It’s supposed to be the Tory housing week, with David Cameron setting out plans to double the number of discounted starter homes to 200,000. It’s an important, salient issue to make election promises on. But more salient is immigration, and somehow the Tories are having to talk about that again today.
Today’s Times contains a plea by Ken Clarke that Cameron drop the Tory target to drive net migration into the ‘tens of thousands’, given its failure in this parliament. Ministers have oscillated between blaming the Lib Dems and blaming Europe for missing the target (they could also blame the growing economy, as Fraser explains here) and David Cameron did closely tie controlling immigration to European reform in his speech before Christmas.
How does Cameron deal with this? Well, in one sense, the Prime Minister is dealing with one of the sources of discontent about immigration today by making announcements on housing supply, given many objections to uncontrolled immigration stem from frustration at poor access to new homes, schools and other services. He may want to focus more on satisfying aspirations, rather than immigration as a reason for building more homes.
But he should indeed be thinking very carefully about whether any sort of target should appear in his manifesto this time around. My hunch is that the Tories, having downgraded the target to what Theresa May called a ‘comment’, will quietly exclude that ‘comment’ from their election campaigning. They have decided not to make immigration one of their six priority areas for the campaign, which has frustrated many in the party, but it does mean that there will be no ‘immigration week’ on the grid where the PM is repeatedly asked about a new target.
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