Following Thursday’s local elections, much has been made of Reform’s success and Labour’s disappointing results. This has been followed by chat and speculation in the media about two topics: whether Reform and Nigel Farage are ready to lead the country, and whether Keir Starmer can survive much longer as Labour leader.
Over the weekend, several stories emerged about potential leadership challenges and manoeuvrings in Westminster to oust Starmer.
Meanwhile, Farage continues to harp on about the how the elections were a ‘truly historic shift’ in British politics, even if the results aren’t quite as outstanding as Reform would have you believe.
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But while all this is going on, you’ve almost certainly missed the fact that the government is actually getting on with the job at hand, particularly when it comes to one of the most divisive topics in British politics: immigration.
This was pointed out by Times columnist Fraser Nelson over the weekend, as he looked at Home Office statistics on immigration.
He highlighted that Starmer was getting decent results here, with net migration being around 80 per cent below the peak under the Tories.
At the same time, basic immigration is falling, with Nelson writing in his Substack that it is “probably at a multi-year low” once you remove students from the equation.
He questioned why Starmer and the Labour machine weren’t making more of this, whilst their opponents shout about ‘stopping the boats’ and mass deportations.
This wasn’t the only promising data Nelson analysed.
The asylum backlog has also been slashed since Labour came into power in 2024. After the backlog soared post-Covid under a Tory government who seemed to have no desire to address the issue, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is making impressive progress on the matter.
As the above posts demonstrate, there are two factors at play here: a lack of coverage from the media and poor communication from the government.
Starmer and Mahmood should be shouting about stats like this, just like Health Secretary Wes Streeting shouts about successes in the NHS since Labour came into power.
This lack of clever comms then feeds into a lack of attention from the press who would rather focus on Westminster psychodrama and Reform publicity stunts (although granted, it is good to see more of the media starting to skewer Farage on his £5m gift from a crypto billionaire).
Yet again, Starmer and the government are quietly getting on with fixing the mess the Tories left them with, as we pointed out last week.
It’s not glamorous stuff but it will reap rewards down the line. Starmer and the government need to get better at selling this message and changing the conversation.