After a severe rout in last week’s local elections, Labour’s Keir Starmer has started drawing up plans to ‘get tough’ on immigration and boost support for pensioners. (No points for guessing this would happen!)
The prime minister’s team is apparently planning to “go big” on migration to fend off Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which made massive gains at the polls, including by restricting visa applications from the nationalities most likely to overstay and claim asylum.
But Labour MPs themselves agree this won’t work—that, as senior backbencher Diane Abbott put it, “it is unikely [sic] to survive a court challenge.” Another Labour MP, Nadia Whittome, wrote on the party-friendly website Labour List that “we’ll never out-Farage Farage on migration—and it’d be wrong to try.”
It doesn’t help that Labour is also preparing to recommit Britain to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a significant block to all attempts—genuine or otherwise—to clamp down on illegal migration.
The government is also reportedly “rethinking” its decision to cut winter fuel payments, a benefit previously paid to all pensioners to help with energy bills. This move has been horrendously unpopular and no doubt lost Labour support from some of its longest backers. Ministers may now increase the threshold over which pensioners are no longer eligible for the allowance—though it appears they have ruled out a full U-turn.
But here too, Labour’s own are far from optimistic about a change in tack making any difference. “It comes up on the doorstep all the time,” one Cabinet minister toldThe—(again) Labour-friendly—Guardian.
Winter fuel will lose us the next election, it was a terrible mistake. But it’s probably too late for a U-turn now.
Labour officials are also likely to respond to the results by hurling abuse at Reform, predicted Nigel Farage. But the party leader insisted that “we’re going to stick to everything that we’ve promised the voters” and make the most of the “massive opportunity to build from here.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
