4 hours ago
6
Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking in a more hostile way about immigration than at almost any other time in the last century, the Guardian can reveal.
An unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches has shown a sharp shift to the right on the issue – with the biggest swing from positive to negative attitudes coming in the past five years.
Experts warn that MPs from the two main parties have been trying to outdo each other over how tough they appear on asylum and immigration since the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said there was “a clear case in principle that what we’ve seen in the past couple of years is a historically unprecedented dual negative shift in sentiment on immigration”.
The following visual analysis shows how MPs’ language towards immigration today compares with previous decades.
The Guardian analysis also reveals that references to immigration have rapidly multiplied in recent years as the issue has dominated British politics.
The proportion of speeches relating to immigration has grown sharply since the late 1990s. Before the turn of the millennium, just 1% of MPs’ contributions in the House of Commons were about immigration. By 2023, the proportion had reached a record high of 5.4% of all speeches.
Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, said there had been a “hardening of the political debate” around immigration since 2022, with parties concerned over the accusation, made after the Brexit referendum, that they had not listened to concerns and reacted too slowly.
“I think there’s an element of overcompensation,” he said. “You end up almost ventriloquising a cartoonish caricature of what the politicians think the public wants to hear, which might be harder than where the public actually are. The parties have seemed to bid each other up.”
The research used an in-house machine learning model, developed by the Guardian in collaboration with University College London, to measure all House of Commons debates from 1925 to the end of 2025, with a focus on contributions relating to immigration. The model was a traditional, non-generative AI (although an LLM was used to label some of the data that it was trained on.)
The analysis shows that Labour’s contributions marked one of its lowest scores in 2025, which is comparable and within the margin of error to that of 2006 – a time when the EU were preparing to extend freedom of movement to Romania and Bulgaria and two years after expanding to other 10 European countries.
As the Guardian model was trained on contributions made on the Commons floor, and measures these speeches in aggregate, it was not applied to speeches delivered outside parliament.
It did not include, therefore, prominent speeches made outside parliament, such as Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” in 1968 or Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” in May last year. Starmer later said he “deeply regrets” the speech, which was criticised for echoing Powell’s claim that Britain’s white population would be “strangers in their own country”.
The Guardian’s immigration sentiment model was developed between newsroom journalists, the Guardian’s data science team and members of the Centre for Data Intensive Science and Industry of University College London, Joe Egan, Eliot Dable, Simran Dave under the guidance of Gloria Gennaro, a lecturer in data science and public policy with the Department of Political Science and supervised by Gabriel Facini, a lecturer in physics and astronomy in the Faculty of Maths & Physical Sciences.
Read the full methodology here.
Photos: PRU/AFP/Getty Images, Maria Unger/PA, PA, Parliament TV, Getty Images, Rex/Shutterstock, PA, Alamy, Jessica Taylor/PA, AFP/Getty Images, EPA, House of Commons/AFP/Getty Images
