Keir Starmer has been doing his best for months to tell the country that there are no easy answers to our problems. There is no magical money tree. We cannot spend what we do not have. We must be realistic about the scorched earth that a Labor government would inherit. This deliberate dampening of expectations does not exactly make the heart sing, but it is better to promise the earth that you will be elected and then clumsily try to wriggle out of it. What is baffling, however, is that this policy of brutally bursting voter bubbles never seems to be applied to immigration.
Last week’s Office for National Statistics figures, which revised the net number of people coming to Britain to 745,000 in 2022, were always going to cause concern in the Conservative Party, followed by the usual rhetoric about reduce numbers in some other draconian way. But this time Labor has met them halfway. The Treasury’s relatively new shadow chief secretary, Darren Jones, suggested last weekend that Labor would ‘probably hope’ to reduce immigration in his first term, and when pressed at a reasonable level he spoke of ‘ normal levels’. about a “few hundred thousand per year”. It wasn’t exactly a rock-solid commitment, but it is nevertheless depressing to hear Labor backtracking on the kind of promises that have backfired on the Tories since David Cameron promised to cut immigration to “tens of thousands”. It’s true that luck may be on Labor’s side here: if the 2022 figures turn out to be one-offs, reflecting a labor market catching up on itself after a freeze on hiring and travel during the pandemic, it could While Labor may see immigration decline naturally, it is still wary. But it is nevertheless a missed opportunity to talk to the public about the real choices facing a small country with an aging population and a stagnant economy.
“Stop small boats somehow” is now virtually the entire immigration policy of the current government, to the point where voters could be forgiven for thinking that it is the Channel crossings that are pushing the numbers so high. But the vast majority of the 1.23 million people who came to this country last year did so with the blessing of a government that is now feigning pantomime horror over their existence: allowed to work, study, visit family or seek refuge through compassionate routes such as those offered to Ukrainians fleeing invasion. Ministers signed two and a half times as many work visas last year as in 2019, almost 40% of which were for health and social care jobs, for perfectly good reasons. Those jobs needed to be filled, and voters would not have liked the consequences of leaving them empty. But ministers’ unwillingness to defend or explain these decisions has left the Tories in the farcical position of furiously trying to divert attention to their own Achilles heel, namely the small minority who came here illegally (85% of them in small boats).
Whether they like the idea of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda or not, polls show that most voters do not believe this will ever happen. The fact that the Cabinet is now openly divided over this policy only reinforces the impression of powerlessness and increases public anxiety, while obscuring what little progress Rishi Sunak’s government has actually managed to make. Interior Ministry figures show that the number of Albanians arriving by small boat has fallen from around 11,500 in 2022 until the end of September, to only 860 in the same period in 2023, indicating that the policy of rapid returns to Albania may have paid off. The number of canal crossings has consequently decreased, while illegal immigration is increasing in the rest of Europe. But by loudly banging its head against the brick wall marked Rwanda, the government has somehow managed to make even this modest success look like a failure – which helps explain why the new minister of Home Secretary James Cleverly now argues that it is about stopping the reforms. boats, instead of sticking to how exactly it should be done. But even if ministers had somehow managed to turn around every boat that left a French beach last year, legal migration would still have reached record levels.
So this is what a future government would say if it were really honest: that the vast majority of immigration to Britain is the result of conscious choices to deliver things that people actively want, such as an NHS that has a great chance to not collapse this winter or Universities not to go bankrupt due to lack of foreign students. Stopping it is of course technically possible, but the price will be the collapse of public services and another dismal decade of low to non-existent economic growth.
You want a radical immigration strategy? Here’s one: fund social care properly so that care workers earn the kind of wages that make this emotionally demanding, physically strenuous and technically skilled job attractive. Better yet, create career paths so they can progress in healthcare as a profession. Not only would it vastly improve the continuity of care for vulnerable people, while preventing several councils from going bankrupt due to rising social care bills, but ultimately ministers would not have to issue 77,700 care work visas a year to close the gaps. although it would obviously take years to train home-grown staff).
But if that’s too radical – if you’d rather have tax cuts today, pretend the social care crisis isn’t happening and just take a chance on what happens to your parents in old age – then you need cheap foreign labor to come and support the system. Of course, Jeremy Hunt went out of his way to argue the opposite in his autumn statement, suggesting that the long-term sick could somehow be forced back into work as an alternative to increasing immigration under Labour. It beggars belief that the kind of measures ministers are proposing – for example asking people with disabilities to find work they can do from home – is somehow a viable alternative, even if this could be achieved without the cruelty that some see as inevitable. (How many social care jobs do you think can be done from the end of a phone? Who is going to provide the routine medical treatment that in some cases prevents them from returning to work in the first place?) is not a magical third way. Those are the choices.
At a time when the far right is on the rise across Europe, British politicians remain understandably nervous about proclaiming such home truths. The Labor Party’s traditional aim in the run-up to the election is not so much to win the debate on immigration, but rather to change the subject. But that won’t be enough in government. When it comes to power, Labor will sooner or later have to fight that battle.