Supply, demand and Nigel Farage: is there really any difference between the Conservatives and Labour over immigration policy?

In the run up to the 1997 General Election, Jack Straw, the then shadow Labour home secretary told Labour party members that in order to win the coming election there must be no more than a width of a cigarette paper between Labour’s and the Conservatives’ policies on immigration. We appear to be very much back in that world now. With the two main parties eager to match each other pound for pound in sounding tough on immigration, their immigration policy aims seem almost entirely aligned. Is there now really any difference?

But while their aims for immigration policy may be increasingly aligned, their underlying rationale for that policy is not. For Conservatives, the focus is animated by wanting to constrain the supply of immigration. For Labour the focus is animated by wanting to constrain the demand for immigration. While this difference between the two main parties’ respective offers to the public on immigration policy has been getting slimmer, and harder to discern, it is just about still there, if you dig below the surface. But you do now really need to strain to see it.

On controlling irregular migration:

The clearest manifestation of the cigarette paper’s difference might be said to be Sir Keir Starmer’s commitment not to go forward with the Conservatives’ plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda as a deterrent to the irregular flows across the English Channel, and his staunch defence of the UK’s international law commitments which he reiterated in the first televised debate.

We have previously argued that efforts to bring control to the irregular flows across the Channel would ultimately be best served by an agreement with the EU to better share the burden and responsibility for refugees in the region, which could also end the incentive to make irregular journeys by breaking the connection between where people want to go and where they end up, and by making a better fist of the very tough job of returning more people whose asylum claims fail.

Labour has spoken of the former. And, with regard to the latter, Labour, spotting an opportunity in the fact that the Conservatives’ tough rhetoric on immigration control has  not been matched by their ability to remove irregular migrants from the UK, have promised resourcing for a dedicated returns and enforcement unit, and also spoken about fast tracking cases for those from ‘safe’ countries and most likely to be returned.

The differences between the parties here can be both overstated and understated. In the case of returns, on the one hand the process of returns is now completely gummed up by the provisions of the Conservative government’s Illegal Migration Act. But on the other hand the government’s returns agreement with Albania does appear to have had an impact. And in the case of relations with the EU, Rishi Sunak has certainly been assiduous in seeking out like-minded European leaders willing to talk tough on combatting irregular migration, and his government has recently concluded an agreement with the European Border and Coast Guard Agency to tackle criminal people smuggling gangs.

And while there are still differences, Labour’s fundamental shift of its position in this policy area to inhabit a similar space to the Conservatives has certainly blurred matters. Labour could have reacted to the events in the Channel, and to the government’s Rwanda plan, by taking a fundamentally different perspective on events. As the Democrats did in the last US presidential election, by not subscribing to the Republicans’ framing of events at the US-Mexican border as an existential crisis. But Labour has chosen a different course.

While rejecting the Rwanda plan as the solution, publicly at least, Labour does not frame the situation in the Channel as any less of a problem than the Conservatives do. Both the main parties are therefore now aligned, both around framing these irregular flows as a serious security problem that must be stopped, and as something meriting a headline pledge to voters that they will do so – part of Rishi Sunak’s five pledges and of Sir Keir Starmer’s six pledges.

Sir Keir’s rhetoric around a new Border Security Command would not have been out of place in the pre-Rwanda plan period when Priti Patel was home secretary. This is a huge shift of position for a party which at the 2019 General Election was even promising to scrap the hostile environment.

Some might argue that Labour has only promised to set something up – a new Border Security Command – rather than actually achieve anything. But given the number of times that the Labour leader has used the phrase ‘smash the gangs’ over the past year – and indeed during the first leaders’ debate on ITV – that seems an exercise in hair splitting which will find little favour with voters when judging the outcome.

And in relentlessly framing the issue as one that is about security and criminality, rather than about immigration per se, it is hard to see what is the pathway out, other than complete success. While you may be able to convince voters to accept less, but still some, immigration, it is much harder to make the case for less, but still some, of the UK continuing to be exploited by heinous criminal gangs.

There is of course no risk-free path for Labour in this hugely risky area of policy. But it has arguably chosen the path that will leave it the most immediately accountable if it wins the election. It could have chosen the path of arguing that the Channel crossings, in the context of overall immigration, are not large enough to present the existential risk that the Conservatives frame them as. Or it could have followed the opposite patch, saying that it would pursue the Conservatives’ plan properly and see if that could be made to work. Of course, both of those paths would themselves, for different reasons, have represented huge challenges for Labour. But so does the path that it has chosen – to argue that events in the Channel really are supremely important, but that it has its own plan which can deal with this.

The genesis of the Rwanda plan was frustration that a securitised response alone did not seem sufficient to bring control to the flows across the Channel. If Labour do take power, it will have the opportunity to see if it can put in place a securitised response which works better. But, this being a summer election – and therefore being held during peak season for the flows across the Channel – it is unclear how much time Labour will be given by the public to see what difference another type of ‘Command’ can make.

