Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?

Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.

Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.

All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.