he said sort of cryptic things, migration is too high, yes, i think 700,000 were there it s too big, but today, for the first time in this campaign, he s been clear about a commitment to get the numbers down, which that is a different thing to saying i think it s too high, why? should the next general election be around that time, people like you and me will say you made a commitment in the last general election, how have you delivered against it? i also think it s significant because of the politics of it and the politics of it are pretty obvious and we should bill it out anyway. this is keir starmer, yet again, as he has every day since, though, it was a bit different at the start, he is trying to basically bash voters over the head with a message that he is moving the labour party way to the right of where it was in 2019 and 2017 general elections when their approach to immigration would ve been quite different to this. that is the message here. we can see this is the mess
sorry, you were pushing fora number, laura. it is interesting because labour s plans are to try to get to a position where we don t need much more migration but how do they plan to do that? yvette cooper is right that the conservatives have tangled themselves in knots four years over the tens of thousands stat that david cameron initially set and theresa may, who was the home secretary for a long time, attempting to deliver that. clearly they are deciding strategically, tactically, not to have a number held over them. however, i think people in the conservative party who want immigration to come down, the problem for conservative governments was not the act of having a target, it was the fact they did not hit their target. labour will clearly have a looser target. net migration last year was 685,000. people are trending