Politics Home | Labour MP Says Government’s Migration Rhetoric Has Failed To Cut Through

Uma Kumaran was elected as Labour MP for Stratford and Bow in the 2024 general election (Alamy)

4 min read16 May

Speaking on a panel at the Progress conference in London on Saturday – hosted by Progressive Britain as a forum for developing centre-left, progressive ideas – Kumaran said the government had been “too timid” in setting the agenda around migration. 

Joining a panel with government minister Matthew Patrick, director of British Future Sunder Katwala, and Emily Graham from the Future Governance Forum, Kumaran said that the government’s approach to communicating its migration policies “hasn’t worked”.

“It is the government’s job to communicate what they are doing,” she said. 

“It clearly hasn’t worked. We’ve alienated people on the left, and we’ve alienated those who want us to take a more extreme position. Most people are somewhere in the middle… We have not had people who are willing to have these types of conversations.

“I’ve offered to have these conversations, I’ve offered to do the media round on migration and immigration. Because what’s a more powerful story? The daughter of refugees who says I acknowledge that there are pressures in this country.”

The Stratford MP is the daughter of Tamil refugees who fled the Sri Lankan Civil War.

She has not yet joined the calls of more than 90 of her Labour MP colleagues for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to step down as leader.

Kumaran said she had been among MPs who had expressed concerns about some of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain, which would extend the standard route to settlement from five years to 10 years for most migrants.

“How do you foster community cohesion?” Kumaran said. 

“How do people build a stake in society if you’re waiting 15 years to learn what’s happening to you and to your children?

“There is nuance here… in the age of social media and very short attention spans, it’s a difficult thing for a government to do. We have done some good work, though. Shabana’s team has done some very good work on safe routes, making sure that our approach to people coming here isn’t just ‘stop the boats’ and nothing else, making sure that there are actually genuine routes for refugees.”

Referring to the party’s devastating losses in the local elections last week, she said it had been a “tough week for the Labour Party”. 

“We are having some of these conversations sadly play out in public… many of us have tried to have these conversations behind the scenes. We’ve tried to have these conversations in private, and it has not cut through.

“We have been really timid in our approach to this… we haven’t shouted from the rooftops about the good things that we’ve done. We are a proud, progressive centre-left party. We should be setting the agenda, we shouldn’t be watching it.”

Kumaran said she felt scared getting the train to the conference on Saturday morning. Both a far-right Unite the Kingdom rally and the annual ‘Nakba day’ pro-Palestine march are taking place in central London.

“I have never, ever felt this scared,” she said, adding that she had been “born and raised” in London.

“My heart rate was definitely raised. I didn’t want to get the train. I was scared, and I’m old enough to have lived through terror attacks, through 7/7…”

As co-chair of the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Parliamentary Labour Party, she sent a message of support to their Whatsapp group this morning. 

“That is the state of the immigration debate in the UK,” she said.

“The rhetoric has gone too far, the media has gone too far.”

She added that she felt widespread disinformation and misinformation online had soured the state of the debate around immigration, and said it was “absolutely the duty of the government” to address this.

Kumaran has had her own comments on X turned off for 18 months due to the high volume of hate speech and threats directed at her.

“I don’t think we’ve been brave enough,” she said, arguing that the government had not “taken on these big social media companies”.

“That doesn’t mean that I think the government should be censoring all this. There are important regulations that should be added. We should challenge our own thinking, but having a wild west is what we currently have. The algorithms don’t work.”

Answering a question from a Labour member in the audience who admitted they did not feel proud to be British, Kumaran said: “Never be ashamed to say you are British.

“I couldn’t be prouder to be British, because you know what, I’ve got nowhere else to go.”