When Sir Jim Ratcliffe, billionaire founder of Ineos, resident of Monaco and co-owner of Manchester United, told Sky News last week that the UK had been “colonised by immigrants”, he tapped into a deep political fault line that has defined British politics for a decade. Apart from the seemingly racist overtones of describing legal immigrants to this country as “colonisers”, Ratcliffe’s numbers for the increase in population that has resulted from immigration were grossly exaggerated.
Ratcliffe, who later said he was sorry that “this choice of language has offended some people”, is not only the chief executive of one of the country’s most globalised companies, but the owner of a football club that, like most of the elite level in England’s national game, has a team dominated by immigrants. The fact that he used language that only a few years ago would have been regarded as pub bar bigotry illustrates how the government has allowed the UK’s debate about immigration to slip out of its control. It reflects the wider strategic dilemma that has shaped Labour’s approach to immigration—an obsession with reducing numbers that is at odds with the economic role migration plays and the actual patterns of inflow and outflow.
Labour inherited three interlocking problems. First, the highest measured net migration on record, even if already declining. Second, a severely dysfunctional asylum system that symbolised loss of control regardless of the actual drivers of migration. Third, a fragile economic context characterised by weak productivity growth, tight fiscal constraints and acute labour shortages in key public service sectors. Labour’s response has been shaped less by a coherent rethinking of the post-Brexit immigration system than by the attempt to manage these pressures in parallel, with little or no attention paid to the interconnections and trade-offs—or, perhaps worse, a determination to deny that the trade-offs exist.
In opposition, Labour framed immigration primarily as a systems failure: underinvestment in skills, incoherent migration rules and administrative collapse in asylum. The manifesto reflected this, emphasising competence, enforcement and long-term workforce planning rather than explicit numerical targets. In government, however, the focus shifted quickly towards numbers management, even in the absence of a formal net-migration target.
This was triggered by two developments. The first was the publication, in late 2024, of revised official migration statistics showing that net migration over the previous three years was far higher than previously estimated. The second was the rapid rise of Reform UK as a political force able to exploit migration as a symbol both of government failure and cultural dislocation. The result was a shift in Labour’s priorities: reducing legal migration became not merely an economic or administrative issue, but a central political objective.
The May 2025 White Paper “Restoring control over the immigration system” reflects this shift. Although it was framed in the language of skills, contribution and fairness, its underlying logic is clearly numerical. And much of the accompanying rhetoric—the prime minister’s claim that the mass immigration had done “incalculable damage” to the country—has no evidential support except insofar as higher immigration is, in itself, considered to be damaging for cultural or political reasons. Measures such as raising skill thresholds, curtailing care-worker recruitment from abroad, shortening the Graduate route, and extending settlement periods are justified less by evidence of harm than by their anticipated effect on inflows.
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As with previous governments, Labour’s policy on legal migration cannot be understood in isolation from the politics of asylum. Irregular Channel crossings and the continued use of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers have become powerful symbols, regardless of their numerical importance relative to legal migration flows; successive government failures, beginning with the Sunak government, to deliver on unrealistic slogans such as “Stop the Boats” have only exacerbated the problem.
Labour’s initial actions—scrapping the Rwanda scheme, restarting asylum decision-making, increasing enforcement against illegal working—were largely technocratic and defensible. But they did not deliver rapid, visible reductions in arrivals or accommodation costs. As a result, the political logic shifted: if asylum numbers could not be reduced quickly, legal migration would have to be. Similarly, the government’s political opponents, sensing weakness, shifted their focus to legal migration and its supposedly negative economic and, increasingly, cultural effects, with greater and greater stridency, as the Ratcliffe incident shows; Labour, caught between conflicting pressures from its different factions, has largely proved incapable of pushing back on this narrative in a convincing or effective way.
This dynamic helps explain why restrictions on students, care workers and settlement emerged as priorities. This is a classic spillover effect: very visible but hard-to-control flows (asylum) generate pressure to restrict less obvious ones (legal migration). The risk, as repeatedly demonstrated in UK migration policy over the past two decades, is that such spillovers undermine economically valuable routes without addressing the original political problem.
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A striking feature of Labour’s first year is the gap between formal control and what people perceive. Objectively, the UK now has more control over legal migration than at any point since the 1960s. Free movement has ended; entry is governed by domestic rules; enforcement capacity has been expanded. Yet public confidence remains low, and concern about immigration has risen sharply even as net migration has fallen.
