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When will the Tories come clean on their migration plan?
Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.
As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the big league now. We could say instead that the net influx in a single year is nearly equivalent to the population of the entire Bristol metropolitan area (680,000) and bigger than the population of Sheffield (560,000).
The original Tory promise of a ceiling of 100,000 typically came in at double, or treble, that number under David Cameron and Theresa May. When he became prime minister, Boris Johnson said he would no longer be bound by that manifesto commitment of 2010, 2015 and 2017. In his own manifesto in 2019, he promised that overall net immigration would come down from the over 200,000 it was then running at.
The thought increasingly occurs that Labour could hardly be worse on this front
In fact, Johnson engineered more than a further doubling: net immigration came in at 504,000 in the 12 months to June 2022. Since then, Rishi Sunak has felt entitled to walk away even from the blond bombshell’s diluted manifesto commitment. The PM will only say he aims to get net migration down from its current absurd level.
By now the fake migration scepticism presented to the public by the Conservatives in every election year does not merely count as the predominant Big Lie of Tory politics in the 21st century, but also as the Long Lie. Anyone who believes whatever version of it appears in the 2024 manifesto probably ought not to be allowed out on their own or to have unsupervised access to scissors.
Ministers are citing an unusual confluence of factors behind the new figures – the Ukraine war, the schemes to resettle persecuted people from Afghanistan and Hong Kong, a belatedly-addressed boom in the number of dependants that foreign students have been bringing in.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick in the Commons yesterday gave the impression that the huge Ukraine and Hong Kong influxes were non-contentious, claiming they ‘command broad support from the British public’. In fact, many of us have warned repeatedly about the likely scale and uncapped nature of those schemes and challenged ministers to say how they would be compatible with pressures on housing or public services capacity. Johnson’s universal offer to Hong Kong British national overseas (BNO) passport holders was especially reckless and theatrical. He did not even seek to put together a group of nations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada to share out the numbers.
New polling commissioned by the Tory peer Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts finds that 53 per cent of the public think the previous 504,000 figure for net immigration was too high, with only two per cent branding it too low. More than two-thirds of voters, 69 per cent, believe that immigration on such a scale has a negative impact on housing availability. Among 2019 Tory voters, concern about immigration and asylum is now way clear as their second highest priority behind the state of the economy. And mark my words, soon it will be top.
At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, something extraordinary happened: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer felt he had been offered a big enough target by Sunak to justify leading in on public concerns about excessive immigration, despite himself leading a party which is sentimentally attached to open borders. Starmer was able to take Sunak to the cleaners without even touching on the most controversial and emotive aspects of the issue, namely the cultural and social impacts of immigration on the current scale. Instead, Starmer merely pointed out the betrayal of British workers left untrained and unemployed while big business was merrily importing unlimited numbers of foreign workers and paying them up to 20 per cent below the previous market rate.
So we never got round to hearing that scarce social housing is now on a per capita basis more likely to have been allocated to foreign nationals than British ones. Some honourable Tories have fought a long and obviously unsuccessful fight for sanity and integrity from their party on this subject. Take a bow, in particular, Lord Lilley, Lord Hodgson and Sir John Hayes. All have argued powerfully that we are never going to get to the high value added, high wage economy we allegedly aspire to while the cheap labour tap is left open. What incentives will employers have to train up non-ideal British workers or to invest in mechanisation?
In many industries, the reverse is happening. Half a century ago automated car washes were all the rage. Now most of us have our vehicles hand-washed by unhappy-looking south-eastern Europeans who will be lucky to be earning even the national minimum wage.
At PMQs yesterday the Labour backbencher Kim Johnson repeated the preposterous suggestion that ‘we are the fifth richest economy in the world’ while making a point about child poverty. For that to be true we would need to have the fifth highest per capita income. We are miles off that and falling ever further down the global league table thanks to the cheap labour, low-tech model of production that the Conservative party has doubled down on since 2010.
Does any erstwhile Tory voter truly have faith that Starmer is the answer? Of course not. No doubt he will take up the baton of mass immigration from Sunak, just as Cameron took it up from Blair and Brown. But the thought increasingly occurs that Labour could hardly be worse on this front.
The annihilation of the current cohort of Tory MPs may prove a necessary step in a bid to create a viable party of government which actually has the appetite to impose responsible immigration control another half decade down the line.
