Keir Starmer: the immigration experiment is over
The News Agents
Global
4.2 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Keir Starmer, sounding in tone closer to Nigel Farage than previous Labour prime ministers, has called immigration a failed lab experiment and decreed it’s time to take back control. Introducing the government's immigration white paper, the PM says that high net migration has done "incalculable damage" to the country. It’s language that suggests he has been spooked by Reform's recent successes. But language, he presumes, voters now want to hear from their leader. Is he right? And what happens to our most vulnerable if we don’t have NHS staff and care home workers to fill the job gaps no one here is taking?
But we start with an extraordinary interview with Victor Orban's right hand man. In the week where Zelesnkyy and Putin could meet in Istanbul for a potentially crucial moment in attempts to bring the Ukraine war to an end, why is Hungary at odds with the rest of the EU over Russia? Why have Hungary and Ukraine accused each other of spying over the weekend? And is Starmer's language on immigration now mirroring Orban's a decade earlier?
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.0 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.7 | Today, this Labour government is shutting down the lab. |
| 0:16.5 | The experiment is over. |
| 0:19.0 | We will deliver what you've asked for time and again, and we will take back |
| 0:24.3 | control of our borders. That was Keir Stama this morning, sounding like no UK Labour Prime Minister |
| 0:31.1 | has ever sounded before. Closing down the lab, the experiment is over. he's talking about the end to the kind of immigration |
| 0:40.7 | we're seeing right now. But it did sound a lot like reform to many people. It could have been |
| 0:47.3 | a Nigel Farage speech in some of the tone that was delivered. But is this practical, |
| 0:56.2 | given the need to keep our care homes open, |
| 1:01.9 | and given the need to keep the crops picked in our fields? Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:12.2 | The newsagents. It's John. It's Emily. And an awful lot more on what Kirstama has been saying this morning, |
| 1:17.5 | because it is absolutely fascinating. You know, the central kind of question of how easy will it be to get these net migration numbers down, which, let's face it, has been the goal of every Prime Minister |
| 1:22.7 | since David Cameron, when he talked about the tens of thousands, Brexit, end of free movement, |
| 1:27.9 | all the rest of it. But now Kirstama is really sounding very, very different indeed from anything |
| 1:34.9 | he said before. Yeah, and we're going to come to that a bit later. But we think this week |
| 1:39.7 | is going to be dominated by what happens in Istanbul, a putative meeting between Putin and Zelensky, |
| 1:45.9 | which could well determine what happens with the war in Ukraine. And today we have an interview |
| 1:50.0 | that you probably won't get anywhere else. It's a view on the Ukraine war we rarely hear. |
| 1:55.7 | It's with Viktor Orban's right-hand man in Hungary, Zoltan Kovach. And we're going to ask him why Hungary's been dragging its feet on EU sanctions |
| 2:04.3 | and whether Hungary even believes that Ukraine is a sovereign state. |
| 2:09.8 | What can we learn about the distrust between those two countries |
... |
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