OPINION
Keir Starmer's party comes across as unconvincing on one issue (Image: PA)
There’s a deep-rooted misconception in British politics. The belief that winning elections depends on endlessly chasing voters who are fundamentally sceptical of you. For Labour, this has meant flirting, awkwardly and half-heartedly, with a vague anti-immigration sentiment, hoping to convince a chunk of voters that they, too, think the country’s gone to hell because of foreigners.
It’s a losing strategy. It’s also intellectually lazy, strategically naive, and, worst of all, a complete misunderstanding of the forces that actually shape people’s lives. In recent weeks, the government has been plastering social media with hard-edged videos and graphics trumpeting the execution of their deportation plans. Bold slogans about ‘stopping the boats’ and ‘tough new laws’ are splashed across timelines, all set to dramatic music and ominous voice-overs.
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This aggressive posturing isn’t just a pre-election stunt; it’s a deliberate choice to continue with the preset framing of immigration as the defining crisis of the moment.
And while the Conservatives, and Reform UK double down on their hostility, Labour seem to think the only way forward is to meet them halfway — adopting a watered-down, apologetic version of the same script.
This government just isn't good at being anti-immigration, it’s just not in their DNA. When they try, it’s like watching a private school geography teacher try to chat to a table of scaffolders in a pub — embarrassing for everyone involved.
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The Tories, Reform, and every two-bit Facebook populist already own that space, and Labour can’t outflank them because they don’t actually believe it. Even when they parrot the lines, it’s obvious they’re uncomfortable in the costume.
What they miss, over and over, is that anti-immigration sentiment in Britain, the kind that gets harnessed by the right, isn’t really about immigration at all. It’s about frustration, neglect, and a desperate need to explain why life feels harder than it used to. When the bins aren’t emptied, when the GP surgery is rammed, when your kid’s school can’t afford glue sticks — you’re angry.
And it’s much easier to blame someone speaking a foreign language on the bus than it is to unravel fifteen years of austerity, decimated local services, crumbling infrastructure, and a political class that treats your town like an inconvenience.
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Normal people actually don’t care about the latest immigration stats or border policies. What they care about is that absolutely nothing works anymore. Buses, the NHS, housing, food costs, pint prices — all the things that make life liveable — have been left to rot.
And when Labour, or anyone else, tries to steer that anger into some wishy-washy version of “we’ll get tough on borders” they miss the point entirely. People aren’t looking for a party that ‘understands their concerns about immigration’ — they want a party that understands their lives.
The truth, if Labour had the guts to say it, is that immigrants didn’t break Britain. The state did. The Conservative government’s obsession with cuts, outsourcing, and deregulation hollowed out public services and left communities fighting for scraps.
Immigration is the scapegoat, the comforting lie that makes it easier to stomach how badly the country’s been managed. Labour should be dismantling that lie, not validating it.
There’s a bigger problem here, and it’s one of confidence. Labour’s obsession with immigration pandering reveals a party that doesn’t really believe in its own solutions. If they did, they’d talk about them relentlessly.
They’d tell voters, in plain language, how they’re going to make their lives better. They’d make the case that it’s not migrants in small boats who made your town centre a wasteland, it’s almost 50 years of treating working-class communities as an afterthought. They’d talk about rebuilding not just infrastructure, but trust.
The most maddening thing is that the answers aren’t particularly radical. Remove the cranks that stand in the way of building some bloody houses. Ensure that the NHS is staffed and funded properly so people aren’t dying in A&E corridors. Bring buses and trains under regional control so they actually work, as Andy Burnham has proved in Greater Manchester.
Invest in the places that politics forgot. That’s what people care about, things they can see and touch and experience every day. Immigration rhetoric, no matter how much Labour tries to play into it, is just noise. It doesn’t fill a pothole. It doesn’t pay a nurse. It doesn’t make your kid’s school decent.
And let’s be clear, there’s nothing centrist or sensible about feeding anti-immigration sentiment. It poisons the well. It alienates the very voters Labour currently has: the young, the diverse, the optimistic, whilst also failing to convince the people they’re chasing. It’s the political equivalent of bragging about cooking a beef lasagne for your vegetarian wife.
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If Labour want to win — really win, and not just sneak into office on the back of a Tory collapse — they need to rediscover some courage. They need to trust that people care more about their rent, their parents’ health, their kids’ future, than they do about which passport their neighbour holds.
They need to start treating working-class people like adults, capable of hearing the truth, capable of understanding that fixing the country is harder than blaming foreigners. They need to tell a story about Britain’s future that isn’t just about closing the gates, but about opening doors.
There’s a better way to win. But it means ditching the cowardice, the pandering, and the lazy assumptions about what people want to hear. It means actually talking about the world we want to build — not just the people we want to keep out.