Good morning. British politics is locked in a race to the bottom on immigration. For years, many people have felt that the political language around migrants and asylum seekers has grown harsher. Now, a groundbreaking Guardian investigation provides evidence of a shift to the right.
The findings show that Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking about immigration in more hostile terms than at almost any point in the past century.
The unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches reveals a dramatic rightward turn, with the steepest swing from positive to negative rhetoric occurring in just the past five years.
Researchers say politicians from the two main parties appear increasingly locked in competition over who can sound toughest on immigration, particularly after the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
So what exactly did the investigation find, and how was it carried out? For today’s newsletter, I speak to Carmen Aguilar García, the Guardian’s data projects editor. That’s after the headlines.
Five big stories
UK politics | Polls open in the Gorton and Denton byelection a day after Reform’s candidate found out he will not face a sanction for leaflets that omitted the party’s imprint.
Health | Hospitals that cause harm and injury to women and babies during childbirth often resort to a “cover-up” of their mistakes, falsify medical records and deny bereaved parents answers, a damning report has found.
UK politics | The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for accidentally revealing he was the source of a tipoff that Peter Mandelson supposedly planned to flee the UK, prompting officers to arrest the former ambassador.
US politics | The US has been accused of “shameless exploitation” over a health financing agreement with Zambia worth more than $1bn (£740m).
Facial recognition | Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
In depth: ‘The language increasingly frames migrants as criminals’
In the UK, the past two decades have been an unusually volatile period for political attitudes toward immigration. The Guardian’s analysis shows that positive sentiment in parliamentary debates reached an all-time high in 2018 – possibly marking a moment of quiet following Brexit, as well as national support for the victims of the Windrush scandal – before falling sharply.
Our data projects and data science teams, first began thinking about the project to measure this in 2023. The investigation required careful planning to measure political language both comprehensively and accurately. Carmen Aguilar García went on maternity leave during its development and returned in 2025. In that relatively short time, she was struck by how dramatically the political rhetoric around immigration had hardened.
“When I returned and reconnected with the project, Keir Starmer delivered the “island of strangers” speech. That felt like a shock to me,” she says. As the project focused on speeches in the House of Commons, Starmer’s island of stranger’s speech wasn’t analysed in the investigation – but Carmen noticed the shift. “I remember thinking that something has changed here,” she says.
She adds that the shift was not limited to Starmer. Other senior Labour figures, including the now home secretary Shabana Mahmood, were speaking about limiting Article 8 human rights applications so more migrants could be deported.
“The tone and rhetoric has shifted,” Carmen tells me. “There was a period when politicians talked about Britain’s proud tradition of welcoming refugees. Now the language increasingly frames migrants as criminals.”
For the Guardian’s data projects team, perception alone is not enough. “One thing is having a perception that language is changing,” she says. “Another thing is asking: can we actually find evidence for this?”.
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The ebb and flow of history
The project found that the way Conservative and Labour MPs are now speaking about immigration has hit one of the lowest levels in the past hundred years.
“What was also very interesting was the swing,” Carmen says. “We reached an all-time high in positive rhetoric around 2018, and now we are at one of the most negative moments again. So in just six or seven years, the tone moved dramatically.”
That may, in large part, be down to the boom in immigration under Boris Johnson’s premiership, where net migration peaked in 2023 with 944,000 people. Though net migration has fallen sharply, voters still incorrectly believe it is on the rise.
While progressive parties such as the Green party and the Liberal Democrats continue to push a more positive narrative, the findings suggest they have had far less influence on the overall political tone than Reform UK. Despite existing for only five years, the party’s strong polling performance appears to have exerted an outsized effect on mainstream political rhetoric.
“Even though Reform had only five MPs in the period of analysis we studied, their influence on political language is quite significant. Labour and the Conservatives appear to be reacting to that pressure,” Carmen explains.
The investigation also examined key historical moments, including both world wars and periods of racial unrest such as the Brixton riots, to assess how major events shaped parliamentary rhetoric on immigration.
One period Carmen found particularly striking were the interwar years. During the 1920s and 1930s, Britain actively encouraged citizens to move across the Empire while simultaneously restricting immigration into Britain itself, a contradiction perhaps best captured by the anti-racist slogan: “we are here because you were there”.
“The 1950s was also revelatory to me,” she adds. “At the beginning of that decade there was a welcoming attitude toward Irish migrants, the Windrush generation, and south Asian migrants, largely because Britain needed workers to rebuild after the second world war.
“But toward the end of the decade you see a shift toward negativity following the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots.”
The data then shows a significant divergence between Conservative and Labour rhetoric in the late 1970s and 1980s. While Conservative language became increasingly negative, Labour moved in a more positive direction on immigration. But that didn’t last.
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Labour’s downward trajectory
For Labour, that changed in two specific moments: in 2006 and 2025. During the 00s, under Tony Blair’s premiership, we saw Labour’s rhetoric against immigration harden, possibly in response to rising refugee arrivals, as well as the expansion of the EU.
