Prof Alex Balch
Alex Balch is a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, with research interests in policies on immigration and modern slavery. Since 2020 he has been Director of Research at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (Modern Slavery PEC), based at University of Oxford.
Twitter: @alex_balch
Email: A.R.Balch@liverpool.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 5: Policy and strategy
50. It’s the cost-of-living-crisis, stupid! (Prof Aeron Davis)
51. The last pre-war vote? Defence and foreign policy in the 2024 Election (Dr Russell Foster)
52. The 2024 UK general election and the absence of foreign policy (Dr Victoria Honeyman)
53. Fractious consensus: defence policy at the 2024 General Election (Dr Ben Jones)
54. The psycho-politics of climate denial in the 2024 UK election (Prof Candida Yates, Dr Jenny Alexander)
55. How will the Labour government fare and what should they do better? (Prof Rick Stafford and team)
56. Finding the environment: climate obstructionism and environmental movements on TikTok (Dr Abi Rhodes)
57. Irregular migration: ‘Stop the boats’ vs ‘Smash the Gangs’ (Prof Alex Balch)
58. The sleeping dog of ‘Europe: UK relations with the EU as a non-issue (Prof Simon Usherwood)
59. Labour: a very conservative housing manifesto (Prof Becky Tunstall)
60. Why the Labour Government must abolish the two-child benefit limit policy (Dr Yekaterina Chzhen)
61. Take the next right: mainstream parties’ positions on gender and LGBTQ+ equality issues (Dr Louise Luxton)
It might go down in history as one of the most dramatic, elaborate, expensive, and ultimately disastrous electoral strategies ever mounted. The Rwanda Plan, forming the centre-piece of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party’s policy to reduce irregular channel crossings (‘Stop the Boats’) was also part of the push for a record 5th term in government. It promised to make irregular migration to the UK the main topic of the 2024 UK election campaign, putting opposition parties on the back foot while also displacing perhaps more difficult policy areas for the serving Conservative government, such as stalling economic growth, wage stagnation and the rising cost of living. However, the concession by the government that deportation flights would not leave before the election, despite the hundreds of millions spent, the emotional trauma suffered by those targeted in nationwide detention operations, and the extensive legislative gymnastics that enabled Rwanda to be declared a ‘safe country’, meant the Conservatives’ electoral strategy was the proverbial dead duck. Despite this ‘failure to launch’, the ghost of the Rwanda plan continued to stalk proceedings and was referred to by party leaders, remaining a key part of the set-piece debates throughout the campaign. One of the results was that the topic of irregular migration created more pressure for the government as the incumbent, increasing electoral vulnerability on its right flank which would ultimately be exploited by the Reform Party.
The election debates on irregular migration were almost completely evidence-free, following a pattern set by the government in the lead up to both the Nationality and Borders (2022), and Illegal Migration (2023) Acts. Research points to neither deterrence nor border securitisation (or a combination of the two), as particularly promising policies for reducing irregular migration. On the contrary, the evidence suggests these are likely to increase risks of harm, particularly for those migrants that have experienced trafficking or exploitation.
A common refrain for all the main parties during the campaign was the statement that the ‘system is broken’ on irregular and humanitarian migration, albeit with competing claims on how this would be fixed, by what time-scale and through which methods. Indeed, when the topic came up in the final head-to-head leaders’ debate, Sunak felt comfortable in joining Starmer making this claim, attempting to convince the public that asylum backlogs would be cleared and that the Rwanda Plan was the best approach, simply needing more time to work. Starmer, perhaps drawing on his prosecutorial background, garnished the Labour Party’s criminal justice approach, with the flourish of not one but two additional three-word slogans, avoiding repetition of the Conservative’s pledge to ‘Stop the Boats’, instead promising Labour would ‘Smash the Gangs’ to ‘Stop the Chaos’. Overall, the leaders debates underlined how the manufactured fear and performative approaches to what is a fairly low (proportionately) level of irregular migration is such that “neither could mount a real defence of their own plans”. Almost entirely absent from the debates, with the exception of the Green Party, were any concerted efforts to assert a human rights defense of the UK’s membership of the system of international protection.
As with the head-to-head debate, the seven-leader version (held at the start of the campaign) yielded few surprises in relation to positions on irregular migration. The two main parties reiterated their securitised/enforcement approach while the others fell on each side along a spectrum. As with the general tenor of the wider media coverage, questions about irregular migration became subsumed by the wider (simplistic) argument about whether immigration as a whole is good for the economy (Scottish National Party, Green Party) or whether immigration is bad (for the economy and also everything else, e.g. Reform). It is notable however, that the prioritisation of irregular migration across the English Channel by the Conservative Party could be perceived as a strategy very much focused on English, rather than Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish voters.
Are we back to the mid-1990s when then-Shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw boasted you could get ‘barely a cigarette paper’ between the Conservatives and Labour on immigration? While possibly true for most parts of the immigration system, there are some differences over irregular migration because of wider policy on humanitarian migration (refugees). The commitment to human rights is one clear dividing line, as is the overall approach to the asylum system. The Migration Observatory’s comparison of election manifestos on irregular and humanitarian migration claimed that “Labour and the Conservatives are offering very different visions of how the asylum system will work”. However, despite ditching the Rwanda Plan, the framing by Labour and the Conservatives is broadly similar, as demonstrated in ‘immigration policy tracker’ which shows how nuanced the differences are likely to be at the point of implementation.
Following the result of the election, newly installed Home Secretary Yvette Cooper wasted little time to announce the creation of a UK Border Security Command. In the true spirit of policy-based-evidence-making Cooper said that to support this there would be research commissioned into smuggling gangs, suggesting that both problem and solution have already been pre-determined by the new government.
