Today’s net migration figures naturally present a problem for ministers in that they are going in the opposite direction to what the government officially says they should be. As Fraser says here, net migration to the UK last year was at a record high of 504,000, and this looks rather different to the high-wage, high-skill and low migration model spoken of in the Brexit debate.
The government approach currently is to focus on the specific bit that winds voters up – illegal crossings using small boats in the Channel – rather than the general numbers. The argument that Rishi Sunak advanced on this at the CBI earlier this week was that this was the thing government has to fix before voters will even contemplate the sort of ‘practical’ system that the business group is calling for.
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is blunter, saying businesses need to wean themselves off their dependency on ‘cheap labour’, while treading carefully around the Channel crossings issue. Labour’s basic position is that it wants to stop these crossings too, but would do this better. The problem that both parties have is that successive Home Secretaries have shown that it is very easy to talk about the crossings, but less so to cut the numbers. When Suella Braverman recently signed the deal with the French for more patrols along the coast and other measures, she was immediately attacked by normally tribally supportive MPs on her own side who complained that this meant very little and was ‘throwing good money after bad’. Talking about the issue when it already has high salience means you don’t appear to be ignoring it, but of course it also makes it even more salient. It’s a tricky one.
So if you’re not solving the Channel crossings – and then not sticking to the pledge of net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ which key figures in your party keep committing to despite all the evidence pointing to it being impossible and an act of economic self-harm – then what do you have to show to voters for your hard work at the next election? That question is going to start to haunt Conservatives who know that two years is no time at all in which to turn around an immigration and asylum system that the Home Secretary herself regularly says isn’t working.
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