Phil Woolas has only been immigration minister a few weeks, and is already controversial enough a figure to be pulled from Question Time. A humiliation for him? I suspect his job is going completely to plan. His Times interview in which he called for the population to be capped at 70m looked part of a co-ordinated campaign, slated as it was ahead of his Politics Show and Question Time appearances. He is, it seems, being groomed to become less libidinous version of David Blunkett – a blunt speaker who occasionally ventures over the top. His job will be to say crazy stuff now and again, cause a stir, and in general give the impression that the government is tough on immigration. Blunkett would use words like “swamped” and then let the press go wild. So he talked tough on immigration while presiding over an utterly chaotic system. I remember talking to one Immigration and Nationality Directorate officer at the time who told me his whole agency may as well not exist, as anyone who wanted to come and settle in Britain could if they put their mind to it.
Brown is astute enough to know that mass immigration + the pending mass unemployment = political disaster (I looked at this in my last News of the World column). And I suspect a genuine change in position on immigration will take place, for political reasons. CoffeeHousers may remember that Liam Byrne, Woolas’ predecessor, trashed Frank Field’s call for a one-in-one-out policy of “Balanced Migration” (pdf). But now things have changed, and two weeks ago Field was invited to brief Jacqui Smith on the subject. So I suspect the Woolas farrago is part of a genuine shift it both language and policy. Brown knows how dangerous immigration can be to him as an issue, and he (or Mandy) most likely decided not to waste Woolas’ next planned explosion now that Osborne is on the ropes.
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