‘Keir Starmer’s Painful Immigration Speech Is a Direct Affront to the Diagnosis He Was Voted in On’

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Clickbait media has apparently made it impossible to pass intelligent migration policy. Keir Starmer’s white paper announcement was a cry for help from the “structured, evidence-led” policymaking he promised voters, traces of which were fighting to be heard over cantankerous layers of clickbait.

His colleague, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, blamed the media, and told me she feared Starmer was walking her party into a second Windrush Scandal.

“When politicians act in this way, it is to play up to the media. But language has consequences, our policy decisions have consequences… We said we learned lessons from the Windrush Scandal and that’s exactly the type of thing that’s happening.”

Before I trained as a journalist, I worked in the asylum sector and in border-lying camps, and I am often amazed at the ignorance of editors and reporters when it comes to basic immigration law, terminology, and context. I also do not believe that accuracy is their priority.

When I interviewed Ribeiro-Addy, who represents my own Windrush-heavy constituency of Clapham and Brixton, for Middle East Eye, she remarked that we seemed different from other media, because we refused to echo Starmer’s binary distinction between the ‘legal immigration’ he spoke about this week, and the asylum routes he’ll be speaking on in the Summer.

We were simply reflecting what is accurate. Entering countries without papers in order to claim asylum is a right enshrined in human rights law to which the UK is signatory. The late Conservative Government did indeed pass a bill to criminalise it (leaving judges to wrestle between national and international law), but our media had been using the term “illegal migrants” without a single grounding in legal reality for years.

The first thing that struck me watching Starmer’s speech was the cavernous disconnect between what he told us the policies are designed to do, and what they will achieve if enacted. Measuring policies against their stated intention is a simple, unbiased metric of accountability that I wish more media had used to analyse his white paper.

It was, frankly, painful watching Starmer sing of his own integrity, while dancing an ‘Us vs. Them’ pantomime at the pulpit. He paired bombastic, nationalistic rhetoric with the insistent logic of bettering UK labour conditions and promoting integration. He denigrated foreign residents as “strangers”, and then immediately leapt to his own defence, saying: “People who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I’m doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.”

Let’s assess that.

Labour’s 2024 General Election Manifesto did indeed pledge to reduce net ‘legal’ migration (p.42). It justified this aim specifically and exclusively using traditional Labour values: “to upskill workers and improve working conditions in the UK.”

Echoes of this were heard in Starmer’s speech. He acknowledged that “pulling up the drawbridge” would “hurt the pay packets of working people,” but reasoned, “we do have to ask why parts of the economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour, rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community”. Among his proposed policies are a few that catered to this goal.

Yet the Prime Minister went on: “Every area of the immigration system, work, family and study, will be tightened up.” Rather like the ‘Take Back Control’ slogan Starmer repeated a full five times during his press conference, this comes from a different playbook to the one he was voted in on.

Starmer justified this with the noble goal of prioritising integration: “When people come to our country, they should also commit to integration, to learning our language, and our system should actively distinguish between those that do and those that don’t.”

What I need explaining to me is how doubling the number of years it takes to get citizenship fosters integration. The UK’s citizenship test assesses people’s grasp of British language and customs, so what sense is there in setting that back — and ripping naturalisation away from people who have waited years to reach the threshold?

“How can you integrate in a country which tells you all the time that you are not part of this country?” Douna Haj Ahmed, a Syrian woman who has lived here for seven years asked me, in response to this week’s news.

Another promise Starmer has repeatedly pledged is to ‘Stop the Boats’. But if Starmer had worked a day in the asylum system, he would understand that slashing family reunification routes — which are currently the only way refugee women and children can come to the UK safely — will most likely lead to more and more women and children joining their male relatives in those boats.

And finally, the biggest break of all.

This week, Starmer stood in front of his nation and blamed net migration for a “squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country”. It was a direct affront to the diagnosis he was voted in on. To those of us sick of seeing migrants scapegoated for underfunded, unreformed and corrupt social infrastructure, Labour’s manifesto was notable for excluding immigration from its five top missions.

In the short year since this Government came into power, they have rolled back on the ‘first steps’ they pledged to take, from recruiting teachers and community police officers to eradicating the non-dom tax regime.

Meanwhile, they have made migrants the scapegoats once again.

Dear Starmer, this is not the “evidence-led” policymaking you promised. This is cheap, short-termist, headline politics. You can gaslight the people actually listening to your proposals for “trying to make this all about politics,” but we have no interest in doing that.

Outside of Westminster, the politics you play by is the policy we live by. People have been uprooted by your words — and they are not “strangers” to us. They are neighbours, colleagues, and friends. Make us choose, and it’s them over you.

Join the conversation at Media Storm’s live show in London on Tuesday 20 May – tickets here.