Migration keeps derailing British leaders

LONDON — Britain’s riots look set to brute-force migration to the top of the country’s political agenda — and not for the first time.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, elected with a thumping Labour majority just weeks ago, faced days of violent disorder on the U.K.’s streets, with the unrest sidelining a carefully-choreographed rollout for his fledgling administration.

Starmer has condemned the violence and faces an immediate challenge of tackling far-right extremism.

But, cajoled in part by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, Starmer’s ministers are also inevitably being plunged into a discussion about an issue that has bedeviled successive U.K. prime ministers.

Tony Blair

Three-time Labour election winner Blair oversaw a huge increase in overall migration to the U.K. Net annual migration to the U.K. increased from 46,800 to 222,600 between 1997 and 2004 — a five-fold rise. 

And, with the British economy booming, the then-prime minister opted not to apply transitional controls to eastern European migrants in the expanded European Union.

Tony Blair has recently advised Keir Starmer. | Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images

At the same time, the salience of migration with the British public increased. In April 2007, two months before Blair resigned, Ipsos Mori found that it was the public’s second most important issue, behind crime.

Out of office, Blair later called for tougher immigration controls as he tried to avert Brexit. He’s recently advised Starmer to “close off the avenues” of the far right by keeping a tight grip on numbers.

Gordon Brown

With the right-wing UKIP and, to a lesser extent, the extremist British National Party rising in the polls, Blair’s successor Brown unveiled more stringent immigration rules in a 2009 speech.

Brown drew swift criticism from the left for using the phrase “British jobs for British workers” — seen as aping the language of the right-wing parties which were snapping at Labour’s heels.

Brown’s most fraught immigration moment, though, came with a monumental gaffe on the 2010 election campaign trail.

In a hot mic moment captured by Sky News, Brown — believing he was speaking only to aides in a car — dubbed a Labour supporting pensioner who had challenged him on the campaign trail a “bigoted woman.” Gillian Duffy had asked him where Eastern Europeans were “flocking from.”

The incident became a huge story that further hurt Brown’s campaign. He issued a groveling TV apology — but the damage was done, and he had helped cement the idea that his center-left party had lost touch with voters on the issue.

David Cameron

While Cameron called time on the Labour government as Britain’s fresh-faced Tory prime minister, he struggled to grapple with precisely the same issue.

Cameron pledged — and then failed to deliver — a “no ifs, no buts” promise to cut net migration to the U.K. to the “tens of thousands.” While later abandoned, that pledge was still thrown back at the Conservatives until this year’s crushing election defeat.

As for Cameron himself, immigration would go on to play a big role in his downfall.

Sensing a threat from UKIP, which combined anti-immigration politics with its Euroskepticism, as well as his own restless Tory backbenchers, Cameron committed to an in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

In the campaign that followed, the Vote Leave campaign pushed a “take back control” message, which swiped at the EU’s freedom of movement.

In an even more direct push, the smaller Leave.EU campaign led by Farage released a now-infamous “Breaking Point” poster, which depicted a photograph of non-white Syrian refugees fleeing conflict and warning: “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” It was condemned by Farage’s opponents, including some on the pro-Brexit side.

But polling in the lead-up to the referendum found that immigration was a top concern. And arguments about taking back control narrowly prevailed — ending Cameron’s premiership.

Theresa May

The migration issue proved to be a headache for Theresa May — who had ascended to the top job after a long spell at the U.K. Home Office — in an altogether different way.

Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman revealed that hundreds of citizens born in the Commonwealth, who had been welcomed to the U.K. as members of the “Windrush generation” rebuilding the country after the war, had been wrongly detained and threatened with deportation and the loss of social security payments. In at least 83 cases, some were wrongfully deported by the Home Office.

Theresa May had overseen a so-called “hostile environment” policy as home secretary in 2012 in a bid to deter illegal migrants, seen as contributing to the Windrush crackdown. | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

The scandal rocked May’s government at a time the Brexit-focused prime minister needed it least — and led to the resignation of her own home secretary.

May had overseen a so-called “hostile environment” policy as home secretary in 2012 in a bid to deter illegal migrants, and this was widely seen as contributing to the Windrush crackdown. She later expressed regret for using the term.

