Keir Starmer doesn’t want you to know something about immigration (Image: PA)
Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour supermajority have nearly five years left in office. That is the reality despite right-wing fantasies about a Government collapse or petitions unseating this administration.
That’s five years to double down on so many things which went wrong under the Tories, chief among them mass immigration.
Last week, revised migration figures showed just how much the Conservatives lied to the British people. Having promised to control the numbers, net immigration (the difference between entries and exits) jumped to nearly one million.
Yet, despite castigating the Tories, Labour shows little sign of wanting to end this. Indeed, cabinet minister and Starmer ally Pat McFadden recently said there would be no commitment to a target, saying these “haven’t worked very well” and any figure would “depend on the needs of the economy”.
A cop out if ever there was one. As I wrote yesterday, the Tories or indeed the Labour Government could easily achieve this goal through a guest worker programme which would plug gaps in the labour market without upending social cohesion.
Yet, for both political and economic reasons – as well as lazy thinking – my money is on Labour keeping the numbers sky high, not least as a cheap and cheerful way of nominally boosting what is increasingly a low-wage and low-skilled economy.
Far easier to do this than improve Britain’s woeful levels of productivity or, for example, to wean universities off their addiction to international student fees, or to get millions of out-of-work Brits off benefits and back into jobs.
Given Labour’s anti-business mindset it strikes me that keeping new arrivals at a near all-time high – and let’s face it, thanks to the Tories even a small reduction in current numbers will be very high – is just about the only tool the Government has to keep the economy out of recession.
The fact Labour’s housebuilding targets are well below what is currently needed, never mind what would be needed if immigration numbers stay at elevated levels, then it is hardly a jump to believe home buying will remain out of reach for millions of aspirational young people, many of whom will simply go elsewhere.
The fact more people likely means more suppressed wages, the gap between real incomes and real house prices is likely to widen further as well.
True, many migrants work in the NHS, but many also use it, leading to – at best – a net zero effect on healthcare. Assuming Labour cannot increase bed and doctor numbers, the chances are more people merely add to the NHS’s woes, regardless of how many people come to work in health and social care.
Under Tony Blair, a new bar for immigration was created. Yet fourteen years of Tory rule did nothing to change this, and now a new precedent has been set which the current Labour Government has little incentive to step away from.
By 2029, we could well be looking at a population of over 70 million, with house prices even higher, wages even flatter, hospitals even fuller and productivity going nowhere.
Most Popular Comments