This reflects a deeper credibility problem. Control is not judged by legal authority but by outcomes that are visible, comprehensible and narratively coherent. In the current environment, three factors undermine credibility:
- Lagged effects. Migration, and even more so migration statistics, respond to policy with long and variable lags. The migration boom of 2021–23 reflected decisions taken years earlier; the bust of 2024–25 reflects policies introduced before Labour took office.
- Category confusion. Public debate routinely conflates workers, students, dependants, asylum and illegal entry. Tightening one category rarely reduces concern about others.
- Service pressure. Even where migrants are working and paying taxes, their presence can intensify pressures on housing, schools and local services if domestic policy fails to respond. These pressures are experienced locally and politically, regardless of national fiscal effects.
In this context, Labour’s rhetorical and policy pivot—emphasising toughness and warning of an “island of strangers”—appears designed to restore credibility. But rhetoric alone cannot resolve the underlying mismatch between migration dynamics and political expectations.
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The risk is the emergence of a migration doom loop, in which political pressure to reduce migration leads to policy choices that weaken economic performance and public services, thereby intensifying the very discontent that fuels anti-immigration sentiment.
The mechanics of this loop are straightforward:
- Political pressure (from Reform, parts of the media, and public anxiety) pushes government to reduce migration numbers quickly.
- Policy tightening focuses on routes that are administratively easy to restrict: students, care workers, mid-skill work visas, settlement.
- Economic and service impacts follow: universities lose income; care shortages intensify; fiscal revenues weaken; local services struggle.
- Performance deteriorates, reinforcing narratives of national decline and government failure.
- Political backlash intensifies, renewing pressure for further migration restrictions.
What makes this loop particularly dangerous is that it can operate even when migration is already falling. Indeed, the sharp decline in net migration in 2024–25 may exacerbate the problem if it contributes to weaker growth or fiscal stress just as the government faces difficult budgetary decisions.
There is little evidence, either from the UK or from comparative experience, that centre-left parties can neutralise populist challengers by adopting their language or parts of their policy agenda on immigration. Reform’s advantage lies in the simplicity of its narrative, as with Ratcliffe’s “coloniser” rhetoric: migration is framed as an unwanted, external imposition, the cause of economic and cultural decline, and radical reductions are presented as the solution. A governing party constrained by legal obligations, economic realities and administrative capacity cannot credibly outbid such a narrative.
At the same time, Labour is clearly at serious risk alienating parts of its own electoral coalition. Young voters, graduates, urban residents and ethnic minorities—groups more likely to view immigration positively—constitute the majority of those who voted Labour in 2024, but have since moved their support to other parties, in particular the Greens. The result is that tightening migration policy not only imposes real economic and social costs, but also political ones.
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The post-Brexit system was supposed to take back control, reduce migration and enable the UK to get the skills it needs while addressing the political salience of high or uncontrolled migration. In theory—even for Brexit opponents—there was a logic to this. Formal control increased. But ten years on from the referendum, the central lesson is that control is not a static policy attribute but a dynamic political relationship. Ending free movement and introducing a points-based system shifted decision-making from Brussels to Westminster. It did not eliminate the structural drivers of migration, the long lags between policy and outcomes, or the incentives facing governments under political pressure.
The result was a classic boom-bust cycle—a liberal approach, combined with the pandemic recovery and humanitarian crises, produced a surge in migration. Political reaction to that surge then triggered a sharp tightening just as flows were already falling steeply. So we have a system that has swung wildly between openness and restriction without ever settling into a stable equilibrium. Employers, including key public services, universities and migrants face uncertainty, and public trust erodes as governments promise control they cannot sustainably deliver.
The deeper problem is that immigration policy is being asked to do too much: supply labour to an ageing economy, compensate for underinvestment in skills and public services, promote growth and improve the public finances, reassure voters anxious about identity and cohesion, and neutralise the populist challenge. No migration system can satisfy all of these objectives at once. Focusing on numbers and treating migration primarily as a lever for short-term political management almost guarantees failure on both economic and political fronts.
A more credible approach would start with recognising three things. First, that migration is a structural feature of a modern, open economy, not a temporary aberration. Second, that the costs and benefits of migration depend overwhelmingly on domestic policy choices—in housing, public services, labour-market regulation and integration. Third, that political trust is more likely to be rebuilt through competence, honesty and institutional stability than through ever-tougher rhetoric.
The prime minister, rightly, described Ratcliffe’s comments as “offensive and wrong”. But he didn’t, and couldn’t, explain why. Without a convincing narrative that goes beyond vague paeans to diversity, he—and the UK—will remain trapped in the doom loop: each attempt to “restore control” undermines the very economic and social foundations on which durable political consent depends.
