Early on Monday morning, Keir Starmer stood at the lectern, looked grimly into the camera, and vowed to cut net migration figures.
This was tough-love Starmer. An immigration system, he argued, had to be based on rules and fairness, on people’s willingness to fulfil obligations and to integrate, or to risk the UK becoming an ‘island of strangers’ should these changes not be made.[1] Placing his government’s latest white paper within his long-professed strategy of Change, he pre-emptively denied claims that these policy changes were a cynical political move. But coming in the wake of local election results which saw the radical-right Reform Party under Nigel Farage hoover up council seats at Labour’s expense, how can this shift on immigration be seen as anything other than a ploy to stave off a potential ‘Turquoise Tsunami‘ at the next General Election?
With his characteristic modesty and grace, Farage spent the weekend crowing in a double-page spread in Saturday’s Daily Mail of exactly what a Reform government would do should they come into power in 2029. Immigration was one issue on his list of priorities; he vowed to freeze it entirely and to appoint a Minister for Deportations, sometime between binning Net Zero and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ‘Restoring control over the immigration system’ white paper issued by Starmer’s government sets out plans to ‘tighten’ current legal immigration routes following years of rising net migration rates. 2023 saw the highest figure so far: 906,000, followed by 728,000 in 2024.[2] The Conservatives’ frequent pledges since 2010 to bring these numbers below the round figure of 100,000 never seemingly worked. In his speech Starmer presented this rapid increase as evidence of the last government’s experiment on open borders gone wrong. It is up to him, he says grimly, to take back control of immigration.
Though long in the planning, there are some striking similarities in this white paper to what Farage proposed in his Daily Mail essay. Farage’s disdain for ‘family reunions and “student over-stayers”‘ are areas that these new reforms will target. As set out in the white paper, there will be tougher Suitability Rules on family visa routes ‘to ensure people are of the good character we expect’ and to introduce new English language requirements for dependents.[3] Graduates will now only be able to remain in the UK for 18 months after their studies have finished and universities may face a levy on their income from international students.[4] Cash-strapped universities already struggling to recruit international students in an already hostile environment can now look forward to the Autumn Budget where plans for this levy will be set out. The fall-out from other changes, such as the ending of the visa route for healthcare workers, also remain to be seen, but they will be vast.
It is Starmer’s concern for integration, something that pervaded his speech and his foreword to the white paper, however, more so than the proposed changes, which most strikingly mirrors the concerns Farage set out in his bid to become Prime Minister: for British ‘values’ seen to be under threat in the face of globalisation. Starmer may soon come to regret his emotive use of an ‘island of strangers’, a term that others have quickly compared to Enoch Powell’s rhetoric on immigrants. Though not as overtly racial as Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech or as violent in its imagery, an ‘island of strangers’ nevertheless conjures up an idea of segregation and otherness. In an interview with Sky News on Tuesday, Robert Jenrick, shadow justice secretary, agreed with Starmer’s use of language, pointing to examples of towns with rapidly changing populations. This concern about a segregated society, of communities living separately in fear and suspicion of each other, pervades much of modern discourse on immigration in the UK.
As Policy Factory has highlighted elsewhere, policy issues are rarely problems of the now but often come with historical underpinnings which have shaped policy direction over time. Though the UK prides itself on having a long history of migration, from the Celts and Romans to the Commonwealth migrants of the 1950s, it also has a long history of nativism, xenophobia and suspicion of outsiders. Though the history of modern immigration policy in the UK is frequently traced to the 1905 Aliens Act, we can see many earlier attempts at policing and restricting migrant populations, often directed by public concerns, in the medieval period. Though English kings may have welcomed Italian merchants as useful creditors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (bankrupting the odd few in the process), these merchants, alongside other migrant groups, were frequent targets of anti-alien legislation and mob violence from distrustful locals. Medieval kings varied in their approaches to these groups, from welcoming to hostile to back again depending on how vocal their subjects were on the matter.
When it comes to immigration policy, political leaders, be they Edward III or Keir Starmer, have always had to find ways to balance the scales between the potential economic benefits that immigration brings with public opinion (although this was not as important a factor for Edward III as it is for Starmer). And immigration is a major public concern for the voting public. A YouGov poll from March 2025 rated immigration as the second-highest issue facing the UK right now, second only to the economy. Though voters may have had varying reasons to choose Reform at the polling booths recently, immigration stands at the top of Reform UK’s manifesto and is the issue they are most vocal about. Whatever the situation may be in 2029, immigration will undoubtedly remain a key voting issue, one that is already concerning Labour.
In taking a tougher, public stance on immigration, Starmer is only repeating the strategies of previous governments in the face of a potential opponent at the polls. Labour’s stricter rhetoric on immigration in the final years of New Labour was tied to growing rhetoric from the Conservative opposition, just as David Cameron’s pledge for an EU referendum in 2015 was intended as a means of staving off Nigel Farage and UKIP. And look just how well that panned out…
Will this move to a strong anti-immigration stance work for Starmer? Most probably not. It did not work for previous governments, and it will only sow further division in a Parliamentary Labour Party already beset by doubts over the direction the government is going in.
Looking towards voters who may be leaning rightwards, the headlines for traditional right-wing media like the Daily Mail, Daily Express and the Telegraph suggest they are unimpressed and don’t expect anything to see change. Looking online, commentors on some of the BBC articles on the subject were likewise sceptical, pointing out where Starmer has backtracked on promises before and arguing for more intervention on illegal immigration rather than legal.
Immigration policy, like any policy that primarily deals with people, their identity and the economy, will always be fraught with division. The process should be governed by clear rules with safe routes for entry to prevent desperate people risking their lives with a fair legal framework in place to support applications. Behind every statistic is a real person. There is no denying that. What should be denied is any blatant attempt by the Prime Minister to use immigration as a shallow means of stirring up populist feeling in a short-sighted bid to attract voters. It won’t work and frankly it risks only leaving a bad taste in the mouth of those who do continue to vote for Labour.
Cover image credit: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street, shared on Flickr under a CC BY-NC-ND license
[1] GOV UK, ‘ PM remarks at Immigration White Paper press conference: 12 May 2025’: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025. Last accessed 14 May 2025.
[2] BBC News, ‘How many people come to work and study in the UK?’ (12 May 2025): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89pvd58nd3o. Last accessed 14 May 2025.
[3] UK Government, Home Office, Restoring control over the immigration system: white paper (2025), pp. 43, 67, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6821f334ced319d02c906103/restoring-control-over-the-immigration-system-web-optimised.pdf.
[4] UK Government, Home Office, Restoring control, p. 39.
