Opening the Borders to Nigel Farage

Keir Starmer's attempts to mimic the rhetoric of the Reform leader will end as badly for him as it did for his Conservative predecessors

The best thing you can say about Keir Starmer’s immigration speech this week is that very few people seem to have noticed it.

The speech, which followed new figures showing that the rise in immigration under the last Conservative Government was even greater than previously thought, was largely lost in the noise surrounding the Assisted Dying vote and the resignation of the Transport Secretary Louise Haigh.

Yet within its short length, it contained some of the most irresponsible and counter-productive rhetoric heard from any Prime Minister in recent years.

Accusing his Conservative predecessors of an “open borders experiment” which was “unforgivable”, Starmer spoke in language that was almost identical to that being deployed, just a short distance away, by Reform Party leader Nigel Farage.

“This happened by design, not accident,” Starmer told journalists inside Downing Street.

“Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a One Nation experiment in open borders.

“‘Global Britain’ - remember that slogan? That is what they meant. A policy with no support, of which they then pretended wasn't happening, and now they want to wave it away with a simple we got it wrong, but that's unforgivable.”

Now it is true that immigration was liberalised under the last Government, in complete contrast to the rhetoric Boris Johnson and his successors deployed at the time.

It is also true that many people voted for the Conservatives, post-Brexit, precisely because they believed that the party would reduce, rather than increase migration.

It would be perfectly legitimate for a Labour Prime Minister to point all of this out and to set out a strategy to bring down the overall numbers of people coming to the UK.

Yet by suggesting that the UK has an “open borders” policy, Starmer has done something very different. Rather than engage in the debate about immigration calmly and responsibly, he has instead engaged in the entirely irresponsible and inflammatory politics of the hard right.

Because Britain does not have an “open borders” immigration system, or anything like it.

That this is the case is obvious to anyone who has ever encountered it at close proximity.

Try telling the families of the refugees dying in the English Channel in a desperate attempt to get here, that Britain has “open borders”, or the hundreds of Commonwealth citizens deported during the Windrush scandal that they are part of an “experiment” in “Global Britain”.

Indeed, try telling any of the people who have harmed themselves at detention centres in what was described in one case as an “attempted mass suicide” that they have had it too easy all of this time.

Because the truth is that the only borders that have been opened over recent years are the borders to the sort of rhetoric and politics deployed by Nigel Farage and his fellow travellers on the hard and far right.