Tuesday briefing: Will Labour’s own ‘go home’ moment work – or lead to more desperate measures? | Immigration and asylum

Good morning. Last night, the Home Office published footage of a group of men being escorted from a bus onto a deportation flight. With that release, the Labour government gains the dubious honour of being the first to publish that kind of footage. It follows the publication on Sunday of video showing immigration raids on illegal workers, and comes as ministers announce that nearly 19,000 refused asylum seekers, foreign criminals and other immigration offenders had been returned to their home countries since the election. Labour explains that it has a good story to tell.

All of this makes for bleak viewing – and that’s the point. The Labour government is pushing a well-trailed effort to counter Reform and the Conservatives on immigration by showing it is every bit as tough as its rivals. As well as the videos, there are Facebook ads – styled in Reform’s signature turquoise – and a leaflet resembling a red-top newspaper declaring that “Labour is tackling illegal immigration”. Taken together, the implication is clear: the hostile environment has not gone away.

The question is whether that message will persuade voters – or if it bears any relation to the reality of how to make the immigration and asylum system more effective. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Daniel Trilling, a journalist who covers immigration and the Home Office and author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, about how this strategy is likely to work out – and what an alternative might look like. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Trump tariffs | Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum on Monday, ramping up his controversial bid to boost the US economy by hiking taxes on imports from overseas. The changes are not due to come into effect until 4 March, raising the prospect of the White House brokering deals with governments seeking reprieve.

2. Assisted dying | MPs are to scrap the requirement for a high court judge to decide on assisted dying cases, with an expert panel to scrutinise decisions instead. The removal of mandatory high court involvement is likely to worry MPs who had been reassured the safeguards were uniquely robust.

3. Israel-Gaza war | Hamas has said it is delaying the release of Israeli hostages indefinitely over “violations” of the ceasefire deal, prompting Israel’s defence minister to order the military to prepare for “any scenario in Gaza”. Mediators now fear that the three-week old ceasefire is in jeopardy.

4. UK politics | Labour was warned more than a year ago about a “vile” WhatsApp group involving two of the party’s MPs, local councillors and a series of offensive messages, the Guardian has been told. The disclosure came as the MP Oliver Ryan was suspended over his membership of the group a day after health minister Andrew Gwynne was sacked and suspended by the party.

5. Technology | Elon Musk escalated his feud with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Monday, leading a consortium of investors that announced it had submitted a bid of $97.4bn for “all assets” of the artificial intelligence company. Altman rejected the offer and suggested he would buy X from Musk for a tenth of that price.

In depth: ‘By making a song and dance about how much you’re cracking down, you’re reinforcing the idea it’s a huge problem’

More than a decade ago, when Theresa May was home secretary, the government sent vans around a few racially diverse areas in London with billboards telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”. It was never a serious strategy: the £10,000 pilot resulted in 11 people leaving the country. But it was the beginning of the “hostile environment” strategy that defined the Tories’ immigration policy for the rest of the decade.

Now Labour is trying its own version of the same thing. The familiarity of the marketing isn’t that surprising, Daniel Trilling said. “Talking to people who work at the Home Office over many years, one thing they say is that there are very few ideas in the toolbox. You get politicians of different generations, doing the same things over and over again to broadcast how tough they are.”

Why is Labour doing this?

At the weekend, the Sunday Times published a well-briefed account of Keir Starmer’s message on immigration at a recent cabinet meeting. “Progressive liberals have been too relaxed about not listening to people about the impact of it,” he reportedly told ministers. An ally of the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, explains that the intention is to blunt the threat from Reform: “Yvette sees the anger on the doorstep in her constituency. MPs in Reform-facing seats fully understand why we have to go further.”

The theory is that people don’t believe that the government is taking strong action on immigration because they don’t see the proof of it in the news. A more cynical description might be to say that Labour wants to tell voters flirting with Reform that it is just as hostile to migrants as Nigel Farage is. And while the tone is very reminiscent of the May era, there are some crucial factual distinctions.

“The Tories at that time wanted to set the anti-immigration mood music, but then pushed a lot of the job of finding undocumented migrants away from government and on to other bits of society – [on to] people who work in banks, or issue driving licences,” Trilling said. “That fit with the overall logic of austerity.”

Today, as Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, points out in this piece, the entire returns operation is run by the Home Office, and the independent agencies that the last Labour government commissioned to run a voluntary programme have been excluded.

Is it likely to work?

The “go home” saga is not a very promising antecedent: it’s hard to find any sign in polling that it or the Tories’ broader strategy shifted opinions about the government’s competence over immigration enforcement. Can Labour expect a more significant impact this time? Clearly, it will depend, in part, on whether it can ultimately say that it has made a significant dent in the numbers arriving in the UK without permission, particularly by crossing the Channel in small boats.

