Andy Burnham takes immigration politics beyond fear of Nigel Farage

Widely expected compromise on immigration crackdown signals shift towards a regime focused on labour market gaps and economic opportunity

Good morning from London, where I have woken up to many front-page headlines about Shabana Mahmood's "£10bn U-turn" on immigration and also to a burning sense of envy towards those in Antigua covering the Commonwealth summit.

It's not so much that the row about slavery reparations and a British apology is escalating, or even the balmy Caribbean weather, but more that Andy Burnham got to meet my childhood hero and cricket legend Sir Vivian Richards.

Burnham told Richards that he'd seen him play many times, but I bet he never got to meet him in the rickety old Somerset dressing room in Taunton. My grandad, a vice-president at the club, introduced an awestruck young me to him back in the 1970s -- an amazing day.

Back to the present, and Mahmood completed one of the slowest and most expected U-turns in recent political history when she exempted about 300,000 social care workers from her plans to make it harder to gain permanent UK residency. More on that below.

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Immigration reset

I watched Mahmood in the Commons ripping up her plan, first set out a year ago, and thought she carried out the exercise fairly deftly, given she had previously claimed that without her tough reforms there would be a "£10bn drain on our public finances" from low-paid migrants using public services.

Her U-turn was met with general approval from Labour MPs, notwithstanding ongoing leftwing complaints that the regime is still too tough.

But it also made me think how much has changed in the immigration debate: Andy Burnham's arrival in Number 10 seems to signal a big shift in the way we view legal migration, even if the emphasis on stopping illicit arrivals on small boats continues.

When Mahmood originally conceived these plans to make it harder to gain indefinite leave to remain (ILR), Keir Starmer was prime minister and Labour was convulsed with fear at the apparently inexorable rise of Nigel Farage's anti-immigration Reform UK.

Now Starmer has gone and Farage's party is in sharp decline. In fact, any day now the Tories will overtake them in the polls and then both traditional big parties will be ahead of Reform -- an important moment psychologically.

But as Burnham noted this week, net migration numbers are "significantly down", from over 900,000 a year in the so-called "Boris wave" after the Covid pandemic, to 171,000 in the latest annual figures for 2025.

Burnham is now quietly tilting immigration policy so that it is less driven by fear of Farage and more driven by the economy and Britain's wider political priorities.

"It's come right down," Burnham told ITV's Tonight programme when asked if migration was too high. "And I think when you have planned migration, it's difficult to say if it is too high or too low, because it's got to be, if you like, following gaps in the economy."

Mahmood's package of reforms to indefinite leave to remain included an offer to new arrivals to apply for settlement in three years to people earning more than £125,141 annually.

Meanwhile, Burnham's comments suggest he is open to a more liberal immigration regime to plug gaps in the labour market and to attract the brightest people to the UK.

"What I have argued is that migration and illegal immigration changed significantly with Brexit. And I think we've got to be honest about that," he said.

Elsewhere in recent days, the prime minister has also floated a return to freedom of movement between Britain and the EU, taking on perhaps the biggest single issue that drove the Brexit vote in 2016.

Burnham's contention is that EU/UK migration is different from some of the longer-distance migration to the UK we've seen since Brexit: he argued it was more likely to be of a "revolving-door" nature.

Indeed, since 2022 Britain has seen net emigration by EU nationals. The countries that once supplied the UK's plumbers and care workers -- places like Poland and Lithuania -- are now economically successful and their citizens are naturally returning home.

There's another area coming up where Burnham is expected to open the doors. The EU/UK summit on November 20 is expected to see Britain sign up to a Youth Experience Scheme to allow 18- to 30-year-olds to travel and work across the Channel, just like the old days.

Under Starmer's administration, Britain originally proposed offering 50,000 visas a year, while the EU demanded 150,000. I'd expect Burnham to arrive at 100,000 by the time he sits down to sign the deal in Brussels.

And further down the track, there will be a deal to allow EU students to come to British universities at much-reduced fees -- almost certainly on the same "home fees" basis as their UK counterparts -- at a cost of several hundred million pounds.

Now try this

I was lucky enough to see David Suchet in Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot in a neo-Gothic church in Richmond, a sublime location for the lyrical and haunting play about the killing of Thomas Becket.

It's only got a few days to run in Richmond and is sold out, but it's then going out on tour, including to Bath next. If you can grab a ticket, I'd highly recommend it.

Easier to come by will be tickets to see Crystal Palace play Hoffenheim in the Europa League at the ridiculously early time of 5.45pm on Thursday. The wheels have come off for the Eagles this season: we need all the support we can get.

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