Britain, according to Keir Starmer this week, is in danger of becoming an “island of strangers”. This was the justification offered by the Prime Minister for his crackdown on immigration as he vowed to “take back control of our borders”.
The choice of phrasing has played well with some. Nigel Farage, in that impressively demotic way he has, said that his Reform party “very much enjoyed your speech… you seem to be learning a great deal from us”. Those voters concerned about the level of migrants arriving on Britain’s shores and a perceived lack of integration may have been equally intrigued.
Others, not so much. Critics have accused Starmer of echoing the language of Enoch Powell and of playing to the populist Reform agenda. The measures contained in the White Paper have bite: they will toughen skills thresholds for visas, close the care work route, demand greater fluency in English, and force people to wait ten years for full citizenship. The tests for colleges and universities offering places to overseas students will be made stricter.
It will all either make a substantive difference or it won’t, but how does this play in Scotland, where the 2026 elections represent Labour’s next major test of public opinion? It is telling that Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, refused to parrot the PM’s language, even while publicly supporting the move to bring down numbers.
In fact, I suspect Sarwar flinched when he heard the speech – not the first time he will have reacted that way to a recent UK government announcement. He is leading a party that wants to win the Holyrood election a year from now. While it is losing support to Reform, which is on the rise and which a recent poll suggested might even form the opposition in Edinburgh, Sarwar also needs undecideds and erstwhile SNP voters to back Labour if he is to stand a chance of becoming first minister and banish the SNP. In short, while he needs some of those on the right, he also needs those on the centre and the left – the classic big tent. It was this coalition that delivered a majority for Labour in Scotland at the general election.
For the purposes of this campaign, the boss getting compared to Enoch Powell is not massively helpful. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of immigration-sceptics in Scotland – 38 per cent backed Brexit, remember. However, the national debate is nothing like the one down south. First, the issue has less salience. This is partly because Holyrood has no control over policy in the area, and partly because Scotland traditionally has lower levels of immigration and therefore fewer arguments about societal transformation or strain on public services.
Second, each of the main parties at Holyrood, including the Tories, has supported higher immigration levels to Scotland: on this issue, there has been rare case of progressive consensus. The SNP and Scottish Labour, the only real contenders to hold power, were both outspokenly critical of Brexit (as were most Scottish Conservative MSPs) and of the approach taken by the last Tory government towards reducing immigration.
There has consequently been no great divide to exploit, and no one to exploit it: no toxic weaponisation of the subject as there has been at Westminster. That might be about to change given Reform’s increasing support. But to many in north Britain, Starmer’s choice of words will have smacked of a merciless harshness unbecoming in a Labour prime minister.
That said, it’s also true that too much is made of the supposedly differing opinions between the electorates of England and Scotland. There is certainly some divergence – Scots are probably a little more to the left, perhaps a little more drawn to the old values of community, solidarity and internationalism. However, those differences are not as stark as is often claimed. On issues such as welfare, criminal justice, and, say, gender reform, we are all much of a muchness.
As Ailsa Henderson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, put it to me, “Scottish political culture tells itself a story about how Scotland is a centre-left polity. Part of that is a myth. Scotland is effectively an electorate who, if you are polling on attitudes, are not markedly different from English attitudes. But we tell ourselves that we are a very different type of polity. [Scotland] is also a polity that is small-c conservative, but tells itself it hates its large-c Conservative Party.” It is really Scotland’s progressive politicians, who have long held the largest megaphone, who insist the nation occupies some sort of left-wing sweet spot. They are wrong.
So much for the politics. It is nevertheless a matter of fact, and not opinion, that Scotland needs more migrants. As a recent report by the Scottish Fiscal Commission pointed out, while the nation’s population is expected to grow a little over the next 25 years, there will also be a 26 per cent increase in the number of 75 to 84-year-olds and a 95 per cent rise in those aged above 85. The working-age, revenue-contributing part of the population will fall. This does not bode well for the future economy or public service funding. Then there is Scotland’s geography – its vast rural areas that have long been reliant on immigrant labour and that risk being even further denuded without it. Let’s be honest, Scots are not going to shag their way to demographic good health.
The debate over immigration is a tricky one. There are legitimate complaints from parts of the UK that have seen the highest inflows and that can fairly argue that they weren’t really consulted in advance. There are areas that could do with a stiff influx of newcomers. Sometimes the argument is driven by prejudice or ignorance, sometimes by a reasonable sense of fairness. And sometimes the politicians will bend in the wind of trending opinion – that’s what politicians have always done, and always will do.
But Scotland, as Alex Salmond used to put it, is not full up. There are ways, not uncommon in other countries, to create pathways to sub-national immigration – Scotland-only visas being one possible example. Labour seems dead against this, though, as it hunts the Reform snark. And Whitehall… well, Whitehall is Whitehall.
An island of strangers – it’s a smart phrase, very resonant, congrats to the speechwriter who came up with it. It can have more than one meaning, though.
[See also: How Scotland learned to love Nigel Farage]
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