It was a bit rich of George Osborne to tease Nigel Farage for ‘a novel approach to policymaking’ for dumping Ukip’s previous commitment to a 50,000 cap on the number of migrants arriving in the UK each year live on the Today programme. George Osborne found this rather funny, even though he and his colleagues have spent the past year doing something reasonably similar. It was on the same programme that Theresa May downgraded the net migration target to a ‘comment’, while Osborne gave newspaper interviews in which he made it clear that it would be rather difficult to meet the target under Britain’s current arrangements with the EU.
But in any case, Nigel Farage has dumped one policy for another – a policy his own immigration spokesman Steven Woolfe was still expounding on the virtues of on Friday at the Ukip conference in Margate. The Ukip leader said today:
‘We’ve had years and years of political parties setting targets. I think the public are bored with targets, they don’t believe targets. What’s really important is: are we going to get a grip on mass immigration or not?’
But what’s now really important for Ukip as it writes its manifesto (one that will be out later than all the other parties’ manifestos, Farage said today) is that it doesn’t make promises that appear to be impossible to keep. And that in turn is quite helpful for the Tories, as one of the problems they’ve struggled to deal with when countering the threat of Ukip is that Ukip tends to promise more than is possible, as well as more than is really desirable beyond something that gets a good headline. The Tories therefore could not match those promises, and were left trailing, but the admission today that a target might not be the best idea is mildly helpful for them, though anyone who declares that this is the moment that Ukip started to fade away is either blessed with special powers of prophecy or overly confident: no such declarations have been proven true to this point.
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