Tony Blair warns Keir Starmer he needs plan to control immigration

UK's new government must deal with issue to stave off challenge from right-wing populists, former Labour PM advises

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer with former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ahead of the Accession Council ceremony in September 2022, where where King Charles III was formally proclaimed mShow more

Former Labour Prime Minister and Middle East envoy Tony Blair has urged Keir Starmer to formulate a "plan to control immigration", warning of the threat from the UKs right-wing parties.

Mr Starmer was on Sunday marking his third day as Prime Minister with a tour of Scotland after Labour’s landslide victory.

But challenges posed by the anti-immigration Reform UK Party remain despite Labour’s overwhelming majority in government, Mr Blair said.

Reform, led by Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage, maximised the damage to the Conservatives at the election by splitting the right-wing vote.

It won five seats in Parliament and 14 per cent of the vote, prompting Mr Farage to warn it will be targeting Labour voters next.

In a column for The Sunday Times, Mr Blair advised harnessing the power of artificial Intelligence (AI) to control irregular immigration, saying "all over the western world, traditional political parties are suffering disruption".

"Where the system allows new entrants to emerge, they are running riot everywhere. Look at France or Italy.

"We need a plan to control immigration. If we don't have rules, we get prejudices."

Mr Blair, the only Labour leader to lead his party to three consecutive election victories starting with his own landslide win in 1997, said he believed digital ID technology offers the best solution to controlling immigration, a key issue on the doorstep during the latest election campaign.

"We should move as the world is moving to digital ID. If not, new border controls will have to be highly effective," he wrote.

Other suggestions included "a tough new approach to law and order". He said he feared "criminal elements are modernising faster than law enforcement".

Mr Blair said the government should "avoid any vulnerability on 'wokeism'", warning against policies that many regard as overly politically correct.

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick said he believed immigration was “at the heart” of the Tory defeat this week.

"The reason that we lost the trust of millions of people across the country is not because we were too left wing or right wing, or had this slogan or that slogan, but fundamentally because we failed to deliver on the promises we made to the British public," he told Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC on Sunday.

Low economic growth, high taxes and the quality of the National Health Service were among those promises, but failure to secure the country’s borders and control migration was ranked “above all”, he said.

Mr Jenrick, who was re-elected MP for Newark, resigned from Mr Sunak's government last year because he believed his Rwanda legislation did not go far enough.

The Conservative government's controversial Rwanda plan aimed to deport tens of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived in Britain without permission to the East African nation, hoping it would deter other migrants from attempting to cross the English Channel on small boats.

But years of legal challenges meant that no one was ever sent to Rwanda under the official scheme.

Mr Starmer, a critic of plan since its inception, declared it "dead and buried" on his first day as Prime Minister.