There are many things one can say about last year’s immigration statistics being revised upwards to a record-breaking three quarters of a million people, but one is that Rishi Sunak, unlike Sir Keir Starmer, is not a lucky general. He got just one day of relatively favourable headlines about the Autumn Statement before this bombshell hit.
But it’s hard to feel very sorry for the Government, because this is in large part the result of their decisions. Yes, New Labour opened the country up to then-unparalleled levels of immigration. But the Conservatives have been in power for 13 years, and last year’s historic figures are theirs alone.
I’m sure that few Tory ministers, if any, ever actually set out to end up importing the population of Glasgow (and change) in a single year. Perhaps the rhetoric about bringing numbers down was sincere, in an unreflective sort of way.
But wanting to reduce immigration is like wanting to lose weight: you need not just the headline aspiration but the will to resist temptation and choose the more difficult option on the arduous (but ultimately rewarding) road to getting there.
Such spirit has been entirely absent from British government. As I wrote back in May in our big piece on the policy interventions ministers could make if they were serious about bringing numbers down, “the Government’s rhetorical commitment to bringing immigration down is a complete fiction.”
Britain has become so dependent on immigration – not to prosper, mind you, but to keep the economy barely afloat – because, like ordering a takeaway instead of cooking, it is moment to moment the easiest thing to do. Building an education sector that actually meets our skills requirements; forcing corporations to take on the costs of basic training they currently outsource to the taxpayer and younger workers – these things are hard.
They’re also expensive. A country where employers don’t have easy recourse to a massive pool of labour from much poorer nations is a country where labour will command a higher price; a “high-wage economy”, as Jeremy Hunt once put it.
Business obviously doesn’t want that. But nor goes the Government, not when the public finances are as strained as they are and it is fighting tooth and nail to try and keep wage increases down. As I wrote of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan:
“…it will always be tempting to pay less for fully-qualified staff, and difficult if not impossible to match the attractive offers luring British medics to foreign postings. A Long Term Workforce Plan is a nice idea. But British politics lives, year to year and spending round to spending round, in the short term.”
(This Government is very fond of the phrase “long-term”. But as I noted in July, the time to start attending to the long term, if you’re serious about it, is right now. In British politics, it refers instead to an imagined time, always comfortably in the future, when we’ll finally start making difficult decisions.)
There is also the generational angle. It is an inescapable fact that the welfare state as we currently understand it depends on a working-age population large enough to sustain it. That refers not just to pensions but also, given our reluctance to tax property and other wealth accrued by retired people (this country’s wealthiest age cohort) everything else too.
Every policy remnant of the post war consensus depends upon a larger working population than currently projected.
— Labour Beyond Cities (@LabBeyondCities) November 22, 2023
In the UK, in a generation it's predicted that outside of major cities most boroughs will be majority retired.
We are not ready for this. It is without precedent. https://t.co/e4WnTgOKM7
Before the welfare state, your safety net was your family, which usually meant your children. Gradually over the last century we collectivised that, with the state stepping in to guarantee what once had to be provided privately. But in so doing we also abstracted things to the point where children are no longer recognised as a public good, and the enormous investment of time and money involved in raising them a contribution to the common welfare.
Instead, we’ve ended up in a place where the balance of public opinion seems to be that children are a private luxury, and that people should only have as many as they can afford – even as decades of flat wage growth, coupled with spiralling housing and childcare costs, continually erode that number. At no point does the welfare state recognise or reward the sacrifices of those who do have kids.
But we still need working-age people to pay the taxes to stop the whole thing falling over. So we import them, in ever-greater amounts.
Again, that isn’t inevitable, the only sensible option for moderate people. It’s a choice. We keep making it because it suits a lot of people: politicians don’t want to ask wealthy older voters for more money; those voters keep the Triple Lock topped up whilst the costs of so doing fall largely on other people; the Treasury will never understand why you would waste 18 years gestating a taxpayer when you can import one ready-made.
For that reason, I’m wary of saying that our current model isn’t sustainable. It is grossly unjust and will have many horrible consequences. But it already has, and yet it ticks along, because those consequences are not evenly spread. It will be at least a decade or two before the people losing the most from the status quo are the decisive share of the electorate – and if we keep importing 750,000 people a year, they may never be.