Two decades ago, Britain chose the liberal path on immigration. “Let’s be good Europeans,” the Foreign Office’s senior representative told Tony Blair as Britain became one of just three EU countries not to impose transitional controls on eastern European migration (the others were Ireland and Sweden). “Yes, we shouldn’t worry about numbers,” Blair replied. But it was the numbers that would haunt his successors. A Home Office-commissioned study projected that only 5,000-13,000 migrants would arrive per year. Yet by the end of the decade, 1.5 million eastern Europeans had done so, representing the then single biggest inflow of people in the UK’s history.
The consequences of this have reverberated through British politics ever since. Nigel Farage’s ascent to the mainstream began here – UKIP finished ahead of Labour in the 2009 European elections, a harbinger of Reform’s future performance. Successive prime ministers have sought to contain Farage’s rise. Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers”. David Cameron vowed to reduce net migration to “tens of thousands” a year. Rishi Sunak insisted that he would “stop the boats”. All were left humiliated. Will this time be different?
Keir Starmer is not a man renowned for his rhetoric; his preference is to avoid grandiose declarations in favour of practical action. While Margaret Thatcher said “economics is the method; the object is to change the soul”, Starmer used his first speech as prime minister to pledge to lead a government “unburdened by doctrine” (something that critics contend has left his administration rudderless).
But on immigration, Starmer has entered new linguistic territory. “He has accused the last Conservative government of running a “one-nation experiment in open borders” – declaring that it did “incalculable” damage – and vowed to “shut down the lab”. Without stronger migration rules, he warned, Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers”. Foes such as the former Labour MP Zarah Sultana likened Starmer’s rhetoric to that of Enoch Powell (who used his “Rivers of Blood” speech to argue that the white British population had “found themselves made strangers in their own country”).
This was overwrought – the late Tory cabinet minister’s address was a cry for racial exclusivity; Starmer’s was a celebration of diversity (migrants, he said, “make a massive contribution today. You will never hear me denigrate that.”). His warning of “an island of strangers” owes less to Powell than it does to Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book Bowling Alone charted the increasing atomisation of US society as community bonds frayed (“it’s a wider social contract argument”, one No 10 source said). Powell did not want an integrated, multi-ethnic society of the kind that Starmer spoke of – he believed that such a thing was impossible.
Yet the parameters of debate have shifted. In 2015, there was a furore when Ed Miliband’s Labour sold red mugs with the words “controls on immigration” on them. A decade on – with limited dissent – Starmer has put immigration control at the heart of his government’s programme. Labour believes that the last five years have been defined by “massive institutional failures to uphold trust and a sense of fairness” (as one Starmer ally puts it). Few on the left would disagree with this: “partygate” and the Truss debacle eroded what little faith some voters had left in politics. But No 10 believes that high immigration is an equal part of this unravelling.
The Blair wave – the eastern European migration of the mid-2000s – is well understood. But only now is the “Boriswave”, a term popularised in late 2024, receiving due attention. There are reasons why this policy transformation was initially missed. Owing to its decision to end European free movement, the Johnson government was sometimes described as the most anti-immigration in history – a reputation that the Tory shapeshifter at times embraced. But he had already overseen a radical liberalisation of the system: reducing the salary threshold from £30,000 to £25,600 (or £20,480 for “new entrants” to the labour market). Unlike the previous policy, there was no cap placed on the number of skilled migrant workers, and employers were no longer required to demonstrate that vacancies could not be filled by domestic workers. Net migration, mostly from outside the EU – the opposite of the Blair wave – rose to a record high of 906,000 in the year to June 2023. This is the “open borders” experiment Starmer now excoriates.
His intervention was framed by some as a break with Labour’s history but, in many respects, it marks a reaffirmation of it. Starmer’s government, with its emphasis on technology-driven growth and revival of public ownership, has been likened to Harold Wilson’s. Here is another echo: in 1965, ten months after entering office, Wilson published an immigration white paper reducing “vouchers” (or visas) for Commonwealth citizens from 20,800 a year to 8,500 and restricting them to skilled workers. “Without integration, limitation is inexcusable; without limitation, integration is impossible,” said future deputy leader Roy Hattersley.
Labour’s pre-Blairite “old right”, embodied by Wilson’s successor Jim Callaghan, consistently championed immigration control. Yvette Cooper, who used a 2013 speech to denounce the “free market liberal approach” promoting “wide open borders”, stands in this tradition. Starmer’s key aides, such as No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and director of strategy Paul Ovenden, believe that border control isn’t an optional extra for a social-democratic party but fundamental to it.
The white paper duly includes a ban on new social care worker visas, an increase in the normal automatic settlement period from five years to ten years, and a 32 per cent rise in the immigration skills charge on employers. Some Labour MPs, emulating the rhetoric of the Thatcherite right, speak of this as necessary “shock therapy”. Ministers have already increased the minimum wage to £12.21 an hour, raised employers’ National Insurance to 15 per cent and announced the biggest expansion of workers’ rights since the 1970s. This, Labour asserts, will help forge the high-wage, high-skill economy that Johnson spoke of but could never deliver (free-marketeers riposte that traditional Labour measures will have a traditional outcome: higher unemployment).
But though the rhetoric is of transformation, the reality may be less dramatic. The measures announced by Starmer are projected to reduce net migration by 100,000 per year – but that would still leave the total at around 300,000 by 2029. Labour sceptics warn that Starmer’s rhetoric could prove too tough for liberal voters while his actions prove too soft for conservative ones. Others fear, as one senior MP warns, that Labour is “pushing hard on legal migration and not hard enough on boats and hotels”. Migrant channel crossings so far this year have exceeded 10,000 (an increase of 40 per cent). Accommodation for asylum seekers, under contracts signed by the last Conservative government, is now projected to cost £15.3bn. For Reform, to borrow Starmer’s language, such trends are of perhaps “incalculable” political benefit.
Every prime minister who followed Blair has failed to answer the immigration question – their words thrown back at them by a gleeful Farage. Keir Starmer’s great gamble is that he can defy this fraught history.
[See more: The EU is not what you think it is]
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This article appears in the 14 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why George Osborne still runs Britain