Last Tuesday, Keir Starmer spent a good 20 minutes answering media questions on Labour’s immigration policies at a science park near Milton Keynes. But with the Conservatives simultaneously tearing themselves apart over their Rwanda bill, not many people noticed.
“It’s funny, that happens quite a lot,” one Labour official said. “We do have immigration policies, but they’re not very dramatic, so sometimes they don’t get much attention. The idea is it’s better to be credible than flashy.”
Such relative obscurity is despite the Conservatives’ best efforts, with ministers repeatedly claiming that Starmer and his shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, have no plans either to reduce official migration or limit the numbers arriving over the Channel in small boats.
Nor is it going to last long. With an election almost certainly happening next year, the scrutiny on opposition policies will inevitably intensify, and details will be required.
Those who did listen to the Labour leader’s Q&A would have learned two things: that in some areas, notably small boats, there are already plans, but that more widely this is a party very much intent on not ruling anything out.
On the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda not just for processing but permanently, although Labour has promised to scrap the scheme, the rationale for this is firmly based on cost and practicality rather than morals. Quizzed on the latter, Starmer went no further than to call it “against our values”.
He also pointedly left the door at least ajar to the idea of the UK processing asylum claims overseas, with those who were successful allowed in, adding that countries including Germany were examining such schemes.
Such studied ambiguity may remain fruitful as long as sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is just a theoretical idea. But some shadow ministers worry what will happen should the planes get off the ground.
If this happens, and Labour subsequently gets into power, it is likely to face questions over whether it would scrap future flights. And if the European courts rule the scheme illegal there will be difficult choices over whether the British government agrees to bring back those who have already been deported.
“If the [Rwanda] bill gets through and one plane takes off, then the questions will stop being about internal Tory struggles and become, ‘What would Labour do about this?’” said one member of the shadow cabinet. “That is a nightmare scenario, I’m not sure we have an answer to it yet.”
On official migration, the strategy under Cooper has been to focus on what the large number of arrivals in the UK to fill job vacancies says about the government’s record on training and skills.
“All this does feel like a missed opportunity given we can control what we do with migration after Brexit,” one Labour official said. “Why has nursing been on the skills shortage list for 14 years? That points to a wider failure.”
One thing that has been absent for now has been targets. Voters do not like broken promises, the Labour strategists argue, and immigration can be influenced by a mass of unpredictable factors.
Last month, Darren Jones, the newly appointed shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, landed in hot water after telling the BBC that Labour would cut net migration to “a couple of hundred thousand a year”.
Cooper, who is well aware of the trouble targets caused for successive prime ministers, made her feelings clear to Jones the next day, and Labour spinners quickly distanced themselves from his comments. “We have no specific target,” they told reporters looking to follow the story.
However, some in Labour believe Jones was simply bowing to the inevitable and that Labour will eventually have to say where it thinks the correct level of migration lies. “We can’t go into the election saying we want to cut net migration but not saying by how much,” said one senior Labour source. “Eventually we are going to have to give voters a sense of what we mean.”
For now, though, Labour enjoys some leeway on immigration policy, not least because of the current polling curiosity that the party’s supporters seem less worried about it than their Conservative equivalents.
“It always used to be that when one party’s supporters were worried about immigration, so was everybody else,” says Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester. “That has changed the last couple of years.
“We’ve seen the salience of migration go from about 10% to about 50% among Conservative supporters, but from about 8% to about 10% among Labour supporters. You’re talking to two completely different audiences.”
Labour voters overall, he noted, were more likely to be university graduates and from minority ethnic communities, groups that tend to be less worried about immigration numbers.
But he added there was no room for complacency: “Even if you can argue that 70% of the people in your electoral coalition are less worried about migration, that still leaves 30%, which is a lot of people. There is still the potential for trouble there.
“The mistake that Labour really wants to avoid is to not make a specific numerical claim about what you’re going to do on immigration that you can’t deliver, as the public will hate you for it.
“But of course, the challenge is that if you don’t make specific concrete claims, how do you build trust?”
