Voices: Well done, Rishi – you handed Keir Starmer his immigration ‘win’ on a plate

It was Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick who took the measures that led to this morning’s dramatic figures showing that net immigration halved last year. But it will be Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Angela Rayner who take the credit.

First, though, we should deal with the reasonable objection that this assumes that immigration of 860,000 a year is a bad thing, and that 431,000 is a better thing. That shouldn’t be controversial. Adding the equivalent population of a city the size of Edinburgh to the population every year is unlikely to improve the quality of life for existing residents, whatever it might do to GDP. It is not surprising that 95 per cent of British people say that the “ideal” level of net immigration is below 500,000 a year.

In fact, last week’s opinion poll by Merlin Strategy found that two-thirds of British people (63 per cent) want immigration to be below 10,000 a year, which is essentially no net immigration at all.

So let us leave aside the knotty question of the implications of lower immigration for economic growth, and assume for the purposes of argument that halving net immigration is a triumph of public policy. Who should take the credit?

Again, the answer should not be controversial. The latest figures cover the calendar year 2024. Labour was in government for the second half of the year, but the policy changes that contributed to the fall in immigration were all made under the Conservatives.

Cleverly, who was home secretary from November 2023, and Jenrick, who was immigration minister for the year before that, have both taken to social media to claim that today’s figures vindicate them.

They both have a claim, although the reductions in visas were driven by No 10, where Rishi Sunak had belatedly woken up to the scale of the disaster bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson.

Unfairly for him, though, the idea of Sunak taking the credit for anything is not going to wash with public opinion. Indeed, the idea that any Conservative should be praised for anything to do with immigration is implausible. It was the Conservative Party that was entrusted with getting Brexit done: one of the most important parts of that mission was to reduce immigration, and it quadrupled.

It falls to the Labour government, therefore, to take the credit for inevitable unwinding of the post-Brexit surge in immigration, and the further reductions that were the result of Tory policy. Starmer is assisted by the delay in publishing the figures five months after the end of the period to which they refer; but he has also sought to associate himself with a policy of lower immigration, set out in a white paper published last week and in the “island of strangers” speech that accompanied it.

The figures are expected to continue to decline over the next few years, with new measures introduced by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, exerting further downward pressure on them. Although the government’s failure to stop the boats – I am sorry, I mean “smash the gangs”… – will undermine its achievement, it will have a reasonable story to tell on immigration at the next election.

But what has Angela Rayner got to do with it? Yesterday, I commented on the astute politics of her leaked plans to soak the rich with small and believable tax rises. Now The Daily Telegraph has published the other half of her secret document, and it is even cleverer.

As well as proposing tax rises that appeal to the left, the document suggested cuts in spending that appeal to social conservatives: restricting access to welfare benefits and the state pension for immigrants who have been here for five to 10 years, and increasing fees for them to use the NHS.

“Tax the rich and cut immigration” is, by coincidence, the policy combination most likely to appeal to Labour voters tempted to defect to Reform.

And on immigration as on tax, she is taking the popular bits of what the government is likely to do anyway, and trying to take some of the credit for them.

Starmer has been a lucky general in taking over just as the peak of immigration passed. But, as he wasn’t responsible for getting immigration down, he can’t complain if his deputy and rival seeks to share some of the credit that doesn’t belong to him.