As a milestone is reached of 50,000 migrants crossing the Channel since he became prime minister, Keir Starmer finds himself in a familiar place – seemingly unable to either stop the boats, or escape talking about them.
Home Office data shows 50,271 people made the journey since the election last July, after 474 migrants arrived on Monday. This is around 13,000 higher than the comparable period the previous year.
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Starmer has tweeted more than 10 times about this issue in the past week alone, more than any other.
On Monday he wrote on X: “If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return. If you come to this country and commit a crime, we will deport you as soon as possible.”
It could be a tweet by a politician of any party on the right – and many voters (and Labour MPs) will say it’s right that the prime minister is taking this issue seriously.
Illegal – or irregular – migration is a relatively small proportion of total migration. Net migration was down at 431,000 in 2024 which the OCED say is comparable to other high-income countries. But it is of course highly visible and politically charged.
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Nigel Farage’s Reform party have had a busy few months campaigning on it, and the prime minister has been toughening up his language in response.
Shortly after the local elections in May in which Reform won hundreds of seats and took control of councils, Starmer made his speech in which he warned: “In a diverse nation like ours, without fair immigration rules, we risk becoming an island of strangers.”
It outraged some in his own party, and he later said he regretted that language.
But it was part of a speech which made clear that he wanted action – vowing to end “years of uncontrolled migration” in a way “that will finally take back control of our borders and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics.”
It’s a long way from his early months as Labour leader in 2020 when he said: “We welcome migrants, we don’t scapegoat them.” Migration did not feature as one of his five missions for “change” at the general election.
The strategy by Starmer and his minister is to talk up forthcoming new measures – a crackdown on social media adverts by traffickers, returns of people without a right to be in the UK which are indeed higher than under the Conservatives, and last week, a “one in, one out” deal with France to send people back across the channel.
The government say some people have been detained, although it is not known when these returns will happen. Ministers are also still pointing the finger at the previous Conservative government – which found stopping the boats easy to say and hard to achieve.
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Baroness Jacqui Smith, a former home secretary, said this morning: “I don’t think it was our fault that it was enabled to take root. We’ve taken our responsibility to work internationally, to change the law, to improve the way in which the asylum system works, to take through legislation to strengthen the powers that are available.
“The last government did none of those things and focused on gimmicks. And it’s because of that, that the crime behind this got embedded in the way which it did. And that won’t be solved overnight.”
But for a prime minister who appears to have come to this issue reluctantly, talking about it a lot – and suggesting he’ll be judged on whether he can tackle it – risks raising expectations.
Joe Twyman, of the pollsters Deltapoll said: “You cannot simply out-Farage Nigel Farage when it comes to the subject of immigration. In a sense, Labour is falling into precisely the same trap that the Conservatives fell into. They’re giving significant prominence to a subject where they don’t have much control”.
Starmer has avoided mentioning firm numbers on how many migrants his crackdown may stop, but as previous prime ministers have found with the difficult issue of controlling migration, if you ask to be judged on delivery, voters will do so.
