Historic fall in UK migration can't come fast enough for Starmer

Figures due on Thursday are likely to show Keir Starmer presiding over the biggest ever drop in net migration to the UK. For the prime minister, however, the hard part will be getting any credit from voters.

Net migration soared after the pandemic, reaching a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023. The in-flux then slowed to a still-exceptional 728,000 last summer, shortly before Starmer’s Labour Party returned to power with a landslide victory over the Conservatives.

The rise, alongside regular arrivals of undocumented migrants on small boats from across the English Channel, has stoked unrest among the electorate and is partly responsible for the astonishing popularity of Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party. As a result, twice-yearly migration numbers from the UK’s official statistics bureau have become the mostly hotly anticipated data point in Westminster politics.


Like the Conservatives before him, Starmer has made reducing net migration one of the key issues of his premiership, and last week promised to reverse the “incalculable damage” he says was caused by high numbers of recent years. His speech was a response to the rise of Reform UK, which won the most votes, most seats and control of most councils in a set of bruising local elections earlier this month.

It is a risky strategy, however. In his attempt to appeal to aggrieved voters, Starmer used language untypically provocative for a Labour leader, warning that Britain could become an “island of strangers.” That led to accusations of extremist rhetoric and infuriated the left of Starmer’s parliamentary party.

“Tone and framing matters a great deal, as well as content, when you’re dealing with an issue as polarizing as migration,” said Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “Any communication strategy that results in the media leading on: ‘Did Starmer use the language of the far right?’ — that’s a comms failure.”

Polls taken in the aftermath of Starmer’s speech on immigration showed his popularity sinking to a rock bottom. “The language was obviously a deliberate choice, and presumably that choice was made because Number 10 believed that creating a firestorm to their left makes people think that actually, for once, they’re doing something about the situation,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “The research suggests right across Europe that this isn’t a tactic that’s likely to work for this government.”

Still, Thursday’s migration numbers could provide a boon for Starmer “even though it’s absolutely nothing to do with anything” Labour has done, Ford added. The expected fall is largely due to policies implemented by former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak as well as a drop-off in the numbers fleeing war in Ukraine and repression in Hong Kong.

Visa applications to the UK fell by almost 500,000 in the year to April compared with the previous 12 months, suggesting net migration — the difference between those arriving and leaving — tumbled by hundreds of thousands in the last calendar year.


Labour’s new curbs on immigration, announced in a white paper last week, could cut net migration by around a further 98,000 people per year, according to government forecasts. The white paper committed to end the use of the much-exploited Health and Care Worker visa, which has been responsible for close to 700,000 migrants entering the country over the past five years.

Starmer’s government also wants to restrict the skilled worker visa program and extend the timeline over which migrants can apply for settlement from five to 10 years.

The clampdown may not help Starmer politically, however, while small boat arrivals are still rising. UK voters often conflate the issues of legal and undocumented migration, and the number of migrants arriving on small boats — most of whom typically go on to seek asylum — has hit 12,699 in the year to date, a record high, suggesting the government’s efforts to “smash the gangs” of people smugglers are having little effect.

Labour ditched the Conservatives’ controversial plan to send some asylum-seekers to Rwanda as a deterrent, relying instead on increased deportations and improved cooperation with other countries to root out criminal people-smuggling rings.

“The issue that most voters are concerned about at the moment is illegal migration rather than legal migration,” Bale said, adding that the white paper is “not really focused on the public’s main area of concern.”

The immigration restrictions could also slow potential growth of the UK economy down by 0.1% per year, according to economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics, increasing the pressure for tax hikes. “Migration curbs roughly undo the GDP boost from recent trade deals,” said chief UK economist Robert Wood and senior UK economist Elliott Jordan-Doak in a note to clients.

That will be unwelcome news to Starmer, who was elected last July on a promise to boost growth. For Ford, the bind in which Labour is caught on migration is indicative of a broader “identity crisis” within the party, which was founded to represent the working class but has more recently garnered most of its popularity among liberal, university-educated metropolitan residents.

He thinks Labour needs to tone down the language on migration, shift the focus away from arrivals and focus instead on the efforts being made to remove people who don’t have a right to be in the UK. “They need to accept that they will never be able to outbid the Tories, let alone Reform on this issue,” Ford said.