EXPLAINED: Keir Starmer's pivot to the right on immigration

Okay so Keir Starmer this morning has announced a crackdown, various new measures that he's going to bring in to sort of curb the 700,000 net migration that we've seen up until, when is it, when would have been, the year to June last year. We're going to see things like English tests, we're going to see things like a crackdown on recruitment of care workers, essentially everything the Conservatives went on about for years as a means of cracking down, that's what they're going to do. You had Yvette Cooper yesterday on the Sunday shows talking about low skilled migration. I don't know if any of you have ever worked in care. Christ. It's pretty high skilled I'd say. They're basically adopting a lot of the reform rhetoric, I suppose in sort of a bid to counter the huge surge in the polls that we've seen and the number of councils that were picked up. What's interesting is Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, friend of the podcast, friend of the podcast, he was on, he did the closing speech yesterday, Progressive Britain, he was talking about compassion for refugees and for migrants, which is fascinating, he said that's their only point of difference to reform. Contrast that to what the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was saying on the Sunday morning broadcast rounds, it's almost as if they're in two diametrically different parties. Okay there's so much there that I want to talk about. I want to talk about labour inconsistency, I want to talk about whether or not there's a vision and if their entire programme for government is just sort of defensively reacting to their political opponents. Shall we just dial into care for a second though and talk about the specifics of that? Because I think, look, there's a separation here to my mind between legal migration and refugees. I think with refugees it's pretty clear cut that we have a responsibility to accept our fair share of the world's downtrodden, particularly given our government's taste for bombing and militarily intervening in the Middle East. Taste for blood. Yeah, taste for blood, which I'm getting myself actually with all these slugs that I'm taking down. I see how it happens. Your neighbour's George Bush. Look, there are pros and there are trade-offs to this. Do we think the appropriate way to staff the care sector, the NHS, any industry is with foreign workers and bringing them into the country to staff those agencies? Absolutely, that's a valid position to hold. It's an equally valid position to say, no, do you know what? We don't want to staff these organisations with foreign workers. We want to staff them with British workers. For me, there are some pretty obvious consequences downstream of that. One is that wages are going to increase in that sector. Let's say you're a young person in London and you're looking at what industry you're going to get into. Entry-level job, no qualifications required. Starting out, I don't know, you look at Costa, you can get £13.60 as a barista in Costa. McDonald's is about 12 quid. The care sector, for which there is quite a lot of training involved, a year-long apprenticeship, 12-week training course, the starting hourly rate is below both of those pay grades. In fact, it's roughly comparable to the McDonald's salary. If you're a young person and you're going, do you know what? I could do this really hard work. Care is not glamorous. I'm sure anyone who has elderly relatives or has someone they know that requires care, it's hard, hard work. Not to say that working in Costa or McDonald's isn't, but if you can earn the same flipping burgers, selling chips, and if you can earn more making coffees for someone, for me, it seems quite obvious that the wages in that sector are going to increase quite rapidly if you stop supplying workers who are prepared to accept a lower salary to do the job. There's also the point of lack of growth as well, lack of salary growth. It can be about five pence over three years. We've got the training involved for these potential workers. That's probably going to mean an increase in taxes in order for the British state to fund it. These are the trade-offs at play in this conversation, but the way that it's couched is we're going to reduce immigration. Okay, fine, but it also probably means an increase in taxes and it means inflationary pressures for the wages of the people that work in that sector. That wouldn't be a bad thing, would it? No. Can I also just say that the House of Commons Library says last year estimated there was around 131,000 vacancies in the care sector? No. Yeah, it's not. What the ****? It's sort of like it's really put in the cart before the horse, sort of similar to what the Conservatives did. Do you remember when they were talking about how we don't train British people anymore? This was a lot, funnily enough, Storm has been saying that again this morning. What's interesting about that point is there aren't courses available to train people. So you can sort of shout about this as much as you'd like to and tell people to get on with it, but if you've cut the education sector for the past 15 years and those courses no longer exist, I'll point to welding, for example. We have a drought of welders in this country. We really need them, but there aren't any welding courses. There's also not any apprenticeships that offer that as a course. If you start by offering it, then you can start turning away, quote-unquote, foreign workers who are currently being used to fill those roles. Yeah, for sure. It's less of a point of principle for me to be like, yeah, do you know what? Absolutely, it's right that the care sector is staffed with people from different countries. For me, as someone of a socialist persuasion, I don't have a problem with increased wages as a result of restricting labour supply. It's not the worst thing in the world. The thing for me, and we'll come on to this, I'm sure, about the incoherence in labour's thinking and reform's thinking is, particularly if you look at reform and the desire for a small state, lower taxes. You look at the Mail on Sunday this week and, admittedly, it's not anything new, but scrapping taxes for those earning less than 20k, but keeping the triple lock. These two things, they're incoherent. You can't have them together. If you want to have a small state, nimble state, but equally you want to staff the care sector with