Few issues have made Labour tie itself in knots as much as immigration over the past decades.
There have been times when the party has tried to ignore the subject, and subsequent high levels of public dissatisfaction with the quadrupling of net migration during the Blair and Brown eras.
At other points, the party has tried cack-handedly to confront perceived public concerns, such as Ed Miliband’s widely criticised “controls on immigration” mugs from 2015.
Until now, Keir Starmer has largely stayed silent, attacking the Tories for incompetently presiding over a collapsing asylum system and failing to tackle small boat crossings, without setting out Labour’s plans to change things.
But with cross-Channel migration likely to be a major issue at the next election, Starmer has decided to square up to the problem.
His approach appears to be aiming for as grown-up a stance as possible – and that involves a careful balancing act.
The Labour leader is trying to sound tough about “smashing the gangs” abusing the system, while disavowing the extreme solutions of the Tories who want to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
He is stressing that he wants no return to free movement, while opening the door to a deal with the EU to create safe routes for some asylum seekers in a quid pro quo for being able to return those arriving across the Channel.
Labour’s goal is for voters to give Starmer credit for attempting to solve a seemingly intractable issue with cross-border diplomacy, and without resorting to inhumane treatment or populist rhetoric.
But the electoral risks are clear: already the Conservatives are attempting to paint the Labour leader as trying to unpick Brexit through side-deals with the EU to allow more migration. At the same time, by ruling out a return to free movement, the Labour leader is giving no succour to former remain voters who may be toying with the Lib Dems.
“We have left the EU. There’s no case for going back to the EU, no case for going into the single market or customs union, and no freedom of movement,” he said on Thursday.
Having set out some concrete policy, Starmer will now be hounded with questions about what level of asylum seekers he would be willing to accept, and to put a number on how much net migration there would be under a Labour government.
In turn, Labour will try to turn the conversation on to its plans to clear the Tory asylum backlog, and stop the spending on hotel bills, portraying Sunak’s party as chaotic and obsessed with unrealistic headline-grabbing policies such as Rwanda.
Suella Braverman lost no time in claiming that Starmer’s plan would make the UK a “dumping ground” for Europe’s migrants, while Starmer retorted that the government’s own plan for dealing with small boat crossings was “nonsense”.
This is no doubt the beginning of a dividing line on immigration policy between the Tories and Labour that could prove crucial at the next election.
And Labour has calculated that it is worth taking the gamble of spelling out what it sees as the only credible way of really “stopping the boats” as Sunak has promised, and will probably fail, to do.
