Internal Labour rows about how the party speaks about immigration are, of course, nothing new. Ahead of the 2015 election, a campaigning red mug with the slogan “Controls on immigration”,was condemnedby veteran MP Diane Abbott as “shameful”.
This week,similar criticismhas greeted a government paper on reducing net migration numbers – less about the proposed policies than the language used by Keir Starmer to introduce them.
Most notable was the prime minister’s warning at a Downing Street press conference that without a change to migration policy the UK risked becoming“an island of strangers”, a near-echo of words used by Enoch Powell in his infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech.
No 10 has defended this language while rejecting the idea that it even accidentally referenced Powell, stressing Starmer’s other remarks hailing the many benefits over the decades brought by immigration.
Privately, officials say the similarity was purely coincidental, but they havedefendedthe overall tone, arguing – as one No 10 source put it – that “Tough words and tough policy are required to solve tough problems.”
However, what is tough to one person can seem overly provocative, even inflammatory, to another. And a series ofLabourfigures have spoken out about the rhetoric, with others expressing worry in private.
This was not, an official said, an intended part of the government’s attempts to combat even more robust language and policies on immigration from theConservativesand Reform UK: “Sometimes you know that people will kick off, but those comments weren’t written for that aim. They are what Keir believes, and has been saying for some time.”
Politically, there are two intertwined imperatives. The first is the way that in the last few years, migration has returned to its former place at or near the centre of UK political discourse.
A long-termYouGov poll trackerof which subjects voters believe are most important shows that about the time of the “Controls on immigration” mug, immigration was at the very top. But after Brexit it plummeted.
This changed, in part due toNigel Faragehighlighting the parallel subject of unofficial Channel crossings, but also as official numbers soared, with net migration topping 900,000 in the year to mid-2023. The line on the YouGov chart has duly crept up again.
The second part of this political equation follows directly: immigration has usually been seen as home turf for the Conservatives. If a Labour government can claim for example, that it has halved migration since taking power, that is a powerful slogan to take into the next election.
It is, however, not just the Conservatives that Labour need to think about. Reform UK have based much of their message around greatly curbing migration, with rhetoric to match, for exampleFarage’s tweeton Monday listing that day’s total of small boat arrivals with the message: “How many are Iranian terrorists?”
It is in this context that Starmer’s language needs to be considered. There has been something of a rhetorical arms race, with Conservatives like Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman discussing it in sometimes apocalyptic, Reform-like terms.
On the other flank of Farage’s party, his former parliamentary colleague, Rupert Lowe,is demandingDonald Trump-style mass deportation programmes, andtalking about“large groups of foreign men loitering in town centres, intimidating locals, especially women”.
Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, said all this could in part explain Farage’s language: “What Jenrick says now is like what Farage was saying 10 years ago. So there does seem to be a bit of a ratchet going on.
“The government seem to be watching and reacting to the language that the people they’re trying to compete with are using, and seeking to make the case in the same terms, without thinking about the consequences of it.”
These consequences, Ford said, could include not just disquiet from Labour MPs and supporters, but also the fact that polling shows that vehemently anti-immigration views are relatively niche – and that those who hold them are unlikely to support Labour.
“In some ways they’re shouting in an empty pub, when all the customers moved down to the Farage Arms months ago,” Ford said.