British workers, well, like you said, that means vocational courses. It means increased taxation to pay for them. The two things don't sit together. It always seems the way with government to make the moral case against care workers before making the fiscal case. It's happened probably for the last three or four years. Like you heard it with, as I just told you about the vacancies, 131,000 vacancies. What did the Conservatives do last year? They decided that any care worker would not be allowed to bring in their family if they were immigrating to work in the care sector. The emotional case there, the grievance politics case is, if someone comes into work in the care sector and they bring with them three children and a wife who are all dependent on the state, then it's not net productive to bring in those people. That's the grievance politics case. The other side of that is, if there's no one to fulfil that role, then Doris, or even actually someone younger, you know, little Bobby, what's he going to do? If there's no one there to fulfil the role, do those people just languish and die? I think what's stunning with this is, as you said Eva, is putting the cart before the horse. We have got this well-trained army of young care workers ready to deploy, ready to plug the gaps. Do you remember when Covid, when they expedited the graduation of medical students, because they were like, ----, medical emergency, we need qualified doctors, go, go, go, go. This is a bit of a care emergency, I would say, if there's thousands and thousands of vacancies and we're just turning off the resources to plug them. But then also those people, instead of ending up in care homes or having at-home care, they then block beds in the NHS. It's sort of like, it's a chain. If you can't send someone home, if there's not a district nurse available or there isn't a carer, they're going to have to stay in possibly A&E. The care sector is kind of one of those political parties, leading politicians have been trying to grapple with this for a long old time. Dementia Tax, Theresa May, Boris Johnson sort of committed to it and then didn't really come forward with anything, didn't he? Corbyn was big on calling for a national care service. And it's a proper and appropriate one because it is a very serious situation. And by the way, I'm not sure private equity is the answer, the ownership of a lot of the companies that provide the actual care, whether it's fostering children or otherwise. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've interviewed George Monbiot about this the last time he was here. We spoke about it a little bit. What's wrong with mixing private interests with healthcare? Said Wes Streeting. Yeah, so we have an ageing population. This is just a macro trend, right? We have an ageing population. I think Bastani's next book is about this and I heard him talking about it on the radio once upon a time where he talks about a snake. And if you imagine a snake eating a large animal, as it passes down the snake, the swelling, that is the baby boomer generation in the demographic pyramid. There's this large cohort of people and as they age and they move through the demographics, they move down through younger, middle-aged, elderly. And then now getting to that point, the tax base, the generational cohorts behind them are not large enough to fund the welfare, the benefits that we are currently saying we're going to provide those people with, whether it's triple-op pension, whether it's care, right? Not selling their assets in order to pay for their care. I reckon that would actually be a lot more popular than it used to be. Well, my elderly relatives that are in care, that is what's happened, right? They sold their houses to pay for their care and then they end up living for a really long time. And there's actually now a slightly scary conversation of whether or not we're going to be able to continue to fund the care of one of my elderly relatives because they've got no money left. What are you going to do about that? Because it's genuinely sort of one of the, and I think this is what Bassani's book is going to be about, it's like definitional crisis. How do you address it? What are you going to do about it, particularly as birth rates decrease, et cetera? And one answer is, you know, you import workers who are able to work in the industries where there are 130,000 job vacancies. Another is a pretty exacting tax regime. I don't think labour or certainly not reform are interested in either of those ideas. So, you know, frank and serious conversation needed around this subject. How long-planned do we think this paper was? The white paper? How knee-jerk a reaction do you think this is? Yes, Ed. Yes, Ed. Look, I think you can't just pull a white paper out of your arse. Sorry for the listener, Ollie had a stroke, a spasm of excitement. He got excited. Look, you can't just pull a white paper out of your arse. Obviously, you can decide when to release it. And this, for me, is the really interesting piece about the Labour Party right now. It gives to me the impression of sort of repeatedly and constantly defensively reacting to your political opponents, whether it is the left of the Labour Party, whether it is the Tories, although actually I think they are increasingly irrelevant now, reform, the Greens, the Lib Dems, ******* SNP, and... Plaid? Yeah. The UP. Finpein. Blind, actually. I don't know if you've read our comments on Reddit. Rassemblement national. Yeah. Basically, any and every party, rather than just, and I think this is where you fall down if you don't actually have your own vision for government and you don't have an underpinning of ideas, you end up with relatively, I would say, incoherent proclamations. So one day, before I went away, Keir Starmer was telling us that globalisation is over. And then whilst I was away, free trade agreements signed with India, America. We love global free trade. Globalisation is great. And actually, forgive me, I'm not across the details. Were there relaxations within the Indian trade deal for visas for Indian workers? No, not quite. It was like a swap. So it's like a... I'll find out. No, that's fine. It's just, I was going to say, in the context of trans-limit immigration, it's... Double contribution convention. That's the thing that was getting everyone up in arms. It's because if they're already paying social security in India, they wouldn't have to pay national insurance