“Mark my words, this government will turn the page,” Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, promised in a recent speech. It is the sort of thing he says about many areas of policy. This time the topic was one near the top of voters’ concerns: immigration. Labour has pledged to expand detention centres, “smash” people-smuggling gangs and, above all, return greater numbers of illegal migrants. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, boasted on December 15th that the government is on course to send home more illegal migrants in its first six months in power than in any six-month period in the past five years. Five days earlier the government had managed to carry out the first removal flight to Pakistan since 2020.