The Guardian view on immigration figures: a well-deserved catastrophe for the Conservatives
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Version 0 of 1. Politicians so often benefit from meretricious headline-grabbing stunts that we should savour the moments when these crash and burn. The immigration figures released on Thursday were an unequivocal catastrophe for a central plank of Conservative electioneering policy. David Cameron’s 2010 pledge to have net annual immigration down below 100,000 by this election has been answered by reality with a heartfelt raspberry: the figure now is nearly 300,000. Some of this is entirely predictable: at the same time as he made his promise, Mr Cameron was planning to run a successful economy, or at least one less unsuccessful than our immediate competitors and neighbours in the EU, all of whom have a free right of entry here. Success in that aim led inexorably to increased immigration from those countries. Conversely, if there had been a massive outflow of EU migrants from Britain, either to Germany or to their homelands, this would have been an indication of a drastically failing British economy. That would have brought its own, greater problems. The political bet could only have been won at a quite unacceptable economic price. But EU migration alone would not explain the rise in the figures. There has been an even larger growth in migration from those countries outside the EU which have been the targets of an increasingly ferocious regime of visas and tribunals. Related: We need to talk about the UK’s immigration policy | Letters Yet it would be wrong to gloat over his discomfiture without considering some of the troubling implications of his failure. It has implications both for the thoughtless and the thoughtful. The thoughtless – which means Ukip’s most hardline tendency – will draw from Mr Cameron’s failure the conclusion that he didn’t try hard enough. One more really determined heave and they will attain their dream of shutting out the aliens, along with the threatening future, much of our present and the recent past. The thoughtful will understand that this is impossible, but its impossibility is also worrying. Under Theresa May the whole apparatus of the state has been bent towards reducing immigration. This may have been a cruel, short-sighted and mistaken policy but governments will make such mistakes, and it is chastening to see the state’s weaknesses so cruelly exposed. One explanation for this is surely the battering that all the public services have taken in the last five years. It is a profound foolishness at the heart of Conservative policy to suppose that you can demand ever greater efforts from a despised and demoralised workforce. But there is also the fact that she is fighting the forces of the global market in ways her party’s ideology would usually warn against. That is not the only contradiction hampering the government. More generally, one can analyse immigration from three perspectives. There is the social conservative view, which would regard all of it with suspicion. This is most clearly articulated at the moment by the Ukip core vote. Then there is the perspective of market efficiency. As employers and even consumers, we want access to an eager pool of low-wage labour. The cost of an NHS which had to rely on home-grown labour would terrify any politician. Those two considerations tend to pull in opposite directions. In any case, both need be tempered by generosity, humanity and imagination. The reasons that immigration has made Britain a better place, and continues to do so, are not just economic but political, cultural and social. Institutionally, the role of generosity, humanity and imagination has been represented by the development of human rights legislation. This has not been entirely satisfactory, in part because these are qualities that cannot be codified. As in so many other areas, no sooner do rules appear than they are gamed, by immigrants and government alike. It is difficult to harmonise these three perspectives. But the effort can’t be ducked. For the past 50 years, policy has lurched alarmingly with no sign of long-term thought. No society can avoid an immigration policy and we need one that is honest, coherent, workable and informed by something more than short-term calculations of electoral advantage based on fear. We owe it to ourselves, and to our future citizens, wherever their parents were born. |