erhaps it was a promise he couldn’t keep; it was almost certainly one he never intended to. Few were surprised when Sir Keir Starmer ditched his pledge from his leadership campaign to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”. There was little Labour could do to achieve this as the Tories pushed through the Brexit deal enabled by their 2019 majority. But Labour’s strategy and policy on immigration still need plenty of work. Starmer has inherited a party whose membership is more passionately pro-immigration than at any point in its history, and an electoral map that seems to demand the opposite, which is why Starmer both made his pledge on free movement and why he dropped it. Unlike most politicians, Starmer ascended to the front bench almost as soon as he entered parliament. He doesn’t have years of speeches, op-eds and backbench revolts that tell us what he thinks about immigration. Most likely, as a former human rights lawyer now singularly focused on getting Labour back into power, he feels pulled in two directions. Starmer’s other leadership campaign immigration pledges were to introduce full voting rights for EU nationals, an immigration system “based on compassion and dignity”, to end indefinite detention, and to “call for” the closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood. His critics on the left will argue that his hokey cokey on free movement means these other pledges will also be casually tossed aside. But the free movement pledge was always the most electorally sensitive one, reopening the Brexit divide that sliced through Labour’s coalition of voters – a divide Starmer is desperate to stitch back together. Labour lacks any strategic framework through which to approach immigration policy. Any strategist can point out the electoral risks of pushing for more open immigration policies. But even after New Labour’s decade-long torrent of crackdowns on non-EU immigration it was still seen as the “party of immigration” by anti-immigration voters, having achieved nothing with its policies beyond hardship for migrants. So how should Labour’s approach develop? First, European freedom of movement needs to be seen as an EU issue, rather than an immigration one. The four freedoms of the single market are indivisible: Britain cannot have one without the other three. Starmer must decide by 2024 if he wants to rejoin the single market via the European Economic Area; free movement is a by-product of that decision. Second, Labour needs to be alive to the potential of immigration as a culture war issue. Large chunks of immigration policy are actually of very little interest to the public. Conversely, it’s easy to get sucked into emotive debates over one-off, high-profile wedge cases, and Labour should avoid this. Instead, it needs to focus on measures that will bring real improvements for the greatest number of people, while fixing the worst elements of the current system, even if they only fall on a few people. What might this involve? The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants published a broad set of proposals in 2019, covering 12 different policy areas. They include the kind of specific policy measures Labour should look at. For example, birthright citizenship – whereby an individual born in the UK automatically becomes a citizen – is the sort of policy many voters assume already exists. It doesn’t. It should. Easing the pathway to citizenship and slashing the costs of visa applications carries few electoral penalties. Ending the “hostile environment” – which, like many Tory policies, succeeded at the ballot box and failed at everything else – is an absolute necessity, and is a commitment Starmer inherits from the 2019 manifesto; backsliding on this would spark a significant reaction from within the party. Undoing the hostile environment entails a number of measures. Some, such as unwinding the obsessive monitoring of international students’ attendance, are uncontroversial. Others would garner more hostile coverage – rolling back the NHS charging regime is urgently needed, but would trigger the usual press hysteria about “health tourism”. Similar publicity would greet other necessary steps, such as scrapping the ban on nearly 1.4 million immigrants receiving public funds. Is there a way around this? Labour oppositions don’t have the kind of media and lobbying network that enabled the Tory opposition to turn a banking crisis into a story of “public sector waste” in the late 2000s. This limits its ability to frame immigration policies in particular ways – it lacks the means to consistently project those messages the way it wants. Labour does have the choice of whether or not to disclose its full plans in its manifesto. They are not legally binding documents, and any party may choose to be opaque about its intentions for electoral reasons. But doing so opens up the party to pre-election attacks from the left for not doing enough to help immigrants, and post-election attacks from the right for trying to introduce measures without a manifesto mandate. Starmer starts from a place of weakness. His party isn’t trusted by voters on immigration; the bent of most media coverage is that immigration is bad; and Labour’s ability to communicate its message to voters unadulterated is heavily constrained. But the voters Labour needs in 2024 are not in the Gillian Duffy mould – anti-immigration pensioners are lost to Labour, regardless of whether it even wants them back. Labour’s key targets will be middle-aged voters in red wall seats. They are not necessarily keen on higher immigration, but they have more immediate things to worry about. And the looming arrival of about 300,000 Hong Kong residents at the invitation of the UK government will – at the outset at least – be the first time in living memory that large-scale immigration receives positive overall coverage. That could influence broader views of immigration. But strengthening migrant rights probably won’t be an electoral asset for Labour. Anti-immigration voters are more exercised by the issue than pro-immigration ones. Instead, this is a fundamentally moral question. And if Starmer is serious about an immigration system “based on compassion and dignity”, he will have to take that risk. • Chaminda Jayanetti is a journalist who covers politics and public services