The Guardian view on Labour’s tough talk on spending and migration: it could cost the party core support | Editorial

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Rachel Reeves and Shabana Mahmood – Labour’s Iron Ladies – made revealing interventions at their party conference. They appear to be scripting a new governing philosophy: fiscal restraint, border control from the state, good behaviour from the public. It’s a message designed to deflect attacks from the right and pre-empt internal criticism. But it will also unsettle Labour’s base and blur the party’s moral line.

Ms Reeves was first up, saying she no longer stands by a pledge made last year not to raise taxes, blaming an uncertain world. That bombshell news was primed for detonation by the chancellor’s insistence that there would be no further softening of her self‑imposed fiscal rules. Last October she had changed them to enable higher investment spending. But the public, she was clear, should expect no such largesse this time round.

Ms Mahmood, meanwhile, used her first speech to conference as home secretary to dramatically redraw the immigration compact. She proposed raising the threshold for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five years to 10. Controversially, she also said successful applicants would be required to have no criminal record, speak English to a high standard, be in work, receive no benefits, and give back to their community. Contribution, it seems, would determine settlement.

The political logic is straightforward. Labour’s leadership team is triangulating the threat from Reform UK on the right while insulating itself from the soft‑left threat posed by the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham. The goal is to be rhetorically tough on migration and spending while still gesturing towards fairness and security.

This approach carries electoral risks that Labour’s leadership underplays. At a Demos fringe meeting, Sir John Curtice showed that Labour is already losing votes to the Greens and Lib Dems. These losses are concentrated in urban areas and university towns, seats that the party cannot afford to neglect. The ILR proposals may alienate ethnic minority and liberal voters who hear in Ms Mahmood’s speech not a challenge to Nigel Farage but an echo of him. Triangulation may keep Reform UK at bay, but it risks unraveling Labour’s own coalition from within.

Though Ms Mahmood explicitly warned against the rise of ethno-nationalism, her policy platform muddies the waters. Deterrence, removals, conditional settlement are not rhetorical gestures; they are policy commitments. Talking tough is one thing. But if Labour ends up with outcomes similar to those Reform covets, voters may not see any difference. There is an important distinction. Sir Keir Starmer branded Reform’s plan to deport migrants already settled in the UK as “racist and immoral”. Ms Mahmood targets only future applicants. But by adding tests of work, English and “volunteering”, she risks turning the right to settle here into a political judgment of a person’s worth. That invites legal challenge, moral ambiguity and confusion over who truly belongs.

Ms Mahmood’s speech looks less like a chasing of headlines than a fundamental repositioning. She is defining herself as a future Labour leader and a patriotic, plain-speaking, Muslim home secretary. She is also staking out a new Labour doctrine: migrants have to earn the invite. But this comes at a price. The party’s ideological centre of gravity is shifting – away from liberal universalism and towards transactional belonging. But it is a step backwards for Labour to only offer belonging to those who pass a morality test rather than one that guarantees rights as a matter of principle.