Even if that is possible – and it’s a huge if – Trilling is sceptical. “It’s just as likely that by making a song and dance about how much you’re cracking down, you’re reinforcing the idea that it’s a huge problem,” he said. “They have completely accepted the previous government’s view that this is a major security threat. Accepting your opponent’s framing in that way seems like a pretty basic political error.”

Another justification offered by the Home Office minister Angela Eagle yesterday was that “it’s important that we send messages to people who may have been sold lies about what will await them in the UK”. But there is little evidence that this kind of deterrent was effective when the Tories made the same claim for the Rwanda policy.

“There’s just not much evidence that this kind of information travels very quickly to people trying to come here,” Trilling said. “They’re often in information-starved environments. And there is the question of whether it is really going to be worse for people coming here from Sudan, or the dictatorship in Eritrea, for example, and who think: my family are in the UK, and that’s where I need to go.”

What is the substance of Labour’s policy?

The border security, asylum and immigration bill sets out a series of measures designed to give law enforcement bodies greater powers to, as you will have heard, “smash the gangs”. The most prominent of them focus on treating the crossings as an organised crime problem, and improving the coordination of UK efforts internally and with foreign partners.

To that end, new “precursor” offences of helping to facilitate unauthorised entry to the UK are created. There is also a new offence of endangering other people during a small boat crossing – a move critics say will criminalise migrants rather than gangs, because they’re almost always the ones on the boats. The bill’s impact assessment says that the effect of these measures is uncertain.

Meanwhile, the new border security commander role will be made statutory, and new obligations are put on partner agencies to cooperate with his work.

“What it’s aiming to do is apply tougher criminal sanctions and tougher policing on an area that is already very heavily policed,” Trilling said. “What it doesn’t take into account is that increasingly severe policing measures have brought us to this point – one of the big reasons for the increase in small boat crossings was the huge amount of money poured into making access to ferries and lorries more difficult. That pushed people to take more desperate measures. The more securitised the route, the more it has to be controlled by middle men.”

What might a different message look like?

One person who thinks about this a lot is Sunder Katwala, of the thinktank British Future. “The way to respond to politicians who paint all refugees as illegals and seek to dehumanise migrants is not to play them at their own game,” he said in a recent interview. “It is to be proud about our integration story, celebrate our values and focus on the importance of a shared community.”

There is good polling evidence that the median voter can be convinced that the UK has a responsibility towards refugees if they are also confident that those whose applications are not accepted will be removed. But, at the moment, Labour is only communicating half of that message. And without any appetite for creating safe and legal routes, it is very unlikely that the push factors at the heart of the problem will change.

Trilling makes another point that is well outside of the zone of the political moment: “I often get asked, what’s your solution to Channel crossings? People get irritated when I say this, but the truth is that it’s not necessarily something that you can make stop. Efforts to make it harder to travel produce more chaos, and more dangerous routes. That has to be the starting point for a productive conversation.”

It’s also true that Labour has the choice about what to emphasise – and that an alternative strategy might not just mean changing the terms of the debate on immigration and asylum, but challenging the assertion that it is the most urgent issue of our times. “If you think about the places where Reform are threatening Labour rather than the Tories, they’re all places where people live with poor infrastructure and poor economic prospects,” Trilling said. “If you started to deal with those things, you might have a more compelling message than how many people you’ve deported that week.”

What else we’ve been reading

• With no immediate end in sight to the dark, dreary days of winter, why not hunker down with some of Michael Hogan’s recommendations for top TV spinoffs. (Better Call Saul is a favourite of mine.) Nimo

• Alien enthusiasts rejoice: Daniel Lavelle’s feature about the mysterious saga of “the best UFO photo ever taken” is an absolute cracker. Features the most thrilling line in journalism: “I’ve been waiting for someone to call me about this for 30 years.” Archie

• Hallucinations are more common than you might think. Adam Zeman explores the line between reality and imagination, which is thinner than it seems. Nimo

• Justin McCurry has a great piece about how Premier League football has become part of North Korean TV schedules. Just don’t expect to see Tottenham and Son Heung-Min, who hails from their enemy to the south. Archie

• Robin Buller’s alarming report highlights how Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies are jeopardising the educational rights of children of undocumented migrants. Nimo

Sport

Football | A tap-in from Daniel Muñoz and a lovely lobbed finish from Justin Devenny (above) gave Crystal Palace a 2-0 win at Doncaster in the FA Cup.

Football | Pep Guardiola has admitted Real Madrid’s front four of Kylian Mbappé, Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior and Rodrygo will be impossible for Manchester City to control for the entirety of their Champions League playoff. City host Real on Tuesday night in the ­opening leg before the return match at the Santiago Bernabéu next Wednesday.

Rugby union | Government officials say they are increasingly pessimistic over the financial stability of professional rugby union, as they defended loans given to sports organisations during the pandemic. Three rugby clubs – Worcester, Wasps and London Irish – who went into administration after being lent £41.6m in public money.

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