Can Starmer sell himself as the 'tough on immigration' PM?

British voters have heard many politicians over the past two decades vow to "take back control of our borders". Unveiling the government's long-awaited white paper on immigration on Monday, Keir Starmer became the latest PM to promise the UK's "broken system" will be fixed, enforcement will be "tougher than ever", and net migration numbers will tumble.

"It's a sign of the times," said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper, that a party led by human rights lawyers and confirmed centrists is "about to undertake a U-turn which is going to make it sound like it has adopted the Fortress Britain vision it once disdained as parochial or even subliminally racist".

What did the commentators say?

There's "just one problem" with the government's new approach, said Jonathan Walker in the Daily Express. "Labour and their lefty friends" have spent years branding opposition politicians who raised concerns about immigration as "horrible, xenophobic and racist". Starmer and his colleagues are "massive hypocrites".

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British voters will be "sceptical" of Starmer's new-found hardline stance on immigration, said Martin Ivens on Bloomberg. "They've heard it all before when it comes to pledges to make the borders less porous." For two decades, "politicians of all stripes" have pledged to reduce net migration, only to produce "half-hearted, ineffective or muddled" measures, even when "promises to curb the influx played a large part in the pledges that got them elected in the first place".

Many proposals – training Britons rather than importing unskilled foreign workers, and raising education levels and standards of English for those applying for skilled work visas – sound "pretty familiar", said The Independent in an editorial. But a proposed change giving clearer guidance to judges on the application of human rights provisions "could have a quantifiable effect, as well as helping to reassure that doubting public".

Starmer's warning that "we risk becoming an island of strangers" has already resulted in the PM being accused of "pandering to the populist right", said The Guardian. Some MPs on the left claimed that his words echo Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population "found themselves made strangers in their own country". But while this rhetoric may put off some progressives, Labour HQ will be more than happy if this message cuts through to up-for-grabs voters in red wall constituencies.

What next?

With Reform UK surging ahead in the polls and surveys showing immigration emerging as the number one issue for voters, it is clear why Labour feels the need to talk tough. "Whether voters will believe Sir Keir really means what he's saying remains to be seen", said Walker in the Express.

"Fury with the failure of successive governments to honour their effusive promises to 'take control' will mean that nothing short of Trump-style mass deportations will be enough" to mollify some voters, said The Independent. But a "first impression" of the government's proposals is that "their bark may be worse than their bite, and deliberately so".

Starmer has avoided setting any targets, other than bringing about a "substantial reduction" in net migration. But successive governments' failure to tackle the issue has "turned the voters against the political class", said Ivens on Bloomberg. "Now Starmer needs to own the change – not just mouth the slogans."