Elsewhere, the first asylum seekers to have been recorded arriving in the U.K. by small boat were logged as doing so on January 31, 2018, during May’s premiership.

That issue that would dominate the in-tray of her Tory successors.

Boris Johnson

Under Johnson, small boat crossings of the English Channel became a high-salience issue — as month after month under his premiership brought record numbers of people making the perilous journey. 

To tackle the issue — and “stop these boats” as Johnson called it — he and his Home Secretary Priti Patel devised a plan. They would send asylum seekers who cross the Channel to Rwanda — permanently.

But two months after it was announced, the plan — pushed as a deterrent by Johnson — was plunged into crisis after the first flight was canceled minutes before take-off, following a last-minute injunction from the European Court of Human Rights. 

Johnson resigned a month later as separate scandals caught up with him — leaving his Rwanda plan in the hands of his successors.

Johnson has admitted post-premiership that legal migration increased to too-high a level under his leadership — despite promising in his 2019 election manifesto that “overall numbers will come down.” 

Liz Truss

She might have been outlasted in office by a lettuce — but there was still time for an immigration row during Liz Truss’ ill-fated premiership. 

After being forced to resign as Truss’ home secretary, Tory right-winger Suella Braverman sent a stinging letter to the prime minister expressing her “serious concerns” about her commitment to the 2019 manifesto promise on lowering immigration, as well as stopping irregular cross-channel migration.

Though we never got to see the results, Truss had reportedly planned to liberalize Britain’s immigration rules as part of an all-out push to turn around Britain’s flatlining economy.

Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak recognized the electoral potency of migration — but had a mixed record on addressing it.

Blaming Johnson’s government (in which he’d been the top finance minister) for high levels of net migration, Sunak soon promised to bring those figures back down to “sustainable levels.”

He unveiled draconian new visa rules in December last year, which included making it dramatically harder for people to bring non-British spouses to the U.K.

Rishi Sunak arguably gave himself a larger headache on irregular migration — by vowing to completely “stop the boats.” | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

New figures for migrant visa applications, released Friday, appear to show that those plans worked on their own terms, although they were watered down before implementation amid concern about a hit to the British economy.

But Sunak arguably gave himself a larger headache on irregular migration — by vowing to completely “stop the boats” and putting the pledge front and center of his pitch to the country.

Sunak pinned his hopes largely on Johnson’s Rwanda plan. He expended much energy and political capital introducing revised versions of the legislation to try and get it past the courts and finally get flights off the ground. 

Those flights were set to finally take off in July this year. But then Sunak called the election, lost it in a landslide, and the expensive and unpopular plan was scrapped by Starmer.

Keir Starmer

As Britain hopes for a period of calm after the riots, Starmer is faced with the question of how to address the underlying issues that prompted so much disorder — without being seen as caving to the far-right.

While few in the U.K. have sympathy for the rioters, the issue of immigration in general has — according to polling — shot up the agenda for Brits since Starmer took office. And his allies are aware of the electoral threat posed by the stridently anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party.

Keir Starmer’s immediate challenge is of tackling far-right extremism. | Toby Melville/WPA Pool via Getty Images

Small boat crossings have continued since Starmer took office, and he has scrapped the Rwanda plan. In its place, Starmer wants a new “Border Security Command” unit to reduce Channel crossings by cracking down on people smugglers. His Conservative critics brand it a mere rebadge of ideas they’ve already tried.

As the dust settles on the riots, Labour MPs and strategists are keen to focus on root causes beyond just migration. One ally of Starmer’s chief strategist Morgan McSweeney, speaking anonymously to be frank about strategy, told POLITICO London Playbook that it’s about “doing the basics right” — like improving economic growth and public services for deprived areas, while also being “really, really proactive in communicating that.”

Starmer’s ex-policy chief Claire Ainsley, now at the Progressive Policy Institute, added that “the discontent the extremists are stirring up doesn’t dissipate easily.” She added: “Beyond law and order, the political center left has to have a better answer to the challenges people face than the political right. Our culture of inclusion and tolerance has to be reasserted.”

Stefan Boscia contributed reporting.