Sir Keir Starmer’s election strategy is already perfectly clear to those paying attention: to give as little substance as possible to his policies for as long as possible. This is to avoid jeopardising his party’s considerable lead in the polls.
Labour policy events simmer with, well, conservatism. Strategists drill home to their councillors and party faithful the need not to take a Labour win for granted.
The electoral logic is sound – why announce detail in your policy programme that would be embarrassing to U-turn on, and which could hand the Tories an opportunity to wrongfoot you?
Indeed, notice how the £28bn green U-turn drew considerable backlash from within, and taunts from without, where the shelving of his ‘National Care Service’ idea hardly cut through at all.
This despite by all accounts being a more politically and fiscally significant policy. The reason is that the ‘National Care Service’, much like labour’s recent economic announcement, contained no concrete suggestions at all.
The devil, for Keir Starmer, is detail. Much better to opportunistically signal that he would have done differently, and leave himself free to give the opposite signal later on when the political moment shifts.
This is especially important for issues of paramount electoral importance like immigration policy.
Seemingly, immigration under labour would solve everyone’s concerns. Numbers would come down, but the UK would be more generous and compassionate.
Workers would, apparently, be trained up and no longer undercut by immigrant labour, while also businesses being able to hire more freely from abroad. He can be everything to everyone, mirroring the contradictory desires of the electorate – a strategy supported empirically by much recent academic literature.
The challenge we face as researchers, and the dilemma facing voters, is how to predict the policy output of a Starmer government. The approach starts with a search for consistency amongst the noise of mixed messaging.
A forensic study of Sir Kier’s views historically, as a barrister and as Director of Public Prosecutions, and as an MP and in his shadow ministerial positions under Corbyn is a place to start.
We then require an evaluation of his priorities, his willingness to adopt new views for political ends, such as during the labour party’s long march to Abilene under Jeremy Corbyn.
The views of his MPs, shadow cabinet and his party membership will impact his calculations on any given policy.
Finally, we need subject-matter expertise, knowledge of how policies would really work, to understand the advice and options available to him, and finally, to evaluate the impacts of his policy.
A new report by the Henry Jackson Society on Starmer’s Prospective Immigration Policy points to the conclusion that Starmer is likely to retain many of the reforms being made by the Conservatives.
For instance, we find that Starmer is overwhelmingly likely to retain the higher earning threshold for overseas workers of £37,800, and is very unlikely to reverse changes to abolish the 20% salary discount on immigrant care workers, not least because it was Sir Kier’s policy before it was a Conservative one.
In a vast majority of cases, there is insufficient evidence to predict with high confidence Starmer’s making or not making a particular policy change. Yet there is also a final category, of changes to policy in which we can be highly confident.
Starmer’s policies, should he form a government following a general election, would involve the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme, an EU-wide returns agreement with a migrant quota, and more generous visa rules for workers to continue to bring their families from overseas.
These changes would result in 250,000 more migrants per year compared to the status quo.
Our forensic analysis, released this month, carried out by researchers and academics specialising in immigration issues and demography, also uses data from the UK’s time in the Dublin III regulation to show that any EU returns agreement – which Starmer intends to negotiate – would mean more migrants being returned to the UK than the UK would be able to send back.
This is in addition to a population and prosperity-adjusted quota, which Starmer has referred to as a “quid pro quo”, for which the UK would take a quota of an additional 124,614 persons per year.
It also shows that an EU returns agreement has very little chance of “stopping the boats”, and would in practice be able to return only a tiny minority of those who have crossed the channel illegally from the EU.
Data suggests only around 300 might be returned per year under an EU-returns agreement, out of the tens of thousands who have made channel crossings, while some 2,600 would be sent from the EU to the UK under the same rules.
This type of analysis has been done before, and is again necessary if we are to gain insight into the policy reality of a Starmer government.
More research and more study is of course necessary to give academics and the voting public a picture of the full policy space, beyond the singular area of immigration, and into tax, investment, healthcare and social issues.
After all, how can we hold our politicians to account if we don’t know what they stand for?