All eyes will be on this right from day one of a Labour administration. And if Labour has no greater success than the Conservative government in stemming the flows across the Channel, we should expect to see the Rwanda plan very much back in people’s minds, and in the news, as the alternative that was never tried. And, if that happens, it is just possible that we might then see both parties’ offerings in this policy space align even more than was anticipated.

On controlling legal migration:

The Conservative government has presided over a post-Brexit, post-COVID boom in net migration to the UK. Geopolitical circumstances played a part, with the flows from Ukraine and Hong Kong, but the larger numbers coming to the UK for work, particularly focused on the health and care sector, and for higher education, many from India and Nigeria, was a result of very deliberate government policy. This included a liberal approach on the right for international students to stay on in the UK after their studies to work, a lower minimum salary threshold for migrant workers, and the use of the Shortage Occupation List mechanism to allow lower wages to be paid by employers in occupations struggling to attract staff.

Faced with the threat that Labour might outflank them on immigration control by committing to tougher policies on salaries required to be paid to migrant workers allowed to fill shortages, and in response to record net migration figures announced in November 2023, the Conservatives a few weeks later then announced a significant reversal of some of their previous liberal policy approaches, with a five point plan of measures designed to reduce net migration to the UK. This restricted dependants of overseas care workers and students from coming to the UK, while also hiking both the minimum salary threshold for overseas workers and the minimum income requirement for incoming overseas partners of British citizens.

Now, with the formal re-entrance into the election spotlight of the UK’s leading exponent of the rhetoric of supply side immigration management, Nigel Farage, with his promise of zero net legal immigration to the UK, the Conservatives have felt the need to take their own supply side immigration management playbook to the next level, announcing that if re-elected they would bring in a reducing annual cap on work and family migration, to be advised upon by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), and voted on in parliament.

And, as, as Farage himself has said, based on recent figures a net zero figure would still “leave room for 600,000 people coming to the UK, which is “plenty” for the labour market”, depending how the Conservatives’ newly announced cap mechanism were to work in practice, this might even ultimately turn out to be tougher on the supply side of immigration than Reform UK’s approach. For the first time, Labour seemed a little unsure how to respond. However the cap mechanism would work, and all the practical difficulties it would inevitably give rise to, it is hard to agree with the shadow Home Secretary’s assertion that it is simply “rehashing failed announcements”.

Labour’s rhetoric has also been that legal immigration to the UK is too high and needs to come down. And in order to go on to the offensive against the Conservatives’ over their record on immigration numbers, Labour have had to adopt the posture of supply side constrainers, confirming that there are some of the Conservatives’ supply cutting measures that Labour will accept.

Even in areas where Labour might be thought more sympathetic to a more open approach, such as the potential for expanding the UK’s youth mobility scheme – which allows young people to come to the UK to work for a few years – to be open to the youth of the EU, Labour have held the line with a firm ‘no’. Seemingly motivated in this particular case by a fear of being misrepresented as allowing the re-introduction of freedom of movement from the EU through the side door.

Yet, even so, it is in the area of work immigration that the underlying rationale difference between the two main parties can still be discerned most clearly. Here, Labour’s emphasis has been much more consistently around seeking to reduce immigration by seeking to reduce the demand for it. Labour has – with some justification – claimed the points-based system as its own idea. But argues that the system needs to be configured in a way that ensures appropriate investment in local training and skills, with employers use of immigrant labour regarded as a privilege employers must earn, not simply a right they are given, and with those who break the rules losing that privilege.

Even both main parties’ common desire to increase the involvement of the MAC – a panel of experts originally established by the last Labour government to provide independent expert research and advice to the government on managing immigration – in actually setting immigration policy comes from different perspectives. With the just announced Conservative policy of a reducing annual cap on work and family migration to advised upon by the MAC, the Conservatives’ plan is to have the MAC assist in constraining the supply of immigration. Whereas, with its intention to link the MAC in to bodies tasked with developing an industrial and skills strategy so that shortages do not just suck in migrant workers, but also galvanise investment in upskilling the local workforce, Labour’s plan for the MAC is for the MAC to in effect assist it with constraining the demand for immigration.

The debates and Farage start – What next?

It seems clear that the Conservatives’ aim in this General Election campaign period is to seek to create the appearance of more than a cigarette paper’s difference between themselves and Labour on immigration policy. And that Labour’s aim is to keep the appearance of that difference to no more than a cigarette paper wide. Labour had been doing a fair job of that. But the first televised debate provided a golden opportunity for Rishi Sunak to magnify the difference, and he took it.

At the same time, with Nigel Farage now stepping back into the limelight, an additional element is added to the mix. While clearly a challenging development for the Conservatives, this may also stress the Labour strategy on immigration to the full.