For months now, Keir Starmer has been at pains to tell the country that there are no easy answers to our problems. There is no magic money tree. We can’t spend what we haven’t got. We have to be realistic about the scorched earth a Labour government would inherit. This deliberate damping down of expectations doesn’t exactly make the heart sing, but it beats promising the earth to get elected and then trying awkwardly to wriggle out of it afterwards. What’s puzzling, however, is that this policy of brutally bursting voters’ bubbles never seems to be applied to immigration.
Last week’s Office for National Statistics figures, revising the net number of people coming to Britain in 2022 up to 745,000, were always going to induce apoplexy in the Conservative party, followed by the usual rhetoric about cutting the numbers in some draconian manner. But this time, Labour has met them halfway. The relatively new shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, suggested last weekend that Labour “probably would hope” to get immigration down in its first term, and when pressed on what would be a reasonable level, talked of “normal levels” being about a “couple of hundred thousand a year”. It wasn’t exactly an iron-clad commitment, but it’s nonetheless depressing to hear Labour falling back on the kind of promises that have been backfiring on the Tories ever since David Cameron vowed to reduce immigration to “tens of thousands”. It’s true that luck may be on Labour’s side, here: if the 2022 figures turn out to be a one-off, reflecting a labour market catching up with itself after a freeze on hiring and travelling during the pandemic, Labour could see immigration falling naturally on its watch anyway. But it’s nonetheless a wasted opportunity to level with the public about the real choices confronting a small country with an ageing population and a stagnant economy.
