Starmer Has No Intention of Cutting Immigration

There was a lot to like in Sir Keir’s speech on immigration last week. He vowed to “take back control” and end the “one nation experiment in open borders”. Even his signature delivery – redolent of an AI-generated hologram with a nasty cold – couldn’t detract from the rare veracity of his message. Forces are pulling our country apart, he said, and we do “need to reduce immigration, significantly”, or “risk becoming an island of strangers”. These are self-evident truths, as was his demand that immigrants integrate and learn English.

But his proposals failed to match the ambition of his rhetoric. Indeed, when one considers the detail of the white paper he unveiled, one inevitably concludes that the forces pulling our country apart, making us into “an island of strangers”, will continue largely unabated. Okay, there were some welcome measures – stricter English language requirements, extending the time it takes for migrants to acquire settled status from five years to 10, linking access to visas to investment in homegrown skills, and ending the recruitment of care workers from abroad – but these amount to small beer compared to the gargantuan scale of the problem.

Net migration into the UK was over 900,000 in 2023 and 700,000 in 2024 (the highest numbers on record), but by her own admission, when interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, conceded that, after implementation – which won’t happen for at least 18 months – the measures will only reduce net migration by a piffling 50,000 people. Fifty thousand! After all that lofty jawing? And right on cue, as if to underline the emptiness of Sir Keir’s bombast, we discovered that another 600 illegal migrants landed in Dover during his speech, taking the number to 12,000 since January, a 40% increase on the same period last year.

The inadequacy of these proposals should come as no surprise. Bloviating speeches can only do so much to pull the wool over the eyes of a sceptical ‘once-bitten-twice-shy’ public that, according to recent polls, views immigration as an even more important issue than the cost-of-living crisis – that’s why so many voted for Reform in the local elections. 85% of Brits want to see net migration slashed to below 100,000 a year. They won’t be fooled by the insincere utterings of an insincere fraud like Sir Keir Starmer.

This is a man who has voted against every immigration reform bill since 2015. He’s never come across a foreign criminal he hasn’t wanted to rescue from deportation. Once more, during his party’s leadership election campaign, he pledged to make the case for freedom of movement, despite the fact that it’s opposed by the vast majority of Brits. The man’s an incorrigible open-borders fanatic, always has been. He once argued that all border controls are racist. But he now wants us to believe he’s changed his mind. Actually, more to the point, he wants us to buy the myth that he’s always advocated strong borders. It’s a Labour value, apparently – or is that laughably? Pull the other one, Sir Keir. You’re an irredeemable globalist and your words ring hollow, as proved by your actions, both past and present.

Just take this week’s reset deal with the European Union. It includes the so-called Youth Experience Scheme – a euphemism for a measure that will allow, once finalised, young Europeans from across the continent to live and work in the UK, along with, if the EU gets its way (again), their dependents. It’s incredible. Sir Keir intends to reduce immigration by inviting an as yet unspecified number of European immigrants into the UK, via a scheme with a name designed to conceal its true nature.

Let’s be honest, any Prime Minister even remotely serious about controlling Britain’s borders would have made the success of negotiations dependent upon France taking back the illegal migrants that leave their shores for Blighty on an almost daily basis.

And what about the Indian trade agreement? This will encourage companies in the UK to hire Indian workers at the expense of their British competitors. That’s right, workers from a country with the largest population on the planet will be exempted from NICs, along with their employers, for up to three years, incentivising companies to hire them. The result? An increase in immigration from India.

These aren’t the actions of a Prime Minister committed to reducing immigration; they are the actions of a Prime Minister who, at the very least, intends to maintain its current levels. And his speech? That was the speech of an underhand salesman desperate to conceal his true intentions.

Joe Baron is the pseudonym of a secondary school teacher.