In the year to June 2023, net migration hit 906,000. For perspective, that’s about 6,000 more than the population of Fiji. Or the combined population of Leeds and Sheffield, if you want examples from a little closer to home.
This is very bad news for Nicolas. This is also very bad news for the Office for National Statistics, who revised up their previous estimate by 166,000. But it’s very good news for my chum Karl Williams at the Centre for Policy Studies. Last year, he forecasted a figure of up to 997,000 and was mocked in the pub for being a couple of hundred thousand out. I owe him an apology pint.
Let’s take a step back. 906,000. Nearly a million people. The population of Fiji. In 2019, we promised to control and reduce migration. In 2010, David Cameron had pledged to get numbers into the tens of thousands. We not only chose to ignore those pledges, but decided to break them in the most flagrant and self-defeating way possible. Glory be to the Boriswave.
Still, in the year to June 2024, migration fell to only 728,000. But celebrating a figure still twice the level when we voted to Leave is ludicrous. James Cleverly feels chuffed about the impact of his increased work visa income thresholds and care worker and student dependents restrictions. But that only reversed previous mistakes. Still! Good news about the chocolate oranges.
As I highlighted on Sunday, immigration was the number one reason why voters switched from us in July. Any path back to Downing Street in 2029 requires making serious amends. It was thus great to see Kemi Badenoch follow in the footsteps of Robert Jenrick, and head to a CPS event in Old Queen Street to announce an almighty migration mea culpa.
Our new leader acknowledged the bleeding obvious: we “got it wrong” on immigration. To say that “we are learning from our mistakes, and it is time for a new approach”, is welcome. But saying that is the bare minimum. Don’t allow Jonathan Portes to fill in the blanks.
Fortunately, she has committed to “review every policy, treaty, and part of our legal framework, including the ECHR and the Human Rights Act”. The overall approach will be shaped by “a strict numerical cap, a fully transparent approach, a reconsidered approach to citizenship and settlement, zero tolerance for foreign criminals, and an effective deterrent for illegal migration”.
All of these pledges will add up to “a detailed plan for immigration to put before the British public before the next election”. Get that plan right, and it can be a significant moment in her overall political mission: “to rebuild trust between the Conservative Party and the British people”.
But does she grasp quite the scale of the challenge ahead? Her unwillingness to commit to a hard target may reflect a desire not to constrain herself as Cameron did. She must also remember the discontinuity between public perceptions of migration levels and reality. As Onward have highlighted, the average voter estimated the 2023 figure at 70,000 – a 20th of the real gross figure.
Half of voters want immigration below 10,000; 80 per cent want it below 100,000. If they become conscious of just how bad the situation really is – if that Fiji stat was drilled into their heads – how much angrier would they become? How easy it would be for Reform to exploit those figures. No wonder Nigel Farage is so fond of Priti Patel. He has so much to thank her for.
Whilst we may have pressed the accelerator on human quantitative easing, our failures exist in a continuity. Annual net migration only exceeded 100,000 for the first time after a year of Tony Blair. The succeeding quarter century added at least 6 million people to the population. Successive Tory PMs promised change but doubled down on New Labour’s excesses, as Badenoch explained.
If she is serious about rejecting “a collective failure of political leaders from all parties over decades”, a clean break on migration is fundamental. Consulting her erstwhile leadership rival on the subject would be a good start. The Twittersphere is giving the Overton window a good push. Across the Atlantic and on the continent, amazing things are happening.
But Badenoch’s only tool is rhetoric. It’s nice to be ahead in the polls. But we don’t really matter. Badenoch can wear the pant-suit and get a few photo-ops, but attention is limited. Perhaps that provides the space for thinking big thoughts about European courts. But every day is a day closer to the locals.
In the meantime, the field is open to Keir Starmer to not only take the credit for changes introduced under the last government, but to drag our record through the mud. His press conference yesterday started Morgan McSweeney’s New Model Government. When he wasn’t plotting against Jezza or organising Dagenham bin collections, he read The Road to Somewhere.
Calling Badenoch’s speech “unforgiveable”, lambasting a “Global Britain…open borders experiment”, a “policy with no support and which they pretended wasn’t happening” – all a very long way from the Starmer who ran on a leadership platform of reintroducing freedom of movement and who once suggested all immigration law came with a whiff of racism. Any port in a storm.
Is he, to quote Neil O’Brien, “full of BS”? Can we take seriously on migration, legal or illegal, a PM who binned the Rwanda scheme and seems keen on an EU youth mobility scheme? Will a man desperate for Jonathan Powell kick his country in the nads really able to break from the New Labour inheritance? Whatever McSweeney briefs, is he ready for the Treasury’s squeals?
Who can say. But the ball is in Starmer’s court. If nothing else, we did demonstrate, in our last few months in office, that reversing the immigration ratchet is not impossible. With the teething troubles of his first few months out of the way, Starmer may choose to build on our example. Or he might revert to type, let numbers soar, and trust in politics further collapses. Happy days.