UK prime minister Keir Starmer has promised to end a “squalid chapter” in Britain’s history by cutting legal migration with tough laws designed to end an era of “open borders”.
Mr Starmer, whose Labour Party was hammered this month by Nigel Farage‘s Reform UK in local elections, said he would “significantly” reduce the number of foreigners moving to Britain, although he declined to set a target.
He said he wanted to prevent Britain from becoming an “island of strangers” as he promised to bring in rules to force immigrants to better integrate.
“The experiment is over. We will deliver what you have asked for,” he said.
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The UK government is today introducing a white paper proposing a raft of tough new measures.
Legal migrants will be required to live for 10 years in Britain before applying for citizenship, rather than the current five. They will also be required to learn English and the country will also prioritise higher-educated migrants with degrees.
Businesses such as care homes will be also banned from hiring cheap labour from abroad, as the government promised to boost skills among some of the nine million British adults who are economically inactive.
The prime minister was keen to portray his government’s tough line on immigration not as a panicked rightwards shift due to the threat from Reform, but as the natural move of a Labour government.
At a press conference in Downing Street on Monday morning, he also repeatedly referred to a pro-Brexit slogan – the promise to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. Since Brexit, legal net migration soared to a peak of almost one million people annually in 2023, although it fell in 2024 to 728,000 and is projected to keep falling.
“What we saw wasn’t control, it was chaos ... I am doing this because it is right, fair, and it is what I believe in,” he said.
