‘Why Labour Together is wrong to back Australia-style immigration targets’

The influence of the Labour Together think-tank on the Starmer project cannot be overstated. Starmer’s current Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney is the former director of Labour Together. The director that followed him, Josh Simons, was parachuted into a safe Labour seat ahead of the general election, despite managing to offend refugees, Scotland, and likely the whole maritime profession in one fell swoop back in February. Their current director is one-time future Paymaster General Jonathon Ashworth, and their advisors and affiliates include leading government figures such as Rachel Reeves, Steve Reed and Alan Milburn. 

It is safe to assume then that their new migration policy paper will be significant in shaping the thinking of Starmer’s government around migration moving forward. In fact, its influence was already evident in the Prime Minister’s speech after the latest round of immigration statistics were released, in which he parroted the Labour Together line that the previous Conservative Government (of Brexit-, Windrush-, hostile environment- and Rwanda- fame) had overseen an ‘open borders experiment’. 

This should concern anybody who has read the Labour Together paper on migration. For those who haven’t, in a nutshell, it endorses an Australian-style national migration plan to cut numbers in line with specific targets (where have we heard that one before?), the establishment of in-year relocation between visa routes (think sophisticated ‘Go Home’ vans), and an emergency break to halt numbers if targets are on course to be missed (deemed ‘neither novel nor effective’ by an LSE study). Yikes. They argue this would be popular with voters, own the migration debate in parliament and bring down numbers. 

Here’s why Labour Together have got this one wrong.

‘Farage-flavoured approach’

Firstly, the policies themselves won’t work. The Australian Government’s own advisors on their targets-based migration system, the consultancy KPMG, think it is causing long-term damage to the economy.

This Farage-favoured approach was the post-Brexit promise of many Leave campaigners and is not far off what the last Government would claim they were doing. But we saw what impact that had on migration numbers.

These policies, on their own terms, fail and the report published by the Institute for Government today highlights the implications of that failure.

READ MORE: ‘Too often activists want to sidestep immigration’

‘Prescription first, selective polling later’

Secondly, they won’t be popular with voters. Labour Together’s arguments that voters of all parties want to see migration numbers cut appear to be based wholly on their own polling conducted in July. Despite the hostile rhetoric that dominates our media landscape, the trends are that public attitudes towards migration are softening, with the numbers of people viewing immigration negatively falling to 32 percent in the last British Election Studies survey.

This feels like a case of policy prescription first, and selective polling later to demonstrate support. If Labour Together were serious about recommending a migration policy that’s a vote winner, they’d endorse lifting the ban on the right to work for people seeking asylum, a policy recommended by the Institute for Government in their new asylum report, which enjoys 81 percent public approval according to YouGov.

Pursuing the adulation of the Daily Mail with machismo talk of ‘smashing’ gangs, ‘cracking down’ on migration and ‘rounding up’ people for deportation is not only a betrayal of core Labour values, it is a signal to progressive voters that Labour is not their home. Sunak and Braverman et al have just learned the hard way what happens when you cosplay as Farage-lite, with the scale of the Tory defeat being largely down to the number of seats they lost on their left flank to the Liberal Democrats, not their right. Labour would do well to not make the same mistake.

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‘Tantamount to playing with fire’

Finally, this approach is dangerous – not just electorally, but genuinely dangerous for our communities. Actively encouraging the Labour government to lean into the anti-migrant policies and rhetoric employed by the populist far-right across Europe is tantamount to playing with fire.

Despite the short memories of the political classes, just this summer across the country we saw our streets literally on fire when racist rioters tried to burn down hotels with sanctuary seekers trapped inside. Damaging community cohesion and eroding public safety is a heavy cost for the country to bear so Labour can enjoy some back-slapping op-eds in The Daily Telegraph for being tough on migrants.

Labour Together have got it wrong on migration. Their directions are not the route map to sunlit electoral uplands nor the ownership of the migration debate for Labour. They are the road to a ruinous breakdown of community cohesion and the house of cards that is the progressive electoral coalition that brought Labour to power in the first place. 

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