| More than a decade ago, when Theresa May was home secretary, the government sent vans around a few racially diverse areas in London with billboards telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”. It was never a serious strategy: the £10,000 pilot resulted in 11 people leaving the country. But it was the beginning of the “hostile environment” strategy that defined the Tories’ immigration policy for the rest of the decade. Now Labour is trying its own version of the same thing. The familiarity of the marketing isn’t that surprising, Daniel Trilling said. “Talking to people who work at the Home Office over many years, one thing they say is that there are very few ideas in the toolbox. You get politicians of different generations, doing the same things over and over again to broadcast how tough they are.” Why is Labour doing this? At the weekend, the Sunday Times published a well-briefed account of Keir Starmer’s message on immigration at a recent cabinet meeting. “Progressive liberals have been too relaxed about not listening to people about the impact of it,” he reportedly told ministers. An ally of the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, explains that the intention is to blunt the threat from Reform: “Yvette sees the anger on the doorstep in her constituency. MPs in Reform-facing seats fully understand why we have to go further.” The theory is that people don’t believe that the government is taking strong action on immigration because they don’t see the proof of it in the news. A more cynical description might be to say that Labour wants to tell voters flirting with Reform that it is just as hostile to migrants as Nigel Farage is. And while the tone is very reminiscent of the May era, there are some crucial factual distinctions. “The Tories at that time wanted to set the anti-immigration mood music, but then pushed a lot of the job of finding undocumented migrants away from government and on to other bits of society – [on to] people who work in banks, or issue driving licences,” Trilling said. “That fit with the overall logic of austerity.” Today, as Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, points out in this piece, the entire returns operation is run by the Home Office, and the independent agencies that the last Labour government commissioned to run a voluntary programme have been excluded. Is it likely to work? The “go home” saga is not a very promising antecedent: it’s hard to find any sign in polling that it or the Tories’ broader strategy shifted opinions about the government’s competence over immigration enforcement. Can Labour expect a more significant impact this time? Clearly, it will depend, in part, on whether it can ultimately say that it has made a significant dent in the numbers arriving in the UK without permission, particularly by crossing the Channel in small boats. Even if that is possible – and it’s a huge if – Trilling is sceptical. “It’s just as likely that by making a song and dance about how much you’re cracking down, you’re reinforcing the idea that it’s a huge problem,” he said. “They have completely accepted the previous government’s view that this is a major security threat. Accepting your opponent’s framing in that way seems like a pretty basic political error.” Another justification offered by the Home Office minister Angela Eagle yesterday was that “it’s important that we send messages to people who may have been sold lies about what will await them in the UK”. But there is little evidence that this kind of deterrent was effective when the Tories made the same claim for the Rwanda policy. “There’s just not much evidence that this kind of information travels very quickly to people trying to come here,” Trilling said. “They’re often in information-starved environments. And there is the question of whether it is really going to be worse for people coming here from Sudan, or the dictatorship in Eritrea, for example, and who think: my family are in the UK, and that’s where I need to go.” What is the substance of Labour’s policy? The border security, asylum and immigration bill sets out a series of measures designed to give law enforcement bodies greater powers to, as you will have heard, “smash the gangs”. The most prominent of them focus on treating the crossings as an organised crime problem, and improving the coordination of UK efforts internally and with foreign partners. To that end, new “precursor” offences of helping to facilitate unauthorised entry to the UK are created. There is also a new offence of endangering other people during a small boat crossing – a move critics say will criminalise migrants rather than gangs, because they’re almost always the ones on the boats. The bill’s impact assessment says that the effect of these measures is uncertain. Meanwhile, the new border security commander role will be made statutory, and new obligations are put on partner agencies to cooperate with his work. “What it’s aiming to do is apply tougher criminal sanctions and tougher policing on an area that is already very heavily policed,” Trilling said. “What it doesn’t take into account is that increasingly severe policing measures have brought us to this point – one of the big reasons for the increase in small boat crossings was the huge amount of money poured into making access to ferries and lorries more difficult. That pushed people to take more desperate measures. The more securitised the route, the more it has to be controlled by middle men.” What might a different message look like? One person who thinks about this a lot is Sunder Katwala, of the thinktank British Future. “The way to respond to politicians who paint all refugees as illegals and seek to dehumanise migrants is not to play them at their own game,” he said in a recent interview. “It is to be proud about our integration story, celebrate our values and focus on the importance of a shared community.” There is good polling evidence that the median voter can be convinced that the UK has a responsibility towards refugees if they are also confident that those whose applications are not accepted will be removed. But, at the moment, Labour is only communicating half of that message. And without any appetite for creating safe and legal routes, it is very unlikely that the push factors at the heart of the problem will change. Trilling makes another point that is well outside of the zone of the political moment: “I often get asked, what’s your solution to Channel crossings? People get irritated when I say this, but the truth is that it’s not necessarily something that you can make stop. Efforts to make it harder to travel produce more chaos, and more dangerous routes. That has to be the starting point for a productive conversation.” It’s also true that Labour has the choice about what to emphasise – and that an alternative strategy might not just mean changing the terms of the debate on immigration and asylum, but challenging the assertion that it is the most urgent issue of our times. “If you think about the places where Reform are threatening Labour rather than the Tories, they’re all places where people live with poor infrastructure and poor economic prospects,” Trilling said. “If you started to deal with those things, you might have a more compelling message than how many people you’ve deported that week.” | 