‘A disconnect between rhetoric and reality’: Can Labour beat the Tories’ record on migration?
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From Labour to the Tories and Reform, all the major UK parties believe the number of people migrating to the UK must come down. But how much longer can Keir Starmer blame high net migration figures on the previous government?
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Read time: 5 minutes
In brief…
- Net migration figures in the UK have fallen by 20% but remain “historically high”.
- Labour MP Jake Richards tells The News Agents we need to reframe how we talk about migration and how it can benefit the economy.
- The News Agents say that after successive governments going hard on migration but the issue getting worse, there is a significant disconnect between the political rhetoric and reality.
What’s the story?
You would be hard pressed to enter Westminster on any given day and not hear endless squabbles between different political parties on their opposing views.
But there is one issue on which politicians from across the divide tend to agree - net migration is too high.
The UK’s net migration figures hit more than 900,0000 in the year up to June 2023, a record high.
This has fallen by 20% this year, down to 730,000, figures released by the Office for National statistics on Thursday revealed. But “by any standards, this is still historically high”, Lewis Goodall points out.
From Labour to the Tories and Reform, all still believe the number of people migrating to the UK must come down.
For now, the Labour Party may be able to pin this on 14 years of Tory rule.
But it won’t always be this way. Sooner or later, the government will need to come up with a concrete plan to bring this down.
So how are they going to do it?
What has Labour said?
Keir Starmer said on Thursday 28 November the Tories had been “running an open border experiment”, claiming his government can turn the page.
He announced in a press conference: “It won’t be quick or easy, but we are going to turn things around, not with gimmicks, but with graft – a government that will not rest until the foundations are fixed, borders are secure, and Britain is rebuilt.”
The Migration Advisory Committee is already conducting a review and the government will crack down on areas where employers are over-reliant on foreign workers, he said.
Starmer added that employers who do not cooperate will be banned from hiring foreign labour.
He refused to set a cap on net migration, but said he does want to significantly reduce the numbers.
Speaking on an episode of The News Agents, Labour MP Jake Richards says that we need to reframe how we speak about immigration, moving it away from a simply numbers-based discussion.
“We talk about immigration all the time in the political bubble. There's this great myth that we don't talk about immigration but it's all we've spoken about the last 20 years.
“It's how we talk about it. Just having a live tracker of immigration isn't particularly helpful. It's about who is coming here? What are they contributing to our economy?
“If we get the economy growing, living standards can go up. Then people do worry less about levels of immigration.”
It’s why, he claims, policies from Rishi Sunak’s government that are in part responsible for the 20% dip in net migration figures may not be worth praising.
This included banning foreign students from bringing dependents with them on their student visas. But this is hitting university funding, which may be damaging for the economy, Richards says.
“We need to be honest about the social contract here. If people want growth, we need good universities. That means we might need immigration for student visas, and that social contract, that give and take, is not being spoken about honestly enough.
“Immigration has been used more than any other issue in the last 25 years of British politics as a political football, and that's not going to change anytime soon.”
The News Agents’ take
Lewis notes that towards the end of the Boris Johnson and Sunak era, “we had a figure in those two years of 1.6 million net migration to the UK”.
He says: “At a time when you have governments which are going hard, hard, hard on the idea of lower migration, we have not seen net migration figures like that in our history before.
“There is a complete disconnect between the rhetoric and what happens”
Jon Sopel says this gap between rhetoric and reality and the disillusionment that people feel with mainstream politics to deliver leaves the “perfect feeding ground for Reform to grow and grow”.
“We saw them get four million votes in the general election, and I bet you Nigel Farage was pumping the air with joy when he heard these figures today.
“This is going to be another recruiting sergeant for Reform to say, well, ‘look just how badly the Tories have failed, and Labour are going to do no better.”
But Emily Maitlis notes: “Farage has never been in power in this country. He's never had to tackle immigration. We've never had to see the choices he'd make.
“He is talking as a populist from the outside who can now aim his guns fairly at the Conservatives and at Labour without ever actually explaining what his solutions are.”
Lewis argues that any solution would have to involve trade-offs.
He says: “This is the problem with this entire debate. It's perfectly legitimate for people to see this figure and be concerned by it because we have got creaking social services, a profound housing crisis and shortage, and industries where wages have been depressed.
“There's no doubt, immigration is not cost free. But as ever, with all of this stuff, it's about trade-offs.”
For instance, Labour could in theory do more on student dependents, but that potentially makes “graduate courses less attractive to international students who are paying top dollar for it”.
Likewise, Rachel Reeves has promised to grow the economy. To help her do so, migrants from engineers and scientists to city traders might migrate. But in turn, they might “want to bring their wife and their kids”, Lewis says.
He adds: “You can see quite rapidly, you run out of room. And you can make those decisions, you can pull those policy levers and we can have a tougher regime, like Japan. But there's no doubt that there are trade-offs.”
Listen in full on The News Agents.