“The second moment happens after 2020,” Carmen says, a few years after Keir Starmer became Labour leader. Although Starmer initially ran on a progressive platform, many of those commitments were gradually scaled back while Labour was in opposition and later in government.
Supporters welcomed the abolition of the Rwanda scheme, but many Labour voters became uneasy at the hardening tone emerging from the party’s frontbench, as well as its reluctance to directly challenge the increasingly hostile rhetoric promoted by Reform UK.
Starmer appeared to shift course again last September, softening aspects of Labour’s messaging on immigration. The upcoming local elections may offer the first indication of whether that recalibration has had any political effect. But the subsequent rollout of Shabana Mahmood’s tougher, “Denmark-style” immigration proposals illustrates how fluid and contested Labour’s positioning on immigration still is.
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The methodology
The findings are striking. But just as compelling is how the investigation itself was carried out.
Carmen tells me the Guardian’s data projects team worked closely with its data science team, and members of University College London, to build a machine learning model capable of analysing a century’s worth of parliamentary speech, looking specifically at immigration references, an extraordinary undertaking that took nearly two years.
“We realised you can’t simply take an existing sentiment model and apply it to parliamentary debates about immigration,” she says. “So we built a completely bespoke model designed specifically to measure sentiment toward immigration in parliament.”
To build the model, the team first gathered all debates from the House of Commons and broke down debates into fragments of roughly five-sentences each that could be analysed individually.
Then, there was an extensive process of annotations of the fragments that were considered to be about immigration. This process involved using a Large Language Model and a team of 12 people manually classifying the fragments as positive, negative or neutral. This expanded dataset was used to train the supervised machine learning model. The model was trained to understand things such as when MPs were quoting views that they then went on to disagree with, or using sarcasm.
“After that, the model classified the remaining material automatically, and our calculations were based on those classifications.”
The result, she says, was an “extraordinary piece of work” – a tool built specifically to measure something many think cannot be measured: rhetoric.
“One striking thing was reading fragments from 20, 30, even 40 years ago that sounded completely contemporary,” Carmen says. “If you removed the date, you could easily believe they were spoken last year.”
What else we’ve been reading
My colleague Jason Okundaye was at the Baftas ceremony, and writes thoughtfully and eloquently on why he thinks anger for the controversy lies squarely with the BBC. Martin
I’m excited about Jonas Patrick Marvin’s debut book The Breaking of the English Working Class. A timely, incisive examination of the systemic abandonment of working-class communities. Aamna
We can all dwell on remembering uncomfortable moments in our lives, but Emily Retter looks at rejection sensitive dysphoria, where people find the experience overwhelming and crippling. Martin
If you read any dispatch from the closely watched race in Gorton and Denton, make sure it’s my colleague’s Chris Osuh’s incredibly moving reporting on what’s at stake and how the community is fighting back. Aamna
Luke Winkie writes for Slate about the ‘true crime’ live streamers who have flocked to the scene of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. Martin
Sport
Football | Vinícius Júnior ran to the corner and danced again, just as he had done in Lisbon a week ago, but this time all around him there was celebration. There was also relief. With 10 minutes left on a nervous night at the Santiago Bernabéu, he had been set free to put the ball past Anatoliy Trubin and Real Madrid into the last 16 of the Champions League.
Football | Former official at Altach in Austria given suspended prison term and ordered to pay female footballers €625 each after secretly filming them in their dressing room.
Ice Hockey | Hilary Knight, the captain of the US women’s ice hockey team, has responded to comments made by Donald Trump after the Americans won gold at the Winter Olympics, calling the president’s quip a “distasteful joke”.
The front pages
“Damning report exposes scandal of NHS maternity unit ‘cover-ups’”, is the splash on the Guardian on Thursday. “Doubling cash for NHS ‘had no impact’” is the main story over at the Telegraph. “Epstein ‘used UK as hub to traffic scores of women’”, says the Times. “Reeves: Andrew must pay back any misused taxpayer money,” has the i. “Is Prince of Darkness up to his old spin tricks,” is the lead story at the Mail.
“Don’t let hate win,” warns the Mirror. “Just say non! Don’t reward French for boat failure,” is the splash at the Express. “Bafta row John: Blame the BBC,” has the Sun. “Gorillas get on my Wicks,” says the Star. Finally, the Metro with: “High rollers.”
Today in Focus
Will Andrew bring down the monarchy?
As MPs vote to release the documents relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as trade envoy, Helen Pidd speaks to Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, about the former prince’s antics in the role and whether this scandal will be the monarchy’s last
Cartoon of the day | Stephen Lillie
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
When a powerful gust of wind blew a stroller into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, Lio Cundiff didn’t hesitate. The 31-year-old dived into the 2C (35F) harbour, treading water for four exhausting minutes to keep a baby girl afloat until rescuers arrived.
A trans man and standup comedian, Cundiff faced financial hardship from medical bills and lost earnings after his heroism, but remains humble. “All I did was a human act,” he said. “I’m just a human who did the most human thing you could do – which is save someone who can’t save themselves.”
At a time when trans communities face the rolling back of rights in Republican-controlled states, Cundiff hopes the rescue offers a broader lesson: “Just take care of one another.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
