Immigration is the albatross around UK politics

BBC News

22-05-2025

Figures released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics are expected to reveal a fall in net migration to the UK. Politicians have long struggled to assuage public concerns over immigration and even with Thursday's expected fall, the issue is still likely to dog the Labour government.In retrospect, 1968 looks like the decisive year. Until then, social class had been what determined the political allegiance of most voters: Labour drew its support from the still strong industrialised working class, while the Conservatives enjoyed the support of middle class and rural constituencies.But in 1968, two events launched a realignment, after which point Britons increasingly started to vote based on another, previously obscure, factor: attitudes to immigration and race.The first was the 1968 Race Relations Act, steered through Parliament by the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. It strengthened legal protections for Britain's immigrant communities, banning racial discrimination, and sought to ensure that second generation immigrants "who have been born here" and were "going through our schools" would have access to quality education to ensure that they would get "the jobs for which they are qualified and the houses they can afford". Discrimination against anyone on the basis of racial identity - in housing, in hospitality, in the workplace - was now illegal.The second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country".Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war.
The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way".But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them," he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political discourse.Powell had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the country.It became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever before.It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment.And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the annual net migration figures are very likely to show a fall in the number of people moving to the UK - something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for Labour's attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited).Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration?
Softening attitudes?
Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated picture.The number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of thousands.Stephen Webb, a former Home Officer civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities."The public have been ahead of the political, media class on this," he says, "particularly poorer, working-class people. It was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That's where the migrants went. That's where the sudden competition for labour [emerged]. You talk to cabbies in the early 2000s and they were already fuming about this."That fear of migrants "taking jobs" became particularly pressing in 2004, when the European Union (of which Britain was a member) took in ten new members, most of them former the communist states of Eastern Europe. Because of the EU's free movement rules, it gave any citizen of those countries the right to move here - and the UK was one of just three member nations to open its doors to unrestricted and immediate freedom of movement.The government, led by Tony Blair, estimated that perhaps 13,000 people per year would come seeking work. In fact, more than a million arrived, and stayed, by the end of the decade - one of the biggest influxes of people in British history.
Most were people of working age. They paid taxes. They were net contributors to the public purse. Indeed, the totemic figure in this period was the hard-working "Polish plumber" who, in the popular imagination, was willing to work for lower wages than his British counterpart. Gordon Brown famously called for "British jobs for British workers", without explaining how that could be achieved in a Europe of free movement.The perception that Britain had lost control of its own borders gained popular traction. The imperative to "take back control" would be the mainstay of the campaign to leave the European Union.A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening," says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration".Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people."
'Island of strangers'?
Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968?
The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections."At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala says.The country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral success.And fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in taxes.He adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost."
Labour's plan
So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it?Legislation to reduce immigration has, historically, been strikingly unsuccessful.The first sustained attempt to reduce immigration was the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1948, the former troopship Empire Windrush had docked at Essex carrying 492 migrants from the West Indies, attracted by the jobs boom created by postwar reconstruction. Almost a million more followed in the years ahead, from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. They all arrived as citizens of the UK and Commonwealth (CUKC) with an automatic and legal entitlement to enter and stay. The 1971 Act removed this right for new arrivals.The Act was sold to the public as the means by which immigration would be reduced to zero. But from 1964 to 1994, immigrants continued to arrive legally in their thousands.In 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then in opposition, told a television interviewer that "people are rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", and she promised "to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration."Not a reduction; an end.Yet today, almost 17% of the population of the UK was born abroad, up from 13% in 2014.
Sir Keir's plan does not promise to end immigration. It is much less radical. It promises to reduce legal immigration by toughening visa rules. As part of the changes, more arrivals - as well as their dependents - will have to pass an English test in order to get a visa. Migrants will also have to wait 10 years to apply for the right to stay in the UK indefinitely, up from five years."It will bring down [net immigration] for sure," says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "If you restrict eligibility for visas, you will have lower migration. The Home Office calculation is that it will issue 98,000 fewer visas. That's in the order of 10%. It's not radical but it is a change."The White Paper also proposes to end visas for care workers. "This has been a visa that has been incredibly difficult for the government to manage," says Sumption. "It's been riddled with problems. There has been widespread fraud and abuse and so it's not surprising that they want to close it. The care sector will face challenges continuing to recruit. But I think closing the care route may be helpful for reducing exploitation of people in the country."Just a week after publishing the White Paper, the government was accused of undermining its own immigration strategy by agreeing in principle to a "youth experience scheme" with the EU - which may allow thousands of young Europeans to move to Britain for a time-limited period. Champions of the policy say it will boost economic growth by filling gaps in the labour market. But ministers will be cautious about any potential inflation to migration figures. It's another example of the narrow tightrope prime ministers have historically been forced to walk on this issue.
Tensions on the Left
There's another sense in which the Powell speech reaches into our own day. It created a conviction among many on the left that to raise concerns about immigration - often even to mention it - was, by definition, racist. Labour prime ministers have felt the sting of this criticism from their own supporters.Tony Blair, who opened the doors in 2004, recognised this in his autobiography A Journey. The "tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions… and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future… Across Europe, right wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don't get it."Sir Keir has felt some of that heat from his own side since launching the White Paper. In response to his warning about Britain becoming an "island of strangers", the left-wing Labour MP Nadia Whittome accused the prime minister of "mimic[king] the scaremongering of the far-right".
The Economist, too, declared that Britain's decades of liberal immigration had been an economic success - but a political failure.There is a world of difference between Keir Starmer and Enoch Powell. Powell believed Britain was "literally mad, piling up its own funeral pyre" and that the country was bound to descend into civil war. Sir Keir says he celebrates the diversity of modern Britain.But even if his plan to cut migration works, net migration will continue to flow at the rate of around 300,000 a year. Sir Keir's plan runs the risk of being neither fish nor fowl: too unambitious to win back Reform voters; but illiberal enough to alienate some on the left.Additional reporting: Florence Freeman, Luke Mintz.
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