Starmer becomes a Farage tribute act on immigration - Angus Robertson

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer holds a press conference on immigration at Downing Street (Picture: Ian Vogler - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The Labour leader echoed the right‑wing slogans he once decried. He promised to “take back control of our borders” and end what he called a “one‑nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control”.

Instead of challenging Farage, Starmer appears determined to copy him. Recent political history teaches a brutal lesson: when mainstream parties validate the talking points of hard‑right insurgents, they do not deflate them, they clear the runway for them. Starmer may succeed only in making Farage seem like the authentic article while Labour looks like a pale copy.

The practical damage begins immediately. Starmer’s proposals will limit the care‑worker visa route, abolish the Immigration Salary List and raise skills and language thresholds. Scotland’s care providers, already battling vacancies, call international recruitment “a lifeline” and warn that removing it is “cruel” and “a crushing blow to an already‑fragile sector.” Unison reminds us the NHS “would have collapsed long ago” without overseas staff.

In some respects these moves are even more hardline than Farage. His immigration spokesperson Anne Widdecombe said, ‘we never signed up to zero immigration,’ and that essential NHS and care workers should be considered "exceptions" to immigration policy, providing the government makes "serious efforts” to up-skill British workers in the meantime.

Starmer says employers are “addicted to importing cheap labour rather than investing in our young people.” That caricature collapses when confronted with Scotland’s demographics.

Last year natural change would have cut our population by 14,500; only inward migration kept the total in positive territory. Remote rural communities still lose residents, skilled trades face chronic shortages and half of all projected employment growth this decade is in health and social care. The Scottish Government’s Migration – Meeting Scotland’s Needs strategy points out that maintaining even modest economic growth requires net migration of around 25,000 a year—levels that Westminster’s new cap will make impossible.

Business groups are blunt: hospitals, hospitality and the burgeoning renewables supply‑chain cannot be staffed from a working‑age population that is already shrinking. Yet Labour has just volunteered to cut the flow further than the Conservatives dared, while blocking SNP proposals for a bespoke Scottish visa route tailored to our economy. That is the definition of allowing Westminster politics to throttle Scotland’s future.

The irony is painful. Starmer entered politics citing moral duty and internationalism. Today he touts ten‑year waits for settlement, English tests for dependants and a policy to let migration “fall” as far as required.

In chasing voters who already prefer the original, Labour risks normalising the worldview of Faragists and if the polls hold, laying a red carpet from the Commons backbenches to Downing Street’s front door.

Scotland sees the danger clearly. Polling shows tolerance for immigration because people grasp the simple arithmetic of an ageing nation: without new arrivals our workforce and our tax base wither. Starmer’s speech ignored both Scotland and reality.

It is clear that governments of whatever stripes are not serving Scotland. It is time we extricate ourselves from the irreversible rightward-shift of the UK – by seizing the opportunities of internationalism, global justice, and economic opportunity as an independent nation in the EU.

Angus Robertson MSP, Constitution, External Affairs and Culture Secretary