Labour to unveil big immigration plans next week – but will they win back votes?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxkl01qjzwo
Posted by suspended-sentence
Labour to unveil big immigration plans next week – but will they win back votes?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxkl01qjzwo
Posted by suspended-sentence
30 Comments
[Betteridge in force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)
I think that after decades of the tory’s throwing out pure BS to win votes, half the country has now adapted to the point where any *actually viable policy* doesn’t cut it anymore, and they’re gonna keep chasing after unicorns like a porn addict an hour into a goon session. They want miracle pills that magically make everything better with zero downside.
There is nothing Labour can actually do to court them other than lie or harm the country. Anything else won’t be enough.
They need to actually do something drastic and prove that they can follow through with it. No snappy slogans, no more words. Talk is cheap.
Im sceptical of what they will do though because they’ve had to be brought kicking and screaming to address immigration, and they are only talking tough now because of the threat of Reform. They are doing it to try and save their own positions come next election.
But we will see. I’d much rather Labour be the ones to get a grip on the situation than Reform or worse come along. I have always said we need one of the main parties to tackle this or we will end up with something far worse down the line and they will propose much worse solutions.
I’ll post what I said in another thread. The only way to cut net migration is to increase the number leaving.
The only thing that will increase migrants exodus is a recession/rising unemployment. People on work visas who lose their jobs, and with no recourse to public funds, will leave.
Rachel Reeves’ rise in Employer NI might deliver this. The BoE says their models show employment growth has stalled. Unemployment has started to rise.
What an irony if Rachel Reeves is the reason migration falls and automation rises. Will people be hailing her in four years as the woman who saved Labour from Farage?!
If Reform voters have to choose between a Reform-esque Labour or just Reform, they’re going to choose Reform. Trying to chase those votes is a fruitless endeavour, especially when they’re already bleeding their core voter base with their neoliberal policies.
Nope they’re trying to replace British workers with Indians !!! Farage for the win
Let me guess – more hoops and massive costs for legal migrants, nothing workable to stop illegal migrants.
They should just say “Listen your concerns about immigration aren’t real, the truth is you just hate brown people so vote for us unless you want to be called a bigot”
This has been a problem all around Europe.
Political parties talk or dont even talk about it, and then far right parties gain traction.
If there is momentum on reform, only labour and tories to blame.
This is what should be shouted from rooftops all around the country:
> David Cameron then **promised repeatedly that he’d get the number of extra people settling in the UK under 100,000. That vow was repeatedly broken**. His government’s lack of ability to control migration from Europe was at the core of the Brexit argument.
> With deep irony, Boris Johnson won that argument in the referendum, **then set up an immigration system that allowed even more people to move to the UK**, peaking at 900,000 in 2023. Rishi Sunak then promised to “Stop the Boats” – but they still came.
> A No 10 insider says the “public has been gaslit for years – taxpayers have been told it’s happening, but nothing has been changing”.
The Tories were dreadful over their residency. But you Labour apologists make me feel a little unwell. The last six months have already proven they will be far more damaging. I hope after this stint, neither get another look in. Ever.
No, because the country’s issues aren’t from desperate people trying to scrape by who arrive in dinghies.
The country’s issues are from allowing wealthy foreign investors control fundamental aspects of our society. Half of London is owned by foreign oligarchs, with housing standing empty of residents because they’re just held as investments, and the our train fees are so high because they are owned by foreign bodies who subsidise THEIR country’s rail travel out of our pockets.
As it always has been, the panic about migration is a smokescreen for pitting the lower classes against each other.
Even if Labour enacted broad changes halting migration, the average UK voter wouldn’t see any fundamental improvement to their conditions because migrants *aren’t causing the problem.* And so then the right wing will sell them ‘Oh well actually it’s X minority who’s really causing the fundamental economic problems you’re facing, let’s legislate them into oblivion next’ and so legislation will be enacted and people will just drift further into populism.
Actually fixing the economic issues of this country will gain Labour voters, not blindly chasing whatever the right wing papers say people want.
I have a huge stick up my backside about a small fix.
There is currently, as I understand it, no link between traveling abroad and getting benifits.
I personally know few people’s parents doing just that. They have international romming, so they pretend they are in the county.
They go abroad like 9- 10 months at a time and come in only for ones in a blue moon walk in check.
Shit like this is a easy fix by linking systems that’s already in place…. But nooooooo
I think we need a Dubai situation
No citizenship ever, just work permits, and when you get too old you have to go back to where you came from
No one is going to care about relaunches and PR.
The fact is the Tories had 14 yrs of uncontrolled immigration.
If Labour end up with 5yrs of uncontrolled immigration then for many voters Reform UK will be the only game in town at the next election.
