What Starmer said as he claimed Tories running 'open borders experiment' after Brexit
Here is the passage from Keir Starmer’s opening statement where he accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment”. He said
When we came into office – we immediately conducted an audit of public finances and we found a £22bn black hole.
Now – the independent Office of National Statistics has conducted vital work on the state of immigration and found the previous government were running an open borders experiment.
As the ONS sets out, nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023. That is four times the migration levels compared with 2019.
Time and again – the Conservative party promised they would get those numbers down. Time and again – they failed.
And now the chorus of excuses has begun. We heard that from the leader of the opposition, yesterday.
But what we didn’t hear what the British people are owed is an explanation.
Because a failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball.
No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident.
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 and which they then pretended wasn’t happening.
And now they want to wave it away with a simple “we got it wrong”.
Well that’s unforgivable. And mark my words - this government will turn the page.
A failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball.
No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident.
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 and which they then pretended wasn’t happening.
And now they want to wave it away with a simple “we got it wrong”.
Well that’s unforgivable. And mark my words - this government will turn the page.
Here’s a comment on Starmer’s language from Lewis Goodall from the News Agents podcast on Bluesky.
Starmer’s rhetoric on immigration in this presser is very striking. Casting the Conservative record in office as: “A one nation experiment in open borders.”
McSweeney’s fingerprints all over it. The direction of the govt will squarely be on more socially conservative, traditional Lab voters.
Robert Jenrick, who resigned as a Conservative minister because he thought his government’s immigration policies were too liberal and who was runner up to Kemi Badenoch in the Tory leadership contest, has described today’s ONS figures as “a day of shame” for his party. He posted this on social media.
Today is a day of shame for the Conservative Party.
Our handling of immigration let the country down badly. The public are right to be furious.
Repairing the damage won’t be easy.
We will only begin to rebuild trust once we own up to our failures and fundamentally change.
Tories claim Starmer has 'no credibility' on immigration because he is ruling out cap
The Conservatives have responded to Keir Starmer’s press conference this afternoon by claiming that he has “no credibility” on immigration because he does not support a cap on numbers. In a statement issued by CCHQ, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:
If Keir Starmer really cared about bringing down net migration, he would not have suspended our increase to the family visa salary threshold and scrapped the deterrent the National Crime Agency said we needed, which were part of our reforms to bring down the numbers down.
Keir Starmer has no credibility on this issue. He has ruled out a legal migration cap and since he became prime minister channel boat crossings are up 23%. And we learnt today that 6,000 more asylum seekers are in hotels - despite Starmer’s promise to end hotel use.
Chris Philp speaking at a Conservative party press conference yesterday. Photograph: Ben Whitley/PA
Starmer discusses joint action on tackling illegal migration in call with German chancellor
Keir Starmer and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discussed tackling illegal migration during a call today, Downing Street said. In a readout of the call, a No 10 spokesperson said:
The prime minister began by updating on the UK’s latest immigration statistics published this morning and set out his determination to continue working together to reduce illegal migration.
Both leaders agreed more could be done to smash the gangs in Europe and intercept smuggling gangs trading in human life.
Germany was a vital partner in supporting that action, the prime minister added.
Discussing progress on the joint action plan to tackle illegal migration, the leaders looked forward to signing the overarching treaty, which the action plan underpinned, in the coming months.
The former Tory chancellor George Osborne has collected a share of a £30m pay pot after the City advisory firm Robey Warshaw reported record profits, Kalyeena Makortoff reports.
Keir Starmer has often said that he wants to reduce the level of net migration, he has always refused to say by how much, or to propose a target, and he has regularly spoken about the need to better train British workers so that employers are not so reliant on foreign labour. We did not know that the govenrment is going to publish a white paper with a plan to cut net migration soon (see 3.25pm), but otherwise what Starmer in policy terms this afternoon was mostly familiar.
