John Power

Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies. No test of need. No review of income. No incentive to move on. Once you’ve been awarded a property, you can stay as long as you like. When you die, your adult children may be eligible to inherit the lifetime tenancy too. Social housing tenants in Westminster pay around a fifth of what renters on the open market spend. They also have access to more than one in four properties in the borough, from flats in postwar estates to £1 million terraced houses. The council says it’s bringing stability to people’s lives but for many young professionals dreaming of their own home, it looks like something else: a bribe.

“I’ll never insult or belittle someone who votes Reform,” Mike Tapp, the Labour MP for Dover and Deal, tells me. “We need to deliver.” It’s a message Labour is increasingly keen to project – but Tapp sound like he really means it. Where others Labour MPs prevaricate on immigration, Tapp supports “return hubs” (for failed asylum seekers). He finds merit in Denmark’s deportation model, arguably the most hardline in Europe. It includes the confiscation of asylum seeker’s cash or jewellery over a value of 10,000 Danish Kroner (around £1,100) to pay for their stay in the country. Tapp doesn’t want to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), but he does acknowledge public impatience with Britain's immigration policies. “It takes time,” he says.

The ‘eradication of structural racism would be a defining cause’ of Labour’s time in power. That’s what Keir Starmer said in 2020, a few months after the death of George Floyd. In the party’s election manifesto last year, it promised to introduce a Race Equality Act to root out racial inequalities as part of a broader racial justice agenda. This included addressing the treatment of black people under the Mental Health Act, appointing a ‘Windrush Commissioner’ and making big businesses publish ethnicity pay gap data. Labour is betting that ethnic minority voters will remain loyal, even as their priorities are quietly shelved But now, with Keir Starmer in No.10, much of this racial justice mission appears to have been forgotten.

Sir Keir Starmer wants you to believe he’s serious about bringing immigration down. Faced with the political threat of Reform and growing anger over record levels of both illegal and legal migration, Labour has finally begun to talk the talk. But ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’, the white paper in which the government details its borders crackdown, is flawed. The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper For all the tough-sounding language about control and fairness, the document is shot through with proposals that quietly liberalise the system and could incentivise more illegal immigration.