This morning’s Sun reports that the Conservatives have decided to kick off the second full week of the election campaign by taking the fight to Labour on immigration: James Cleverly claims that the UK would become a “magnet for illegal migrants” if Sir Keir Starmer wins the election; Robert Jenrick argues that the Labour leader “fought to stop foreign criminals being deported”.
It will be interesting to see how much mileage the Tories actually get out of this. Because as we noted in December, there’s an obvious problem with their attempting to fight the election on immigration: that it is now three times higher than when David Cameron took office in 2010.
This gives Labour an easy out when pressed for specifics on where they want the level of immigration to be. “We clearly want to see significant changes in place because we have seen the numbers treble”, says Yvette Cooper.
Whilst ministers have brought in some measures which are starting to bring net immigration down, most of this has happened so late that the effects will only really be felt the other side of the election, when Starmer will likely be in position to take the credit for falling numbers.
Yet right to the end, the Government’s actual enthusiasm for tackling this problem was scarcely obvious; just look at the embarrassing way that Cleverly managed to trip himself up over the graduate visa, somehow finding a form of words that got the Migration Advisory Committee to reject reform of a policy it really doesn’t like.
As for deporting foreign criminals, Jenrick’s preferred attack line, the Tories don’t have a stellar public image on that either, having for 14 years refused to reform the legal frameworks which allow rapists and other serious offenders to plead human rights and become this country’s problem forever. Sure, Starmer isn’t likely to reform those laws either, but it isn’t obviously much of a wedge when we didn’t do it whilst we had the chance.
One suspects the bigger problem for him will come after the election, should he win it. As the Conservatives have illustrated time and again, there’s a big difference between promising lower numbers and actually following through on the sort of sustained, structural shift in the economy needed to deliver it.
Today the Times reports that Labour’s immigration proposals “received a muted response from businesses”; the Confederation of British Industry says businesses want “credible plans to ease shortages and support growth”, whilst the Recruitment and Employment Confederation warns that “the plan could jeopardise Starmer’s pledge to make the UK the fastest-growing economy in the G7”.
On the second point, it depends a lot on how Rachel Reeves is choosing to define growth. In recent years the Treasury has focused almost exclusively on the inadequate measure of headline GDP ‘growth’, without a per capita adjustment. This is simply a measure of whether the economy is getting bigger, not whether the people in it are getting better off, and can be most easily boosted by – as the REC implies – just adding people to the economy.
Now, Reeves’ Mais Lecture mentioned the word ‘growth’ 58 times and the words ‘per capita’ not once. But Labour has chosen to focus heavily on increasing “living standards”, a promise they can only fulfil by delivering genuine, per-capita growth. That means, amongst other things, rising wages and/or increased productivity, neither of which are facilitated by giving businesses unlimited access to cheaper labour.
The real question is, will Starmer and Reeves be able to come up with a workable proposal for weaning large parts off our economy off those imports? Businesses won’t want to pay more wages, nor to pay for workplace training; universities currently can’t hike tuition fees to break even on domestic students, nor would Labour’s internal coalition be wildly keen on raising them anyway.
Ultimately, Starmer doesn’t give the impression of someone who thinks there’s anything fundamentally wrong with our current political economy, except that it has been run by the Tories. That will work, politically, for a while, especially as the initial reductions in headline immigration numbers play out. But in the long run, it’s a recipe for more broken promises.
