Keir Starmer’s condemnation of Conservative immigration policies made a lot of short-term political sense.

Days before, Kemi Badenoch had released a stilted video full of clichés like “the system is broken”. “All governments” have failed on immigration, she said, over images of Tony Blair and David Cameron but not Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak. (If I was David Cameron, who got non-EU migration lower than any other PM in the last three decades, I would be annoyed.)

Directly attacking the Conservatives’ “open border experiment”, then — their plan to “deliberately liberalise immigration” in the aftermath of Brexit — the prime minister put the blame on his opponents with enthusiastic bluntness. For once, Starmer was on the front foot, and you could tell that he enjoyed being there.

It will be hard for Mrs Badenoch to respond. Starmer is quite correct that the Conservatives sent immigration to unprecedented levels. Badenoch’s bland admission that her party had “got it wrong” — unlike Robert Jenrick’s words about “a day of shame for the Conservative Party” — was so inadequate as to be insulting, though perhaps she doesn’t feel able to be more severe given that Conservative loosening of immigration laws was celebrated by one Kemi Badenoch. (“In particular I’d like to thank the home secretary for removing annual limits on work visas and also on international students,” she told Sajid Javid.)

So, there is very little that the Conservatives can say without incriminating themselves. But as much as I’m a critic of Mrs Badenoch, she was right about one thing — it isn’t just a post-Brexit problem, or a Conservative problem, but a problem that has been acute for almost three decades. Promise after promise has been made, and promise after promise has been broken. Prime Minister Starmer’s attack was politically effective but not entirely honest.

It was Tony Blair, not Boris Johnson, who, in the words of Dr Erica Consterdine in Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of the Migration State, “transformed Britain’s immigration system from a highly restrictive regime to one of the most expansive in Europe”. Looking at a graph of migration to the UK, one can see a handsome slope rise upwards in ‘97. This was also a plan of deliberate liberalisation — not on the scale of Johnson’s, perhaps, but as radical for its time.

Tony Blair has advised Prime Minister Starmer. He is something of an elder statesman of “Labour moderates”. What, if anything, does Starmer think the Tories did differently from New Labour?

I wonder if the government has opened a box that it will not be able to close

Effective as Starmer’s attack will be against the Conservatives, I wonder if the government has opened a box that it will not be able to close. It could not ignore the immigration issue, of course, but having condemned its predecessors with such gusto it should now be forced to prove itself to be different. 

It should anyway. Will it? Maybe not, with Britain’s supine press. Perhaps net migration will fall from 700,000 to 650,000 and Times columnists will declare the issue solved. But the awkward coughs about “unsustainable” numbers from regime attack dogs like Matthew Stadlen illustrate a growing sense that something must be done, if not because of the object-level issue then because of the scale of public dissatisfaction. 

After all, the median British voter thinks that immigration levels are ten times lower than net migration levels actually are. It will be hard to convince such people that numbers in the hundreds of thousands represent a big step in the right direction. (British voters also tend to prefer migration from first world states to migration from countries like India, Pakistan and Nigeria — the biggest beneficiaries of the Conservatives’ immigration boom.)

Meaningful reform will not just require policy tweaks. It will require the wholesome abandonment of the can-kicking dependence on cheap migrant labour that Tom Jones calls “human quantitative easing”. It will require, as Luca Watson and Sam Bidwell have recommended, the rejection of attempts to prop up failing universities. These are things, it seems to me, that a responsible government should do. But will Labour? And will anybody hold them to account?

Prime Minister Starmer should also be forced to explain what he is going to do to reverse Conservative policies if he is such a passionate opponent of them. Few of the people who migrated to Britain since 2020 will have earned the right to apply for indefinite leave to remain. This is not to say that none of them should earn that right, of course. But they do not have that right and if Prime Minister Starmer is concerned about the effects of the Conservatives’ “open border experiment” he has the power to change the means by which it is received. Condemning the Conservatives, alas, could be a neat way of obscuring his own responsibility.

Talk about this issue enough and one is bound to be called “anti-immigration” (actually, this is one of the nicer things one ends up being called). I suppose some people are genuinely “anti-immigration”. Not me. I am an immigrant and not because I think I am the sole glorious exception. But it has been painfully obvious that the scale and nature of migration to the UK, over several decades, has built up dramatic problems — economic problems, when it comes to less productive demographics, cultural problems, when it comes to irreconcilable belief systems, and security problems, when it comes to terrorism and crime. 

One hopes that the kind of people who dismissed such criticisms as senseless bigotry will not get away with laundering their political opportunism as serious and informed concerns.