‘The PM’s speech is welcome. Too often activists want to sidestep immigration’

I have become accustomed to reading the annual release of immigration statistics with the accompanying feeling that I am going mad. Sometimes I have made the mistake of following it by going to a Labour party meeting and feeling madder still.

Occasionally though I sense a kindred spirit. We exchange nods, and after a couple of pints acknowledge that perhaps something is not entirely right with the Tory policy of bringing in the equivalent of a Birmingham every year.

So Keir Starmer’s speech today came as a welcome intervention, and a somewhat vindicating one.

Thirteen years ago, Maurice Glasman received a cacophony of hate for his suggestion that immigration was a political question, and not one that should be left to the eternal wisdom of the free market.

READ MORE: Read full transcript as Prime Minister slams Tories’ ‘open borders experiment’

More recently, I have sat in Labour party meetings where immigration has been treated as though it were a mere ‘culture war’ issue which we should sidestep – rather than the basis of our broken economic system. Since Blue Labour’s intervention in 2011, successive Conservative governments elected on pledges to reduce the numbers have quintupled levels of immigration.

The entire architecture surrounding our immigration policy – the legal framework, the capacity of the civil service, the media discourse – belongs to an era that is long past.

Across Europe, social democrats are leading the way in reasserting a world of nation-states and borders. The Prime Minister is right that Britain should take its place in the modern world rather than persisting with the illusions of globalisation and the platitudes of multiculturalism that were falsified decades ago.

Britain, through its long history, has been a country of remarkably low levels of immigration – and frequently, as recently as the late 20th Century, a country of net emigration.

Within this context, flows of refugees were limited and controlled, and so the 1951 Refugee Convention made sense. As did, for example, the policy of indefinite leave to remain after a maximum of five years during a period of sustainable levels of immigration. And it was reasonable for journalists to argue with one another about whether immigration was good for the economy or not, or how best we could increase integration between different communities.

READ MORE: Labour conference 2024: Campaigners’ anger after CLP motion for ‘humane’ immigration policy blocked

But that was then and this is now. Anyone dealing in such abstractions should have to do so with the graph of net immigration from the mid/late-20th century to the present-day hovering above their head, a graph in which you would have to zoom out the y-axis every few years to keep up. The material facts are so extraordinary as to render abstract discussions about immigration’s pros and cons redundant.

Perhaps there were once valid arguments either way about the necessity of importing labour into certain sectors with shortages, but one cannot – as Boris Johnson did the other day – defend mass immigration in this way today. After all, only a very small minority of non-EU migrants who now make up the vast majority of immigrants arrived on a work visa anyway.

What is distinctive about the current wave of immigration is how little it has added to the labour force. And once there were reasonable arguments to be made about the principal problem with housing being supply, but when net immigration over the past 13 years has amounted to the equivalent of the entire Scottish population, ignoring the demand side of the equation is discrediting.

Ending the deliberate policy of mass immigration is a rejection of the free market lie that human beings are fungible units that can pass undifferentiated across the smooth surface of the globe, and it allows us to move beyond the era of asymmetric globalisation (with us in the role of naïve lackies to first China and increasingly the USA’s mercantilist realism).

Immigration has been used to cover up our problems

Instead, by tackling mass immigration, the prime minister can take the first step in a realistic appraisal of Britain’s body politic. Growth, productivity and real wages are stagnant; our infrastructure and public realm are crumbling; and our country has not found a sustainable growth model since the 2008 recession.

For years, the solution to all of our problems has been the same. Immigration, the easiest lever to pull, has permitted the covering up of our growth-per-capita problem by – barely – increasing gross GDP; the covering up of chronic low pay and poor conditions in health and social care by importing cheap labour; and the cover-up of the crisis of higher education by permitting universities to operate as visa mills.

Starmer’s speech is a start and should be welcomed. But the white paper must make it real.

How many times have the British people – who have voted to reduce immigration in every election since 1992 and been ignored each time – had to endure the mealy-mouthed plea of equivocating politicians to ‘listen to legitimate concerns’, before going on to bottle it in response to lobbying from the unlikely coalition of big business and naïve activists, aided by Treasury short-termism?

Badenoch boasted about liberalising visas

This time must be different. There is no need for demonising rhetoric, nor a system that is individually punitive, but instead sober and sensible policy that brings us into closer alignment with our European allies.

That this is a political necessity is clearly understood by the government, and Labour should not rest until every voter knows that Kemi Badenoch boasted about lobbying successfully for liberalising work and student visas. But it is also a material necessity.

Reducing our dependence on mass immigration is a necessary but not sufficient step towards restoring Britain’s prosperity in the era that follows globalisation.

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