Theresa May will today claim that high levels of immigration make it ‘impossible to build a cohesive society’. The Home Secretary will tell the Tory conference that it’s not just about building more schools and homes to deal with immigration, but about driving those numbers down too:
‘Now I know there are some people who say, yes there are costs of immigration, but the answer is to manage the consequences, not reduce the numbers. But not all of the consequences can be managed, and doing so for many of them comes at a high price.
‘We need to build 210,000 new homes every year to deal with rising demand. We need to find 900,000 new school places by 2024. And there are thousands of people who have been forced out of the labour market, still unable to find a job.’
This is fascinating, given the repeated failure of the Tory net migration target. That target, to get net migration down into the ‘tens of thousands’ was back-of-the-envelope stuff anyway, yet the party stuck to it for the 2015 election. May did downgrade it to a ‘comment’ for the purposes of the campaign, but she’s now back to campaigning for ministers to maintain the target’s current design.
Perhaps she is aware that Tory MPs see the party’s immigration failure as one of the biggest questions she will have to answer come the leadership contest, and perhaps she is contemplating backing leaving in the EU referendum as a way of answering that question. But at present when the leadership contest does come up, most Tory MPs say ‘May, well she’s got quite a lot of explaining to do’. Clearly she’s decided that this ‘explaining’ involves talking tougher.
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