Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Politics

Immigration policy can ‘swamp’ a party’s message. But Cameron knows this

James Forsyth

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Cameron enters the immigration debate

Brown’s nativism is based on the political calculation that he can say things which no Tory leader can. The legacy of Enoch Powell means that Tory politicians must always fight against the suspicion that their real immigration policy is to ‘send them all home’, which is why including the word ‘racist’ on Tory election posters in 2005 was such a disastrous idea.

David Cameron — to the trepidation of some in his inner circle — waded into the immigration debate this week. In a long and thoughtful speech, Mr Cameron argued that net immigration to this country is too high, something that he had already said on Newsnight in August. This is a dangerous position for any politician to take, especially one of the centre-Right. In essence, the leader of the opposition is arguing that it would be better if some people in this country were not here.

It also begs the question of what the ideal number of migrants would be, and on that there comes no answer from the Conservatives. Cameron would have been on far safer ground if he had stuck to a critique of the incompetence of the government’s immigration policy, and the fairytale land from which many of the official statistics derive.

The question is whether Cameron’s foray into the immigration debate is the precursor of a full frontal assault. The temptation is great. Immigration routinely ranks as one of the electorate’s top two concerns and the Tory line on it was enthusiastically received in the press. The danger for the Conservatives is not that their immigration policy is unpopular, but that it is so popular that they will become as dependent on it as the Saudi Arabian economy is on oil exports. As the 2001 and 2005 general elections and the 2006 US mid-terms showed, immigration policy can drown out the rest of a party’s message.

Tory high command is alert to this danger. This speech was designed to put on the record party policy and the thinking behind it. There will, however, be no repeat of the mistakes of the 2005 election campaign. Cameron himself realised the damage that the excessive emphasis on immigration was doing even before the postmortems of the campaign had begun.

There are, though, still dangers lurking out there from this speech. The licence this policy gives members of the party whose speaking style is more soapbox than soft soap could come back to haunt Cameron. It would only take a couple of backbenchers proclaiming the policy with inappropriate gusto to unpick the good work that the reasoned tone of this speech did. The Conservatives have earned the right to be heard on immigration, not to hector.