You can’t out-Farage Farage: Labour’s immigration gamble is a dangerous mistake, writes Humza Yousaf

17 May 2025, 14:59

By Humza Yousaf MSP

This week, Sir Keir Starmer warned of Britain becoming an “island of strangers.” The phrase dripped with the same fearful undertones as Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech

Framing our increasingly diverse nation as being contaminated by foreign customs, languages, and loyalties. It was a moment that underlined a lamentable truth: the Labour Party has become so desperate to stem the decline in their polling, they haven’t just lurched to the right but are comfortable embracing rhetoric once confined to the hardest edges of the Conservative Party and now central to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

Powell’s 1968 speech warned of immigration as an existential threat to “our blood and our culture,” stoking racial panic that led directly to decades of hostile migration policies.

Starmer’s invocation of “strangers” is a modern echo — a dog-whistle to voters who blame migrants for every social ill, from stretched public services to the cost-of-living crisis. It betrays a failure to understand, or deliberately mask the fact that Britain’s prosperity depends on migration, on openness not building walls.

Let’s be clear: no one sensible advocates complete open borders.

But the line between “managed migration” and “hostile migration” is crucial. In NHS England, roughly 35% of doctors are non-British, they keep hospitals functioning, more importantly they save lives on a daily basis.

Over 10,000 posts in social care in Scotland are filled by those who have come here via the Skilled Workers Route (or its predecessor). Hospitality, food processing, logistics, construction, tech — every major sector relies on migrants to plug chronic skills gaps.

Denigrate immigrants as “strangers” and you undermine and repel the very people who keep Britain afloat.

Starmer’s plan to tighten student visas, scrap social care routes, and limit skilled-worker entry overlooks one simple fact: Britain, like most of Europe, needs migrants.

As the Office for National Statistics projects, the UK working-age population will shrink by over 4 million by 2030 without immigration.

Europe faces a shortfall of 45 million workers by 2050. If we chase talent away with self-defeating, insular policies and inflammatory rhetoric, we guarantee skills shortages, wage inflation, and slower growth.

The proposal to axe social-care visas in particular exposes the cruelty and absurdity of this approach. Scottish Care’s director, Donald MacAskill, has rightly slammed the plans, warning it will leave dementia sufferers and the elderly with no one to assist them.

When you rip away a route that allows dedicated carers, who contribute significantly to caring for our elderly, within a country that has an ageing population, you don’t solve a political problem, you create a crisis.

Labour seems convinced that the answer to Reform’s appeal is to adopt even more restrictive immigration policies, matched by hostile rhetoric.

But the simple truth is that they cannot out-Farage Nigel Farage. You cannot win by mimicking the language of exclusion and resentment.

To stop Reform, Labour, and all of those who believe in progress not regression, must offer a vision of the opportunity that exists if we attract the best, brightest and those willing to graft to this country.

Imagine a nation that actively recruits nurses from the South East Asia, engineers from Eastern Europe, and tech entrepreneurs from the sub-continent, then actively supports upskilling them, including ensuring there are enough ESOL classes available to them. That is a strategy to outpace Reform, not pander to its worst instincts.

Watching Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar slavishly fall into line behind Keir Starmer and suggest Scotland needs to “cut immigration across the board” is painful.

Under current rules, neither Sarwar’s father nor my own would have been allowed into the UK to build prosperous lives, not only for their own families but for the hundreds, if not thousands of people they have employed over the years. Sarwar’s promise of standing up to Starmer and up for Scotland is rightly ridiculed, and as I suspect Anas will find out the people of Scotland see right through it.

He has sat silent as Starmer betrayed WASPI women, cut the Winter Fuel Allowance, slashed disability support, and now threatens our country’s prosperity all to try and pander to Reform voters.

I speak as the proud grandson of immigrants. My grandparents worked night shifts in factories and restaurants so their children could flourish.

We should feel a sense of pride that in Britain at one time we had a Muslim Mayor of London, Hindu PM and Scottish-Pakistani First Minister.

That is a blueprint for other nation’s on how multiculturalism has been a success, not a failure.

I commend the First Minister for demonstrating leadership by condemning Reform’s vile rhetoric and standing firmly for inclusive values.

If only more politicians had such conviction, we would not be on the brink of possibly handing the keys of No 10 to Nigel Farage.

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Humza Yousaf is a Scottish politician who served as First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party

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