A week ago, Westminster was emerging dazed from Reform’s triumph in the local elections. A week later, Labour has announced a panoply of measures designed to reduce immigration including a ban on new care worker visas and an increase in the normal automatic settlement period from five years to 10 years. Keir Starmer may have used the weekend to confirm that Labour now regards Reform as its main opponent but for liberal critics here is proof that he is chasing Nigel Farage’s tail.
Yet it was in a speech to the CBI in November 2022 – long before Farage’s return to the political frontline – that Starmer told businesses that “our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency” by “investing more in training workers who are already here”. The Prime Minister’s approach to immigration has certainly evolved – in the 2020 Labour leadership contest he vowed to “defend free movement as we leave the EU” – but lower numbers have been central to his message for years.
Yvette Cooper, however, can claim a far longer pedigree. As allies point out, Cooper has been championing controlled migration for more than a decade (or as one puts it, “before Reform was even a twinkle in Nigel Farage’s eye”). Back in March 2013, as shadow home secretary under Ed Miliband, Cooper used a speech to IPPR to denounce the “free-market liberal approach” which promoted “wide open borders” for the purpose of “flexible, cheap labour” (she also called for stronger English language requirements). Yesterday, now ensconced in the Home Office, she vowed to end the Tories’ “free-market experiment”.
Despite holding one of the great offices of state, Cooper is often overlooked in analyses of Labour. She is not a member of the party’s ascendent Blairite wing – Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting, Peter Kyle, Liz Kendall – nor of its more sceptical soft left (Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, Lisa Nandy). As an original Brownite, she is one of the last representatives of a mostly forgotten political tribe (the same is true of her Yorkshire ally Defence Secretary John Healey). Having stood for the Labour leadership a decade ago, she has no interest in offering herself as a putative successor to Starmer.
But on immigration, one of this government’s defining political and policy issues, Cooper’s approach has prevailed. The old assumption that economic growth depends on permanently high immigration – often revered by the Treasury – has been discarded (“we had record high net migration and an absolutely flatlining economy,” remarks one Home Office source of the Conservatives’ legacy).
In this cause, No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and director of strategy Paul Ovenden are regarded as key allies (it was Ovenden who wrote Starmer’s memorable attack last November on the Tories’ “one-nation experiment in open borders”). Like Cooper, McSweeney has long believed that border control is not an optional extra for a social-democratic party but fundamental to it.
Expect much commentary today to the effect that this is an “un-Labour” approach, proof that the party has betrayed its core values. Yet throughout Labour’s history, liberalism has been the exception rather than the rule.
With remarkable symmetry, 10 months after entering office, Harold Wilson’s government published an immigration white paper in 1965 reducing “vouchers” (or visas) for Commonwealth citizens from 20,800 a year to 8,500 and restricting them to skilled workers. “Without integration, limitation is inexcusable; without limitation, integration is impossible,” declared then-backbencher Roy Hattersley as he endorsed this approach. Cooper would argue no differently today.
“Does Yvette want tea or coffee? She hasn’t made her mind up yet,” runs an old Westminster joke told by her detractors. But on immigration, Cooper made her mind up long ago. And her approach has become the government’s.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: The dangerous relationship]
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