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Good morning. Thanks for the kind emails about one of the things I got wrong over the past year in politics.
Some of you generously reminded me of some of the things I got right. I’m relieved that I correctly predicted that the Labour government would be forced to scrap the two-child benefit limit and to retreat on its welfare cuts, because it shows my grip on what the Parliamentary Labour party thinks is still about right. While getting predictions right can be helpful for stress tests, getting things wrong is, I think, where most of our really useful lessons are.
In that spirit, some thoughts on another howler.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Bluesky and X, and Georgina on Bluesky. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Not courting business
The Labour government has moved to drastically reduce the number of people coming to the UK. As it stands, unless something significant changes, we are heading to very low numbers of people coming into the UK, net, and therefore to the period of “sustained net emigration” that many in the British political class purport to want.
I did not expect this at all and initially saw Labour’s tough rhetoric as pure opportunism: immigration to Britain was already falling from its 2020s peak because of the unwinding of the post-pandemic surge in movement and the big one-off increases caused by the arrivals from Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Ukraine. I thought Labour was simply moving to cynically take credit for changes that were already happening.
In reality, over the past year, Labour has gone significantly further in reducing immigration than the Conservatives ever did and all indications suggest, unless there is a very big change politically in the government, it will continue to do so.
There are two big reasons why I did not see this coming. First, my tendency is to see the present and future through the lens of the past. For the past 14 years, we’ve had Conservative governments that have talked a lot about reducing immigration but what they’ve really meant was “let’s have more arbitrary cruelty in the system but keep numbers high”. (This was also New Labour’s approach to managing the politics of immigration.) I wasn’t expecting the pattern of “Home Office wants lower immigration, Treasury does not, Treasury wins” to change under Labour.
This relates to another thing I had missed, which is that I hadn’t really absorbed quite how sceptical of business and of economic liberalism this government would be in practice. (I am going to blame age on this one: my anchoring memory of a Labour government is New Labour — a much more economically liberal Labour government than this one.)
So my big lesson here is: Labour’s default setting is less business friendly than I expected.
Now try this
The great films I saw in 2025, in the order I watched them: A Real Pain, I’m Still Here, Julie Keeps Quiet, Good One, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Dying, Sorry Baby, Blue Moon and Eternity.
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