Has Keir Starmer found the sweet spot in British politics?

Are the final obstacles in the way of a comfortable Labour victory at the next election being swept away? The dirty little secret of British politics is that there is now a large amount of consensus on most big policy issues between the two main parties: the differences are largely in the detail. 

The most recent citadel to fall is what one might call the cultural issues of immigration and national identity. Labour appears to be flirting, again, with Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the left on economics/right on culture combination, which was also the mood music of the 2019 Tory blue collar conservatism election.

Democracy is having its wicked way and its magical force-field is forcing Labour to pretend that it is not, deep in its bones, a party of liberal graduates, as it tries to win back those small-c conservative voters the Tories nicked from them over Brexit. 

On national identity the party has already sung God Save the King and Keir Starmer is rarely pictured far from a Union Jack. He has also fallen in behind the pretty hard version of Brexit that the political configuration of 2019 ended up producing. 

And now on immigration Starmer and Stephen Kinnock, the party’s spokesman on the subject, are starting to sound more restrictive than the current government. Starmer is today telling the CBI that immigration must not be used as a substitute for investment in training British workers or productivity enhancing machinery and technology.

The current government have been saying similar things since 2019 and it was, in part, the rationale for ending free movement, (although the picture was briefly muddied by the Truss-Kwarteng blip). 

Yet the record of British employers on training and investment more generally remains pretty dreadful and the new immigration system is so liberal that almost two-thirds of jobs in the UK economy are in effect classified as high skilled and potentially subject to a work visa. 

So far, all Starmer and Kinnock are really doing is falling in behind the government’s immigration policy and, in effect, backing it against the demands for even more liberalisation from employers and the Treasury (the most powerful lobby of all for keeping migration high). 

That is a start. To be fair, Kinnock has sounded even more restrictive than the government in calling for a return of the resident labour market test, which requires employers to check that a British resident can’t do a job before bringing someone in from outside. He also sensibly wants ID cards for asylum seekers.

Words are cheap. Remember Gordon Brown’s cynical and unachievable ‘British jobs for British workers’ pledge? But words are all oppositions have. And Starmer surely has the room to go even further on immigration and related matters. 

Thanks in part to the fact that ending free movement has not reduced overall numbers and that the government has talked tough but delivered nothing on stopping Channel boats, the government’s standing on immigration has slumped with voters. 

So why not pledge that a Labour government would make the current liberal regime for skilled migration more restrictive over time and establish special training regimes for jobs on the Shortage Occupation Lists (if a job is on the list it can by-pass immigration restrictions)? 

Starmer currently appears to be master of all he surveys inside the party and has backing from inside his inner circle from Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley, both of whom have Blue Labour leanings. 

Nevertheless that left on economics/right on culture sweet spot of modern politics – what one might call the ‘missing majority’ – is popular among voters but has surprisingly few friends among MPs and party activists on both sides. Tories don’t like the left on economics and many are ambivalent about the right on culture too, and Labour people mainly hate the latter.

Does Starmer have the strength to really test the discipline of his party and start to push back on so-called ‘woke’ issues? And what about those Channel boats? Of course everyone would like a returns deal with France. But as that seems unlikely to happen some kind of off-shoring system which stops people getting to this country, but leaves them safe and comfortable in Rwanda or somewhere else, is the only answer. 

If, as seems probable, the European Court of Human Rights rules against the government on off-shoring, whose side will Starmer be on? If he backs the current government then he can almost be guaranteed to form the next one.