Louise Haigh’s damaging exit puts question mark over UK transport agenda

Louise Haigh has resigned as transport secretary after admitting that she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence over a mobile phone she had wrongly claimed was stolen a decade ago.

It deprives the new government of a politician who had been one of its most dynamic ministers in the first five months in office. In terms of Labour’s factional balance, it means the exit of one of the cabinet’s most leftwing members. Some more thoughts on that and Keir Starmer’s big immigration speech below.

Thank Lou, next

There’s never a good time for a government to lose one of its most effective members, but this is an exceptionally bad one. Politically, it adds to the general mood of malaise around Keir Starmer’s administration.

More important, it comes at a time when some of the government’s most ambitious and radical plans in the transport brief are moving from legislative challenges — the easiest part of the new government’s job given the size of its majority — to tricky questions about implementation.

Although what you might call the Department for Transport’s “headline objectives” (managing the transition to electric vehicles, reform of England’s buses outside London, and to renationalise the railways) will not change following her exit, there are many ways to go about achieving them. Whoever ends up as the new transport secretary will now have to navigate that, while also embarking on what will be a fraught negotiation over the department’s future spending plans.

The words “railway renationalisation” can cover any number of policy approaches, but Haigh’s chosen route was among the more far-reaching and radical ones. (Much more on that in this excellent piece.) Now a new secretary of state will have to make that legislative vision work in practice — in addition to working around the department’s very tight spending settlement that adds an extra wrinkle into implementation. Equally important, they will have to navigate how to flex the UK’s rules on electric vehicles in order to support the country’s struggling electric vehicle industry.

The most significant political change is that by ending what is in many ways the fiction of the UK’s “privatised railway” (if your fares and your frequency of service are all set by the state, just how private an operator are you?), Labour hopes to achieve a better integrated and more efficient railway. And if poor service arises, the government will certainly get the blame. It has now lost one of the ministers who had shown an ability to get things done and passed. Whoever replaces her will have the difficult task of implementing a new approach they did not set.

This isn’t the first time that Starmer has lost his first-choice Cabinet minister: Thangam Debbonaire’s defeat in Bristol Central meant that Lisa Nandy became culture secretary instead. It is fair to say that has meant quite a major change in approach in that department: and it may well be that we see a similarly significant shift this time around. Regardless, it is an important blow to Keir Starmer’s new government both politically and in policy terms.

Unattainable ‘sustainable’?

Let’s start with the obvious, which is that the last Conservative government did not, despite what Keir Starmer says, launch “a one nation experiment in open borders”.

Starmer should ask anyone who has tried to hire someone from outside the UK, or a university that has sought to attract overseas students if the last government was pursuing a policy of “open borders”. He should ask anyone who was caught up in the Windrush scandal if the last government was “an experiment in open borders”. Or he could ask the families of the 314 people who have died making the Channel crossing to the UK since 2014 just how “open” the UK’s borders really are.

Labour’s cynical political calculation here is that they are pushing at an open door in multiple ways. Most UK voters already believe that the Conservative government did fail to control immigration and that the current levels of immigration to Britain are too high. Given that the spike in recent years was driven by the surge in suppressed labour demand after the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is good reason to believe, even without changing any policies, net migration to the UK will continue to fall next year (figures for the 12 months to June 2024 showed net migration declined 20 per cent compared with the previous year). The new government’s security pact with Iraq may well reduce the number of crossings by small boat, too.

So it is possible that come the next election, Starmer will be able to say that net immigration rose under the Conservatives and is falling under Labour, and this will pay electoral dividends for the party in four or five years’ time.

Immigration is not a particularly significant concern among Labour voters, but the minority to whom it matters tend to live in electorally important constituencies. And simply staking out a position which doesn’t antagonise Conservative and Reform voters into voting tactically for one another — in the manner that Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters did in 2024 — could benefit Labour.

But equally, it may not. There are some obvious global shocks that could see net migration climbing. For example, a lopsided peace settlement in Ukraine followed by another Russian invasion either into Ukraine again, or into another frontier state. Labour’s own policy objectives, particularly on housebuilding, are going to be incredibly hard to accomplish without some liberalising of immigration for certain jobs.

And regardless, let’s assume for a moment that the UK’s net migration figures do fall during this parliament to something like the numbers they were in the 2010s: we are still talking about roughly 300,000 people a year, almost all of whom are people coming to the UK to work or study.

In addition, while there is a great deal of appetite to reduce immigration in general, there is a limited appetite to specifically cut from the groups coming here, as the chart below from Oxford university’s Migration Observatory shows. There is one important difference between electoral concern about immigration in the 2020s compared with the 2000s. In the 2020s, it tends to focus on the very high number of overall immigration, rather than on its specific local impacts.

Yes, it’s possible that Labour’s cynicism will pay off for the party. But consider this scenario: in 2029, net immigration will have fallen drastically from 2023’s levels but will still be running somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000, and that this number will be, in the minds of most British voters, unacceptably high, while, at the same time, most voters will oppose any measures that would actually reduce the figure.

The Conservatives will have a hard numeric target that will be lower than whichever number the Labour government has hit. Reform will have a number that is net negative. Voters whose first preference is a Green or Liberal Democrat vote will feel rather bruised and less likely to vote Labour tactically. Reform and Conservative voters won’t buy that Labour has fixed the problem.

As I said yesterday in the context of Kemi Badenoch’s promises on immigration, what makes these pledges impossible to achieve is that you can’t have an immigration policy that is divorced from what you want to achieve in public services and across the economy as a whole. If you are not willing to significantly change our economic and social model, perhaps in practically unachievable ways, you are unlikely to keep your promises on immigration, and you are going to pay a political price for that sooner or later.

Now try this

The National Theatre’s new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, is a delightful version of one of my favourite plays. It’s a terrific cast and the costumes are wonderful.

There are very few general tickets left at time of writing, but don’t forget that £10 “Rush” tickets for the next week’s showings will go on sale every Friday at 1pm on the National Theatre’s website, while it will be shown in cinemas in February (you can book tickets to that, here).

However you spend it, have a lovely weekend!

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