“Take Back Control”. The Brexit mantra promised many things. Liberation from the Brussels bureaucracy. Freedom to strike trade deals. Above all, the end of free movement of people and sovereignty – that magic word! – over the nation’s borders.
10 years after the British people voted to leave the EU, “Take Back Control” has turned out to be a brilliant slogan but an empty strategy. There is a case study waiting to be written about immigration, the decisive issue in the referendum campaign and one which continues to haunt Andy Burnham’s Government.
As he prepares to address his first Labour Party conference as leader and Prime Minister, Burnham should reflect on an irony. Successive post-Brexit governments have struggled to contain legal and illegal immigration. Yet Labour, in contrast to the May, Johnson (in particular), Truss and Sunak governments, is making tangible progress in both areas.
Small boat arrivals from across the Channel are below 28,000 for the first time since December 2021, some 43 per cent below the peak. The £662m agreement with France, signed in April, has put more police on the beaches and stopped roughly six in 10 boats from launching in its first three months of this year. More than 80,000 people with no right to be in the UK have been removed since 2024 (though the asylum appeals process remains clogged).
Net migration, meanwhile, is down more than 80 per cent, having peaked above 900,000 in 2023. ONS projections suggest it should drop below 100,000 by the end of this year. The target Conservative governments promised and missed for 14 years is therefore within reach – under Labour.
Yet Burnham, like his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer, is governing as if the facts were stacked against him. Why the timidity? No doubt he has an eye on his left flank, ever watchful for any sign that Labour is turning into Farage-lite.
Burnham also knows that his Government is in for a long war. Channel crossings are volatile; weather and smuggler tactics vary; and the “one in, one out” returns deal with France is small. Moreover, boats are larger and more dangerous.
This week’s arrest of far-right activist Daniel Thomas, known to his followers as “Danny Tommo”, for slashing a boat with a knife carrying 50 migrants from Normandy provoked more negative headlines and a posse of protestors.
But a policy does not have to be perfect to be working. There are risks in Burnham opting for relative silence. The news narrative is already shifting. The Government is removing asylum seekers from hotel accommodation to former military bases in Braintree, Chelmsford and Piddington, the Oxfordshire village which last week voted quixotically for independence from the UK.
Burnham has declared that the burden of housing asylum seekers should not be borne solely by the poorer parts of the country. It sounds reasonable, but it’s also a recipe for radicalising Middle England.
Perception can trump reality. The fear of immigration can turn out to be more potent than the numbers themselves, as many believe to be the case in seaside resorts voting Leave during the Brexit referendum. It is striking, for example, that a recent British Future/Ipsos tracker poll found that half of voters think migration rose last year; only one in six knows it fell.
Furthermore, around 40 per cent of British people surveyed believe that small boat crossings have increased compared to last year, according to a YouGov poll. The figure was even higher among Reform UK voters (70 per cent) and Conservative voters (56 per cent).
Burnham has a duty to set the record straight. Having established that Britain is indeed taking back control over its borders, he must then do a harder thing: make the case for controlled immigration, a proper system to manage and regulate entry to this country.
Britain is ageing. The NHS, the care sector and agriculture all need overseas workers. So does the hospitality sector, including hotels and restaurants. Britain’s universities also depend on foreign students for a large portion of their income.
Burnham witnessed this first-hand when mayor of Manchester. He also championed the need for employers to step up training rather than relying solely on cheap foreign labour – a sensible step in the transition toward a more balanced economy where skills matter and the productivity rises accordingly.
Let’s be clear: none of the above amounts to an “open door” policy on immigration. Measured and targeted, it is a riposte to the nativism espoused by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the mass deportation favoured by its far-right cousin Restore Britain. For now, it also helps to neuter the opposition Conservatives who treat every boat crossing, however small, as a national security emergency.
Yet, the Tories, under Kemi Badenoch, do have a signature policy in favour of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Badenoch holds the ECHR responsible for tying successive governments in legal knots over removing asylum seekers to third countries such as Rwanda. She strongly believes that the whole legal machinery on asylum seekers needs overhauling.
Without shouting about the progress made on bringing down the numbers, the Burnham government will continue to be held hostage by social media images of asylum seekers wandering England’s beaches and anti-migrant activists like Danny Tommo acting like martyrs to a patriotic cause.
That’s no reason to be in a funk about immigration. Labour has so far performed better than the Conservatives. Over to you, Prime Minister.
Take back control of the debate.
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