But that does not do justice to the sheer audacity of his messaging. By forcefully accusing the last government of intentionally turning Britain “into a one-nation experiment in open borders” (see 4.12pm), he flipped an issue that has haunted Labour for years. And not just Labour; at the general election the Tories were still attacking Starmer personally for advocating “free movement” when he was running for party leader. Now he has been able to capitalise on an ONS data revision to make a plausible case that it was Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak who were the real open borders fanatics.
Plausible, rather than slam-dunk. In all the many inside accounts of the last Conservative government, you won’t find evidence of a deliberate plan to get net migration up to 900,000 a year. But this was the consequences of the decisions that were being taken, as people like Suella Braverman were happy to point out at the time. This charge certainly has enough merit in it to stick.
Yesterday, when Kemi Badenoch devoted her first policy-focused speech as Tory leader to immigration, she openly said this should be a winning issue for her party because Labour would never be able to deliver the reduction in net migration numbers that the public want to see. Perhaps that will turn out to be true. But today’s figure show that the last Conservative government failed on its own terms on this issue, and Starmer did a better job today at rubbishing their record than Badenoch did defending it.
What Starmer said as he claimed Tories running 'open borders experiment' after Brexit
Here is the passage from Keir Starmer’s opening statement where he accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment”. He said
When we came into office – we immediately conducted an audit of public finances and we found a £22bn black hole.
Now – the independent Office of National Statistics has conducted vital work on the state of immigration and found the previous government were running an open borders experiment.
As the ONS sets out, nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023. That is four times the migration levels compared with 2019.
Time and again – the Conservative party promised they would get those numbers down. Time and again – they failed.
And now the chorus of excuses has begun. We heard that from the leader of the opposition, yesterday.
But what we didn’t hear what the British people are owed is an explanation.
Because a failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball.
No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident.
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 and which they then pretended wasn’t happening.
And now they want to wave it away with a simple “we got it wrong”.
Well that’s unforgivable. And mark my words - this government will turn the page.
Q: The ONS had to revise its past net migration figures. Do you think we need a rethink of how these figures are calculated if they are so wide of the mark?
Starmer says the problem with these figures does not lie with the ONS. What is shocking is not the revisions, but the actualy figures. He goes on:
You have to double take when you see an increase of 184,000, to 906,000 in four years.
If we think about the previous decade or more, in terms of the sorts of numbers we were talking about, what’s shocking is not the way the figures are arrived at. This is one of those occasions, a bit like the £22bn [the black hole Labour claims to have discoverd in government accounts for this year], a bit like the prisons are over full, where the shock through the system is the sheer size of the number, and the loss of control under the last government.
Q: [From the Sun] Are you sympathetic to the argument that immigration is bad not for economic reasons, but for cultural reasons?
Starmer says he has talked about the economic impact. He says Britain should be training people to do the right jobs. The government should have a skills strategy.
(That was not what the questioner was really getting at.)
Q: Of the £5.4bn spent on asylum, how much has been spent on hotels. And can you get the spending down to zero next year?
Starmer says he wants to bring costs down, and hotel use down. He says one problem was that claims were not being processed. Now they are being. There has been “a significant redeployment of staff”, he says. And more flights have left taking people back.
Starmer says he wants to see net migration fall 'significantly'
Q: Will you set a target for reducing immigration?
Starmer says:
I want to see immigration come down significantly. I said that before the election, I said that during the election, I say it again here today.
That means bearing down on the influences that have driven it up this high with the measures that I set out a moment ago. We had a supposed cap in place for the best part of a decade, and it didn’t have any meaningful impact on reducing immigration.
So I don’t think setting an arbitrary cap, which is what previous governments have done, is the way forward. But do I want it to significantly reduce? Yes, I do, and that’s what our plan will achieve.
Q: Have you changed your view on assisted dying?
