Britain’s migrant crisis risks being pushed back to ‘elephant in the room’ status by the government once again as new left-wing Prime Minister Andy Burnham declined to mention the policy area once in his first speech.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham made a broad, if vague, speech on his governing priorities as he arrived at Downing Street to form his new government and commence governing on Monday afternoon, but some of the most important policy areas in the country went unspoken.
The state seizing control of industries, homelessness, mental health support for young people, and welfare spending all got a namecheck on Monday but migration — persistently one of the top-performing policy areas in polling year after year — went without a single mention.
Pollster YouGov, which asks members of the public what areas of government policy matters most to them at least monthly, shows immigration has been the most important, or second most important, policy area over the past year, and consistently in the top three for the past 15 years. Border control is unfailingly a major factor at election time and features reliably in local, national, and referendum votes.
Although Burnham has vowed in the past that he won’t try to “out-Reform” Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party in a bid to claw back working class votes, it is undeniable that the Labour movement has drifted in Farage’s direction in some policy areas, notably the nationalisation of strategic industries, and the reindustrialisation of Britain. The clear exception to this is on migration policy, where the divide may be widening.
Observing this total failure to mention the importance of dealing with Britain’s border crisis whatsoever, and the apparent return to the old legacy political approach of simply pretending mass migration isn’t happening, Reform UK spokesman Zia Yusuf said the omission shows Burnham is still pitching himself to his own “insane open borders backbench” Parliamentarians, not the wider country. He said: “Immigration is listed by many pollsters as the most important issue British voters are concerned about. Yet Andy Burnham did not mention it once in his first speech as PM.”
It isn’t as if Britain’s boat migrant crisis is no longer worth talking about. While the English Channel crossings started under the Conservatives, more illegals arrived on England’s southern border by boat under the leadership of now ex-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer than under any other Prime Minister.
Beyond public perception, migration of all types, legal and illegal, are a major force remaking British society. As reported in 2025, racing mass migration drives 98 per cent of population growth: more people die than are born in the United Kingdom and there are fewer White British people in the United Kingdom now in the 1980s despite the overall population having leapt by millions.