U.K.’s Labour Takes the Immigration Issue Back

National Review Online

Saturday, May 17, 2025

 

Recent local elections are a reminder that voters in Britain are fed up with mass immigration. And the current Labour government is responding.

 

Repurposing a slogan from the Brexiteers, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that his country would “finally take back control” of its borders — and that he would “close the book on a squalid chapter of our politics, our economy, and our culture.”

 

In a frank and welcome speech from a British political leader, Starmer lambasted the previous Tory government for campaigning on taking control of the border and then doing nothing. “Between 2019 and 2023, even as they were going around our country telling people, with a straight face, they would get immigration down, net migration quadrupled,” Starmer huffed. “Until in 2023, it reached nearly 1 million, which is about the population of Birmingham, our second-largest city. That’s not control — it’s chaos.”

 

In a demonstration that some of the old political taboos erected upon the grave of Enoch Powell have been shattered, a Labour leader said that his country was becoming “an island of strangers.”

 

These are astonishing words from any political leader in the United Kingdom, all the more so because it was Tony Blair’s popular Labour government that opened this very chapter in British history. The nearly 30-year period from 1997 to now will have a primary header in the history books, the Demographic and Social Transformation of England. And for once, these words are, it seems, going to be backed by some action. Perhaps the most important (for now) is that the government plans to retroactively extend the residency requirement for the grant of an Indefinite Leave to Remain (roughly, the equivalent of a green card) from five to ten years, timing designed to limit the extent to which the “Boriswave” surge of migrants can take root. This influx followed poorly thought-through changes to visa rules introduced in 2021 — while Boris Johnson was prime minister. The proposed changes are a welcome and overdue first step.

 

Cambridge historian Robert Tombs wrote that if a nation is a people with a sense of kinship, a political identity, and representative institutions, then England may be able to claim to be the oldest nation on Earth. And yet England (more than Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) has been utterly transformed since 1997, when Tony Blair’s Labour government sought to remake the nation as a “multi-cultural society.” The foreseeable social problems have been ignored for decades by successive Labour and Conservative governments, vindicating G. K. Chesterton’s century-old observation: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.”

 

Politically, Starmer’s speech is risky. At times, it seems the only words missing from it were, “Nigel Farage was right, there I said it.” Critics believe it could transform the next election into a simple test: Whom do you trust more on immigration, a Reform party that was always sincerely opposed, or a chastened Labour Party? It would be a binary choice from which the Tories are, rather notably, missing. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives’ new leader, had recently (and belatedly) proposed doubling the ILR’s residency period, but she has now been outflanked. Starmer can now portray himself as someone who is trying to clean up the worst of the immigration disaster the Tories left behind.

 

Voters worried about immigration may find the choice between Labour and Reform less straightforward than Reform may hope. Starmer’s speech was reportedly crafted by Morgan McSweeney, the notorious Downing Street political Svengali. McSweeney, an Irishman, has seen off a nationalist challenge from the right to Labour before and understands that territory. He’s routinely refocused Labour away from metropolitan lifestyle liberalism, to bread-and-butter issues of government delivering good service. But if Starmer wants to seal the deal with voters tempted by Reform, he will have to do more. In Denmark, the center-left Social Democrats swung behind an immigration policy tougher than Starmer’s and have been rewarded with a sharp drop in support for the populist right. That would be an obvious precedent for Starmer to follow, but he also has to hang on to Labour’s support among Muslim voters, a key constituency he cannot afford to lose. They have started to vote for sectarian alternatives.

 

We praise Starmer guardedly for his courage, while recognizing the cunning behind it. This week’s turnabout should be a lesson to all Tories, and to Republicans here in the United States if they haven’t learned it already. Voters will eventually get what they want. And if they can’t get it from you, someone will make an opportunity of your failure to deliver. We live in an age in which the internet, falling travel fees, and globalization of culture have all dramatically reduced the financial and social costs of emigration. Voters in first-world countries are desperate for a sense of control over their own destinies in this new environment. Starmer’s Labour is now promising exactly that. He has to deliver or he will have finally opened the door to Nigel Farage and the Reform party.