The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The Left’s support for open borders is a betrayal of Britain – and its own voters
It is astonishing, when you consider recent history, that Sir Keir Starmer thinks he can credibly claim that Labour will bring down immigration – legal or illegal. This is a man who once claimed that a “racist undercurrent … permeates all immigration law”. As a Remainer, he battled to keep free movement. As shadow immigration minister, he fought against changes to Tier 2 visas, including a £35,000 salary cap.
He also fought against attempts to bring down the number of overseas students and the dependants they were bringing to the UK, and called for an amnesty for illegal workers and those who employ them. “Fairness and common sense dictate that we should not support the criminalisation of employees themselves for illegal working,” he declared in 2015.
According to an analysis by the
Henry Jackson Society, between 2015 and 2022, Starmer voted 14 times against a stricter asylum system and abstained 22 times, never voting in favour of stricter measures. Indeed, he actually tried to modify the law to allow Channel migrants who are “afraid to return” to their home countries to be eligible for asylum, and endeavoured to prevent small boats that reach UK waters from being turned back.
Perhaps he thinks that everyone has forgotten all this in the fog of the Tories failing to clamp down on the mass immigration that started with the last Labour government. But the figures are stark for the Tony Blair effect on Britain’s borders. As Karl Williams of the Centre for Policy Studies has set out, in the 25 years up until his election in 1997, cumulative net migration totalled just 68,000. Over the next 25 years,
1998 to 2022, it totalled at least 5.9 million – almost a hundredfold increase.
Against that backdrop, we’ve witnessed the smuggling gangs running rings around the Home Office, as many Left-leaning MPs, and charities, campaigners and lawyers have done everything in their power to keep illegal immigrants in this country, on top of the legal ones. Such is the basketcase that our Border Force has become that we’ve effectively been witnessing an amnesty for those arriving across the Channel by barely inflatable dinghies. Just 155 migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats last year have been removed from the country.
In pledging to scrap the Rwanda scheme should he become prime minister – even if it works – Starmer has laid bare the truth about Labour. Not only does the Opposition clearly believe, deep down, that there’s a cruelty to controlling immigration but, like the Tories, they also remain convinced that it increases economic growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The last quarter of a century was marked by a sclerotic GDP per capita growth rate of just 1.2 per cent. That’s barely half the growth rate of the preceding 50 years.
Even when factoring in an eyewateringly high net migration rate of around 350,000 a year for the next five years, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that growth will “pick up to around 2 per cent in the middle of the decade as slack in the economy is taken up, before falling back towards its assumed trend rate of around 1⅔ per cent by 2028”. It’s hardly a convincing economic argument for keeping our borders wide open.
So forget all this guff about migrant returns deals with the EU and Britain’s shores becoming “hostile territory” for smugglers – even if Labour somehow succeeded in “smashing the smuggling gangs”, it wouldn’t make much difference. Because they’d be following in Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak’s footsteps in doing very little about the hundreds and thousands of migrants we let into the UK every year perfectly legally.
At least the Conservative prime ministers talked about reducing the number down to the “tens of thousands”. Starmer cannot even bring himself to do that. In fact, when the issue of legal immigration is brought up, the Labour leader and his wannabe home secretary Yvette Cooper seem to run for the hills.
Yet just as the Left has been forced to wake up to the reality that a woman cannot have a penis, in large part thanks to Dr Hilary Cass’s sanityrestoring report, so too must Labour accept that (largely unskilled) mass migration has done many of its own voters more harm than good.
The Bank of England has now admitted what many had long suspected: that the housing crisis is being made significantly worse because of uncontrolled immigration.
According to the Bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, higher interest rates were not responsible for record hikes in rental costs, which jumped by 9.2 per cent in the year to March. Instead, he said, “quite large increases in immigration” were piling extra pressure on to Britain’s housing stock, after net migration hit a recordbreaking 745,000 in 2022.
“The population is growing,” he said. “To some extent, the rents are really a reflection of supply and demand factors [and] reflect things that aren’t to do with monetary policy.” Pointing out that delays in the planning sector have made a bad situation worse, he added: “We don’t really build enough houses in this country.”
With net migration continuing in the hundreds of thousands, will we ever be able to build enough houses? Since 2001, the UK population has increased by eight million, of which seven million were migrants. As former immigration minister Robert Jenrick pointed out this week, in a video with fellow Tory MP Neil O’Brien to highlight the perils of uncontrolled migration: “One home would have to be built every five
A group of people, thought to be migrants, crossing the Channel in May 2023
minutes, night and day, just to cope with the record levels of immigration to England.”
Sorry for stating the obvious, but unprecedented population growth in a supply-constrained market causes prices to rise. But the Left has never been willing to join the dots, preferring instead to gaslight anyone suggesting that the unaffordability and unavailability of housing might be linked to mass migration. It’s been easier to brand people bigots and racists than accept the facts.
Ironically, the people who have lost out most from this state of denial are one of the Left’s most loyal voting groups: the young. Their futures are being trashed because of open borders. Mass migration has been linked to suppressed wages, and the working poor may be losing out most. Immigration has become a get-out clause for not bothering to fix welfare, leaving millions to languish on benefits. And it puts huge pressure on public services, which hurts those who can’t opt out with private healthcare or education the most.
Having spent his entire working life on the wrong side of this argument, Sir Flip Flop is now insisting that Left-wing activists who call for open-border migration are “wrong”. Really? Since Labour has been betraying its own voters on this issue for years – no one should believe a word Starmer says.
Cummings doesn’t appear to have delved into these pages since
started questioning why on earth a man who these days boasts of “drinking ’til 3am ... with AI people” advocated draconian lockdown measures – and apparently on the basis of very little scientific evidence.
Even Prof Neil Ferguson, who incorrectly predicted 4,000-6,000 deaths a day in an email to Ben Warner, the Vote Leave data scientist who was brought into Downing Street by Cummings, had the self-awareness to caveat his doomsday scenario with the words: “This event is in the natural disaster category and the cure (eg massive social distancing, shutdowns) could be worse than the disease.”
Oddly, no one, including the “genius” that is Dominic Cummings, thought to model this at the time. Before he attempts to fix Britain, Barnard Castle’s own tinpot authoritarian might perhaps want to consider owning up to being part of the reason why the country is in such a mess.