IT’S easy to see why Labour are frustrated. It doesn’t seem to matter how many immigration raids the Home Office makes, or how many people are arrested, the voting public still don’t seem satisfied.
In fact, the polls suggest they are even more minded to flirt with Reform UK than they were this time last year, when a Tory-led Home Office was raiding and arresting at a much lower rate.
It’s almost – almost – as if it doesn’t actually matter what efforts are being made to improve the UK’s border security, and that voters are much more influenced by what’s being said on the subject by the right-wing men with the biggest megaphones, both at home and abroad.
“We don’t think it’s enough just to look strong on migration, we actually need to be strong,” a Downing Street source told The Guardian. “We’ve done really well on returns but people say they don’t believe it, that if it was true they’d see it on the news.”
There’s an incoherence here, as yesterday’s publication of footage of immigration raids was clearly all about looking strong, and convincing those disbelievers. When Labour trialled adverts in the north-west of England trumpeting the number of deportations that have taken place under their watch, they found that people thought they were lying.
They have responded to this in a bizarrely literal way, by releasing footage of people being removed from houses and car washes then marched onto planes. This in itself does nothing to show the scale of the operations, but it functions as a gimmick that helps get the figures out there.
Unfortunately for Labour, their plan is unlikely to have had the desired effect for two main reasons.
One obstacle to people “seeing it on the news” is other news breaking, and while the story of the raids did make broadcast headlines, in the end it didn’t spend long at the top of the politics section of the BBC News website.
The Sunday publication of more messages from a WhatsApp group called “Trigger Me Timbers” led to Oliver Ryan becoming the second MP to be suspended for participating in it, generating a second wave of negative press for Labour and bumping the immigration story into second place.
While The National gave due prominence to the release of footage of migrants being escorted onto planes for deportation – to highlight criticism of the move, including the Green Party co-leader referring to “breath-taking cruelty” – readers of the Daily Mail website had to scroll past stories about the offensive WhatsApp group, the new health minister’s views on single-sex toilets, Andrew Lloyd Webber joining the latest protest by farmers and the price of Freddos soaring to £1 before they got to the headline about “Britain’s Trump-style mass deportation flights”.
The second problem for Labour is that many of the voters most concerned about immigration are probably not particularly interested in the status of the bloke who works at the cut-price car wash or the woman who provides cheap manicures.
And they may have little interest in joining the dots between these two groups, instead just wanting the problem solved by some unspecified “tough action”, the effects of which will be clearly visible on the streets where they live.
“It’s important that we send messages to people who may have been sold lies about what will await them in the UK if they get themselves smuggled in,” Home Office minister Angela Eagle told Radio 4 yesterday.
But that would be the purpose of disseminating the footage overseas, not showing it to voters in the UK. Labour can’t seem to decide if they want the people in the footage to be viewed as victims or villains – and by trying to have it both ways, they will fail to convince either of their intended audiences.
A policy of “show, don’t tell” is not the way forward when large swathes of people remain convinced the Government is lying to them. Many will rightly conclude that the arrests depicted represent low-hanging fruit for the National Crime Agency, and view the footage as a cynical attempt to suggest their local concerns are being addressed.
Even if some voters see the deportations and feel satisfied that Labour are being “tough on immigration”, Keir Starmer and colleagues seem to be so narrowly focused on that group – those who might turn towards Reform UK – that they have completely forgotten about another; natural Labour voters who abstained rather than voting for what passes as the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership.
These voters will be dismayed to see Labour trying to outdo Reform UK on immigration, especially if they live in Scotland and have an understanding – as the great majority of Scots do – that we need to encourage more people to come and live and work here.
Will Labour seek to show the positives of legal immigration with the same enthusiasm as they are showing their illegal immigration crackdown? That seems unlikely.
