Has Keir Starmer Gone Far Right on Immigration?

On Monday, Keir Starmer announced new policies aiming to reduce net legal migration and to prevent illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers from appealing Home Office deportation orders.

Starmer posted on X shortly before his press conference that “The Tories ran an immigration system that relied on cheap foreign labour instead of investing in British workers. That betrayal ends now.”

He refers to the three-fold rise in net migration which followed Brexit, after Boris Johnson’s government liberalised immigration laws against the advice of quango the Migration Advisory Committee.

After setting the Skilled Worker visa salary threshold to less than the national median wage (£31,461) and lower than the minimum wage (£17,920) for new entrants, allowing primary recipients to bring limitless dependents, removing the requirement for foreign students to return home after completing their degree, and removing the requirement for British businesses to advertise jobs to British worker first, immigration soared to net 906,000 (gross 1.2 million) by 2023.

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I wrote about what Labour’s immigration white paper contains, and how Starmer is sprinting to occupy an emerging new centre-ground mineswept by the Online Right, this week for Courage Media and Substack.

In Monday’s speech, Starmer told the press,

“Until in 2023, it reached nearly 1 million, which is about the population of Birmingham, our second largest city. That’s not control – it’s chaos.

“And look, they must answer for themselves, but I don’t think you can do something like that by accident. It was a choice. A choice made even as they told you, told the country, they were doing the opposite. A one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control. Well, no more. Today, this [political content redacted] Government is shutting down the lab. The experiment is over. We will deliver what you have asked for – time and again – and we will take back control of our borders.”

But will they?

• Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick alleges these measures will cut net migration by a meagre 50,000.

• Home Office analysis suggests they will reduce the number of foreign workers and students coming to the UK by 98,000 a year.

• Professor Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee, said Labour’s white paper could cause net migration to fall “under 300,000 and probably closer to 250,000 in the next few years”.

• This is despite Home Office insiders’ estimation that net migration will rise from OBR projections of 315,000 – 400,000 per year to 525,000 every year.

And yet, Labour MPs and Peers, like Alf Dubs, are accusing Starmer of using “language which is reminiscent of Powell”.

“I’m unhappy that we have senior politicians who use language which is reminiscent of Powell, and I’m sorry that Keir Starmer used some of the phrases that you’ve just quoted,” Dubs told LBC. “It’s not the sort of person he is, and I don’t think it’s what he actually believes in.”

Dubs is referring to the following quote from Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech:

“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.”

Powell has been proven prescient. Despite being pilloried at the time for quoting his concerned constituents, if anything, Powell underestimated the scale, speed, and consequences of demographic change. He didn’t anticipate, for example, the Pakistani rape gang scandal, and its subsequent and ongoing cover-up by public officials from local councils, to the police, to Parliament.

But Starmer will not be happy about these comparisons, which Nigel Farage has said

“The use of that language was not in Keir Starmer's interest - it's a catastrophic mistake that will divide the left for years to come.”

So why is Keir Starmer doing this?

Labour just lost 187 seats and its sole council in May’s local elections. Reform became the largest party at the local level in England, with two-thirds of voters’ chief concern being immigration. Nigel Farage went from denouncing mass deportations as a “political impossibility” to announcing a week before the local elections that a Reform government would appoint a Minister for Deportations, with the mandate to remove every illegal immigrant in Britain.

It is undeniable that a clean distinction between “Online” and “Real life” no longer exists, and that discourse on X ineluctably shapes politics.

One need only look at the output by the Conservatives’ social media account in recent weeks to gauge the direction of political travel: with CCHQ ignoring strategists screeching about “the danger of chasing populist parties like Reform to the right”, and insisting they, not Farage, are the ones who can credibly conduct mass deportations.

Those derided as the “Online Right” have successfully set the national immigration centre-ground.

The Adam Smith Institute’s Sam Bidwell has long campaigned on reforming ILR rules, and helped the term “Boriswave” enter public consciousness. I called for “Mass deportations” at Reform UK’s annual conference, and was met with applause by members mere days after Nigel Farage had denounced them as a “political impossibility”. In the midst of vociferous backlash among Reform’s supporters to Farage calling mass deportations “a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language” in March, Adam Wren commissioned polling which found that 99% of Reform voters support the removal of every single illegal immigrant in Britain.

Labour’s new English language requirement for visa recipients and dependents follows a long campaign by former-Reform, now independent MP, Rupert Lowe, who procured the cost of public sector translation services through Parliamentary questions.

When he first told “literally a communist” Ash Sarkar on BBC Politics Live, “I don’t care, they should speak English”, and that all translation services should be scrapped, Lowe was met with screeching derision. Now, it’s Labour government policy.

A fortnight ago, Lowe partnered with think-tank the Centre for Migration Control, claiming that deporting 400,000 migrants would save us £10 billion per year. This is almost certainly a conservative under-estimate, as illegal migration cost the taxpayer £14.4 billion in 2023, and Channel crossings have increased by at least 86% since.

Nine MPs have signed Lowe’s motion in Parliament for a national strategy to conduct mass deportations. The emerging consensus is that they all have to go.

Were it not for the arguments advanced by the Online Right, now repeated by Conservative MPs in Parliament, we would not have reached the point where even the socialist Prime Minister, who wrote that a “racist undercurrent … permeates all immigration law”, is now saying Britain is becoming an “island of strangers” thanks to mass immigration.

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