here, which was sort of the visa relaxation that everyone was losing their ---- over. Okay. Yeah. So that seems to me to be, in the space of a couple of weeks, you're just sort of directly contradicting yourself. You mentioned it, Yvette Cooper versus Darren Jones. Oh, we're, we are compassionate and lovely and we're the nice party versus, you know, it just... He's, he is correct to say that is their point of difference. Can I talk to you about a sort of the internal row about the white paper? I'd love to hear it. So there's sort of this, okay, so you've got the Home Office, the Department for Education and the Treasury. This is, they've all got a conflicting opinion on where immigration should be and how immigration affects the economy. So you've got Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary who wants to bring down the numbers on immigration, right? That she's, I would say that she sort of proved herself more, a little bit further centre-right than the rest of her party. She wants to bring the numbers down. That's her achievement. Then you've got Bridget Philipson, who's Education Secretary, and she's looking after all of the universities. The universities are pretty much funded predominantly, if not only by foreign students, but the foreign student visas are sort of the gateway, quote unquote, to illegal migration. And also because I think it was Suella Braverman, but it could have been the Home Secretary before her, who included the number of foreign student visas in the entire net migration number, which means it bolsters the number. So Department for Education wants to keep foreign students coming in, but Home Secretary wants to bring them down. Then you've got Rachel Reeves in the Treasury. Every time that there's a surge in migration, the OBR actually sort of uprates how much fiscal headroom she has. No, it's just, I can see where you're going. It's like, because Rachel Reeves wants more fiscal headroom, and she's like, no effects, we must increase the immigration. It's so ******* stupid and funny. And then there's also, okay, so the sort of triangle of argument going on, because what the Home Office is then saying to the Treasury is, actually, the OBR rules are sort of somewhat arbitrary. You are allowed to tell them as a Treasury that you're changing the terms of the fiscal rules. So you could actually tell the OBR, no, no, no, no, you've got to measure net migration if it's higher, then I've actually got less fiscal headroom. And Reeves is like, I'm not ******* doing that. So do you see this sort of round? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I love it. Are they falling out over it? There's been some hostile briefing. Well, I would point you towards what I said to you about Darren Jones, and I'd point you to what he said about a sort of more moral case toward migration. And I would argue that possibly the man in the Treasury who's saying that there's a bit more fiscal rule when you're a bit more compassionate to... Have we considered compassion? But what of kindness? Economic growth should be measured by compassion. Wow, you guys have had a bold face. Yeah, about time. I love it. Look, I think this is... I think this is... I appreciate I've spoken a lot, so I'll shut up in a second. But when I've been going on about the apparent lack of an ideological underpinning to Keir Starmer and his government, I think this is why it's important. And this is where it starts to bear out in those contradictions and in this reactive agenda, rather than just going, do you know what? Look, you don't even have to be a socialist. You can just be a social democrat. You could be a liberal if you wanted to, Keir. But just be like, these are my ideas. And so I know my answer to the questions and challenges I will be posed as Prime Minister because of my ideological underpinning. And instead, because I think one of the defining components of the right wing of the Labour Party is its factionalism, and we spoke about it briefly with Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrand, and I think we've referenced it in passing before, the punching hippies thing that Duncan Robinson wrote about in The Economist the way in which the Labour Party was revelling in picking fights with its own left wingers and the Green Party, and almost feeling that piece warned of the danger of essentially needlessly picking fights with these people because eventually you will need a base to vote for you if you want to seek re-election, right? But I think you see it, we talk about it during PMQs when someone from Reform asks a question and Starmer doesn't engage with it, he just attacks Reform, right? Same with the SNP, same with multiple other political parties. And I think that's part of the problem, I think that's why you end up with a programme of government that seems incoherent at best or completely incompetent at worst. Do you know what, it seems like, I was wondering why Starmer is attempting to take Farage to task over immigration, or like playing Farage at his own game. It's because he doesn't have his game. He can't talk about what he wants to talk about because there's no big thing for him to talk about. There is no Starmerism. Yes, exactly. It doesn't exist as a concept. What does he want to do? I used to get asked this all the time, did you get this when you were on, I think at the beginning of broadcast and then loads of, a lot of journalists hadn't been paying attention to Labour in a while, so they'd ask you on air, what is Starmerism? And you'd be like, how long have you got, Pal? Because it's like, I can't film. It takes some time. Yeah, I think, I mean. It's sort of like, I mean, you could replace him in an instant with another, pretty much anyone from that sort of centre-left faction, because he's essentially just sort of, I mean, okay, so obviously he's a puppet for the Labour right and we understand all of that, but because the policies are so incoherent, you could literally bring in anyone and you could subjectively argue. See what he did this morning? He went back to his speech in 2022, Labour conference, was it 22? And he said, I've actually been saying for a really long time that we needed to train people up. And it's like, yeah, but in the same speech, you also said we needed to have like moral and compassion for migrants. What I mean is Starmerism is so subjective because it basically cherry picks and chooses whatever works for the flavour of the day.