Too little too late, actions speak louder than words and he doing it to win and then back to norm so its temporary. Internet is ruining it for these people as they are waking up, slowly. But they are waking up
Whether it wins votes will largely depend on what the plans are, I suspect.
I wish our politics would stop being reactionary and focus on fixing the long term systemic issues in the UK. People and businesses want to see a long term plan with clear goals and timelines, not spur of the meoment policy decisions with no long term thought.
No because the anti immigration rhetoric isn’t based on real life experiences, its people being hoodwinked by social media into blaming a vulnerable group whilst the rich hoard more money for themselves
Soooooo smashing the gangs not going to plan….who’d a thunk
I don’t see how they can. Reeves’ big growth plan is based on the migration numbers from ONS and OBR. So, if they are going to change, then Reeves will have to get her spreadsheet back out.
It had a net migration of 2.5m total by 2030. I’m not sure how people can be surprised when it’s been floating around since Feb.
Labour couldd improve the UK 100% and Laura K (election fraudster) would still frame it as a bad thing, anyone who thinks the BBC is left wing just needs to watch and read this excuse for a ‘journalist’s’ content.
The issue is we need immigration to grow GPD as young adults aren’t having children anymore. Young adults aren’t having children because of the cost of living relative to income. Wages just don’t cut it everything is stupidly expensive in this country. From housing, to trains, to eating out or having fun, god forbid child care or anything else needed for raising a family. There needs to be a massive redistribution of wealth in this country, or the snake will continue to eat its own tail and the fertility rate will continue to drop and the government and the government will still seek to raise GDP by immigration.
No because both Labour and the conservatives have said this how many times and nothing has happened. Unless they actually bring the levels of economic migrants to near zero, completely stop the boats and start the gargantuan task of remigration of the swarms of young men that have recently entered this country (whether we think this is a good idea or not) and all of this is done in a way noticeable to voters then they won’t bring back votes. There’s not a chance of that happening so I seriously doubt they bring back votes.
I’ve long subscribed to the theory/notion that, post 1970s labour union uprisings, certain influential free-market capitalist thinkers (supported by Reagan & Thatcherism) managed to permanently change the socio-political landscape with a sinister method of both massively increasinging immigration – for the obvious historic reasons that it increases the available labour pool and so tilts power away from the working class towards capitalists & business-owners – **but also simultaneously** demonising immigrants, refugees and people of other cultures. This toxic rhetoric managed to turn most left-leaning economists, thinkers and politicians into also becoming almost pro-immigration (or perhaps more accurately anti anti-immigration), despite the obvious negative consequences for a country’s existing working class.
I’ve always found it allegorious to how in the Star Wars Episode 1 prequal, Palpatine managed to play both sides and turn a democracy into a tyrannical Empire with him as Emperor. That’s an obvious dramatisation but to me there’s some similarity in how a topic with massive economic implications became out-of-bounds and gave one-side complete control despite a democratic setting.
Consequently, we see that since the early 1980s, immigration in Western countries has increased [near exponentially](https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/) and its clear underlying role in the change to the [wealth-inequality landscape](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jun/27/century-income-inequality-statistics-uk), which for most the 20th century had been trending towards a more egalitarian future up until the 1980s since which inequality has been consistently rising.
The Tories will say it is too little too late, Reform will take the credit for it being their idea, Labour supporters will revolt saying it is too right wing, charities will say it is too harsh and the media will find a tiny flaw and make it out to be the end of the earth and if they can’t find one there will be misinterpretation as to what is really happening.
What immigration are we talking about? The 750 thousand that come here quite legally and take up jobs or the 80 odd thousand refugees/ asylum seekers. Or both?
>Her White Paper, which will be called “Restoring Control Over the Immigration System” and be 69 pages long, is a big moment for Labour to try to sort a messy system, under which the numbers of people moving here rose way over most people’s imagination.
I’m so glad a party that goes to this level of detail and analysis on such a big problem is tackling this issue. How anyone thinks Reform is better equipped to tackle it I have no idea. Farage will be too incompetent that immigration will end up increasing under him. His proposed timeline alone makes me think he will just try anything and see if it breaks.
>But the big principle in Cooper’s thinking is that the immigration system should be fundamentally linked to the labour market – helping British workers get the skills to fill vacancies, rather than overseas workers being brought in again and again, to plug the gaps.
Looks like they are finally tackling the underlying issue. Employers have been relying on using foreign labour and indentured servitude to plug a gap and keep wages down. I hope this actually leads to more training opportunities for those who are entering the job market. We are desperately in need of those.
absolutely not, immigration is a massive red herring around falling living standards, they need to stop persecuting trans people and the disabled.
I have almost no doubt I’m going to be underwhelmed by this announcement.