Keeping Trumpism out of Britain

Mahmood remains convinced that she is doing the right thing to restore public trust. A significant part of this government sees a willingness to upset Labour members as the litmus test for getting it right on immigration. That thinking became particularly associated with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s recently departed chief of staff, the key architect of the PM’s political project. 

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That argument is now under increasing pressure. After 19 months, it is clear that Labour’s political strategy is not working. There is an increasing recognition that a governing party that has lost half of its support can no longer afford to offend its own supporters so gratuitously. 

The strength of the Green Party challenge in the national polls, and this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, is rebalancing the debate about the risks to Labour’s electoral coalition next time around. But working out what that means for the government’s voice and policies is not simple.

“Immigration” is not one issue. It is about small boats and asylum hotels, the overall numbers, and the rules for how migrants become British. It sits at the heart of the most contested issue in British politics: the future of the post-Brexit relationship, whether to rip up the European Convention of Human Rights. Calls for mass deportations and remigration again make immigration central to countering racism, being clear about where the line should lie between debating policy and xenophobic prejudice.

Labour’s first moves in office were pragmatic and liberal: scrapping the eye-wateringly expensive Rwanda scheme and restarting asylum processing as the only way to clear the chaotic inheritance of a backlog including over thirty thousand asylum seekers stuck in hotels, with no realistic prospect of removal. 

It inherited record net migration numbers, which were already set to fall fast. Last Spring’s immigration white paper made modest policy changes, for example ending the health and social care visa, which had been exploited. But it was overshadowed by Starmer’s incendiary language of the “incalculable damage” of high levels of immigration. Only his regret at using the words “island of strangers” will be recalled. 

Net migration has now collapsed and will be at its lowest level for two decades this Autumn, though our political and media debate lags behind and only a sliver of the public has noticed. Labour cannot compete in a simple numbers game, which is now going beyond the elimination of net migration to an ugly debate on remigration and deportation. 

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Having managed numbers down, the government should introduce an annual immigration plan, along the lines of the Treasury budget, to engage the majority, who want to know how pressures on housing and services are managed, while protecting the gains for the NHS, universities and economy.

Outside Reform’s rejectionist core vote, the broad majority want control of asylum to be combined with compassion, not to import the cruelty and chaos of ICE’s rampages across Trump’s America. Zia Yusuf’s mistake is to think that scrapping the ECHR delivers a solution to Channel Crossings, when it really rules out returns to Europe, making control even harder. 

Labour must show that cooperation can deliver what isolation cannot. The UK should offer a significant controlled route for those seeking asylum here, along with an expanded returns guarantee for those who come outside it. Deeper cooperation could include shared patrols to save life in the channel. Expanded safe routes would help those who need protection while closing the smuggling routes.

On settlement and citizenship, it is crucial that the government rethinks its major reforms. Ten years to settlement – which only Switzerland has adopted – should be the ceiling, not the norm. To introduce the longest period of “unsettlement” in any democracy – and applying it to people already here – will harm integration, not promote it. Applying these retrospectively will create an enormous constituency of grievance that will wreck any attempt to rebalance Labour’s voice on immigration.

Labour may be tempted to change its tone of voice more than its policy on immigration. Indeed, the party’s comfort zone may be to try to avoid the topic, so as not to give more oxygen to Reform’s favourite issue. But changing the subject has its limits. If one of Labour’s central arguments in 2029 will be to reject importing Trumpism into Britain, it will need to find a distinct voice to articulate its alternative agenda too.

What Labour needs is not a “lurch to the left” as much as a significant rebalancing of its voice to find an authentic centre-left account of how to manage immigration and integration. A liberal party membership will want to see its values reflected in policy – while remaining mindful of balancing electoral pressures across different constituencies. Controlling immigration fairly means fairness for those who come to Britain and the communities they join – with more confidence to reject rather than echo the authoritarian hard-right politics of Trumpism: remigration and racism.