According to an expert, Starmer’s immigration talk rhetoric is a lot like what we’ve seen before: big claims but not much action.
Politicians make grandiose promises about things they don’t fully control to get votes, according to Madeleine Sumption.
An analyst says that Keir Starmer’s promise to “smash the gangs” that benefit from small boat crossings is similar to what Conservative-led governments have done in the past: use “bullish rhetoric” without much proof that it can be done.
Madeleine Sumption, who runs the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said that the prime minister has made the same mistakes as Rishi Sunak and David Cameron by making “bold claims with great certainty about things governments only partially control.”
The UK and French governments are fighting over a new accord to prohibit gangs from smuggling people across the Channel. Starmer promised to “smash the gangs” before the 2024 general election, but opposition parties are getting more and more angry with him for not stopping more people from coming to the UK.
As of February 25, 2026, 2,209 persons had come to the UK in small boats, which is around 7% more than the same time in 2025.
Starmer ignored the criticism of the phrase at prime minister’s question time last week when Nigel Farage called it “a total, abject failure.”
Sumption wrote the book What Is Immigration Policy For? is a member of the government’s independent Migration Advisory Committee and said, “Governments of all kinds like to make big promises, like ‘stop the boats’ and ‘smash the gangs’ and ‘net migration falling below 100,000.’
“In practice, the results have been disappointing since things that they couldn’t control had a big impact. That included being a member of the EU, France’s willingness to work with the EU on asylum policy in the case of net migration, or the wide-ranging, dispersed activities of smuggling gangs that are very hard for the government to control.
Sumption added that politicians have not been able to be honest with the public about the fact that their programs might not work.
People say they want their politicians to be honest, yet when it comes to immigration regulations, the most honest political pitch generally doesn’t succeed. On the campaign trail, saying “we don’t know if this will work, but we’ll try it out, and if it doesn’t, we’ll try something else” won’t go over very well.
“So, instead, immigration debates are full of big statements that people are very sure about things that governments only partly control. “This isn’t a political issue; we see this problem in governments all over the world,” she remarked.
When Sunak was prime minister in 2023, he made a commitment to “stop the boats.” This phrase was then put on lecterns and used in social media videos. Sunak said that the 2024 general election was “too stark, too binary” when he lost to Starmer.
Cameron, who was prime minister from 2010 to 2016, said he would cut net migration from “hundreds of thousands” to “tens of thousands” each year. By 2015, the number had grown to over 300,000.