to remain a relatively high migration nation.
Content from our partners
Related