Starmer says it is a genuinely free vote. He does not want to put pressure on MPs. He has got a huge amount of experience on this. As DPP, he looked at every case for five years. He will vote tomorrow, he says.
Starmer says rise in net migration under Tories 'off the scale'
Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: [From Beth Rigby from Sky News] People feel let down by their politicians. What does bringing net migration down. Are you talking about the low hundred thousands? And how does that square with your need for economic growth?
Starmer says people were let down. This kind of increase was unprecedented. The rise in immigration was “off the scale”.
He says it will take “hard graft” to get it down.
He wants immigration to come down “significantly”, he says.
But he repeats the point about the four-fold increase not being “bad luck”, but “their policy”.
He says what they have discovered today is another “legacy failure”.
UPDATE:Starmer said:
When you say people have been let down, you are absolutely right because they were promised by the last government that we would get control of our borders and we had a government that completely lost control of our borders.
This sort of increase is unprecedented. It is off the scale what has happened in four short years. The way to get it down is the hard graft, not the gimmicks but the hard graft of driving it own on the skills agenda, migration advisory committee, making sure we are cracking down on employers that are breaking the rules.
Starmer mentions the deal with Iraq – briefed to journalists earlier, but embargoed until 3pm. (See 3.09pm.)
He says he has a message for the public.
Where the last government failed you, this one will not. They drove immigration numbers up. We will get them down. They left the NHS flat on its face. We will get it standing tall again. They [made you] poorer. We will put more money in your pockets.
It won’t be quick or easy, but we are going to turn things around, not with gimmicks, but with graft – a government that will not rest until the foundations are fixed, borders are secure, and Britain is rebuilt.
We will publish a white paper imminently, which sets out a plan to reduce immigration.
The Migration Advisory Committee is already conducting a review and where we find clear evidence of sectors that are overreliant on immigration, we will reform the points-based system and make sure that applications for the relevant visa routes, whether it’s the skilled worker route or the shortage occupation list, will now come with new expectations on training people here in our country.
We will also crack down on any abuse of the visa routes.
For far too long, we’ve been casual about malpractice in our labour market, which sends a clear signal overseas that we’re a soft touch.
Well, no more – our rules will be enforced.
Any employers who refuse to play ball, they’ll be banned from hiring overseas labour.
Starmer says today's ONS figures show Tories were running an 'open borders experiment' by design
Keir Starmer says the figures from the ONS today show the last government were running “an open borders experiment”.
He makes the point, made by a Labour spokesperson earlier (see 11.25am), about how the figures show net migration going up four times under the Tories.
This wasn’t just bad luck, he says.
He claims this happened by design. It was an experiment to turn Britain into a country with open borders.
And now the Tories want to wave this away with a simple “we got it wrong”.
Scottish government says it will restore winter fuel payments for all pensioners next year
Every pensioner in Scotland will receive a winter heating payment next year, the Scottish government has announced. PA Media says:
Ministers were forced to delay plans to bring in the devolved pension age winter heating payment this year when the universality of its UK-wide counterpart was cut.
This afternoon social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville announced the Scottish government will ensure every pensioner receives a payment next year.
Under the plans, those in receipt of pension credit or other benefits and who have received a £200 or £300 payment this year will get the same next year through the devolved scheme.
All other pensioners will receive a reduced payment of £100.
As well as widening the eligibility of the payment, Somerville also announced a further £20m for the Scottish Welfare Fund and the same amount for Warmer Homes Scotland in this financial year.
The Scottish government, she said, has been forced to “mitigate” decisions made by the UK government, adding: “There has been change, but that change is that we are now mitigating against a Labour government and not a Tory one.
“We have not taken this decision lightly, given the significant pressures on the Scottish government’s budget, but this Scottish government is determined to stay true to our values.
“On our watch, we will treat people in this country with fairness, dignity and respect.
“We will not abandon older people this winter, or indeed any winter, and we will continue to protect our pensioners from the harsh reality of a UK Labour government.”
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