'Keir Starmer's Painful Immigration Speech Is a Direct Affront to the Diagnosis He Was Voted in On'
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Clickbait media has apparently made it impossible to pass intelligent migration policy. Keir Starmer's white paper announcement was a cry for help from the "structured, evidence-led" policymaking he promised voters, traces of which were fighting to be heard over cantankerous layers of clickbait.
His colleague, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, blamed the media, and told me she feared Starmer was walking her party into a second Windrush Scandal.
"When politicians act in this way, it is to play up to the media. But language has consequences, our policy decisions have consequences… We said we learned lessons from the Windrush Scandal and that's exactly the type of thing that's happening."
Before I trained as a journalist, I worked in the asylum sector and in border-lying camps, and I am often amazed at the ignorance of editors and reporters when it comes to basic immigration law, terminology, and context. I also do not believe that accuracy is their priority.
When I interviewed Ribeiro-Addy, who represents my own Windrush-heavy constituency of Clapham and Brixton, for Middle East Eye, she remarked that we seemed different from other media, because we refused to echo Starmer's binary distinction between the 'legal immigration' he spoke about this week, and the asylum routes he'll be speaking on in the Summer.
We were simply reflecting what is accurate. Entering countries without papers in order to claim asylum is a right enshrined in human rights law to which the UK is signatory. The late Conservative Government did indeed pass a bill to criminalise it (leaving judges to wrestle between national and international law), but our media had been using the term "illegal migrants" without a single grounding in legal reality for years.
'The Media Is Silent About Female Asylum Seekers - Yet Fixated About Men Arriving in the UK'
There's a reason news outlets never focus on the many women seeking refuge in the UK, argue Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia
Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia
The first thing that struck me watching Starmer's speech was the cavernous disconnect between what he told us the policies are designed to do, and what they will achieve if enacted. Measuring policies against their stated intention is a simple, unbiased metric of accountability that I wish more media had used to analyse his white paper.
It was, frankly, painful watching Starmer sing of his own integrity, while dancing an 'Us vs. Them' pantomime at the pulpit. He paired bombastic, nationalistic rhetoric with the insistent logic of bettering UK labour conditions and promoting integration. He denigrated foreign residents as "strangers", and then immediately leapt to his own defence, saying: "People who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I'm doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in."
Let's assess that.
Labour's 2024 General Election Manifesto did indeed pledge to reduce net 'legal' migration (p.42). It justified this aim specifically and exclusively using traditional Labour values: "to upskill workers and improve working conditions in the UK."
Echoes of this were heard in Starmer's speech. He acknowledged that "pulling up the drawbridge" would "hurt the pay packets of working people," but reasoned, "we do have to ask why parts of the economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour, rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community". Among his proposed policies are a few that catered to this goal.
Power, Visas, and the Pol...
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Clickbait media has apparently made it impossible to pass intelligent migration policy. Keir Starmer's white paper announcement was a cry for help from the "structured, evidence-led" policymaking he promised voters, traces of which were fighting to be heard over cantankerous layers of clickbait.
His colleague, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, blamed the media, and told me she feared Starmer was walking her party into a second Windrush Scandal.
"When politicians act in this way, it is to play up to the media. But language has consequences, our policy decisions have consequences… We said we learned lessons from the Windrush Scandal and that's exactly the type of thing that's happening."
Before I trained as a journalist, I worked in the asylum sector and in border-lying camps, and I am often amazed at the ignorance of editors and reporters when it comes to basic immigration law, terminology, and context. I also do not believe that accuracy is their priority.
When I interviewed Ribeiro-Addy, who represents my own Windrush-heavy constituency of Clapham and Brixton, for Middle East Eye, she remarked that we seemed different from other media, because we refused to echo Starmer's binary distinction between the 'legal immigration' he spoke about this week, and the asylum routes he'll be speaking on in the Summer.
We were simply reflecting what is accurate. Entering countries without papers in order to claim asylum is a right enshrined in human rights law to which the UK is signatory. The late Conservative Government did indeed pass a bill to criminalise it (leaving judges to wrestle between national and international law), but our media had been using the term "illegal migrants" without a single grounding in legal reality for years.
'The Media Is Silent About Female Asylum Seekers - Yet Fixated About Men Arriving in the UK'
There's a reason news outlets never focus on the many women seeking refuge in the UK, argue Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia
Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia
The first thing that struck me watching Starmer's speech was the cavernous disconnect between what he told us the policies are designed to do, and what they will achieve if enacted. Measuring policies against their stated intention is a simple, unbiased metric of accountability that I wish more media had used to analyse his white paper.
It was, frankly, painful watching Starmer sing of his own integrity, while dancing an 'Us vs. Them' pantomime at the pulpit. He paired bombastic, nationalistic rhetoric with the insistent logic of bettering UK labour conditions and promoting integration. He denigrated foreign residents as "strangers", and then immediately leapt to his own defence, saying: "People who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I'm doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in."
Let's assess that.
Labour's 2024 General Election Manifesto did indeed pledge to reduce net 'legal' migration (p.42). It justified this aim specifically and exclusively using traditional Labour values: "to upskill workers and improve working conditions in the UK."
Echoes of this were heard in Starmer's speech. He acknowledged that "pulling up the drawbridge" would "hurt the pay packets of working people," but reasoned, "we do have to ask why parts of the economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour, rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community". Among his proposed policies are a few that catered to this goal.
Power, Visas, and the Pol...
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