Net Zero. Before 2019, this combination of what you score goals in and the mathematical concept of nothingness played little part in political discourse. But since Theresa May used the dying days of her premiership to amend the Climate Change Act in order to provide herself with a legacy (by 2050), it has become a useful litmus test for one’s willingness to drink the eco Kool Aid.
Deployed by one Prime Minister as the greenest route to Cakeism; babbled at by another; fiddled with at the edges by a third. Net Zero remains what it always has been: an unaffordable and impractical act of national virtue-signalling by a generation of politicians who will be long gone by the time the target must be reached. It is cynical, counter-productive, and avoids our real energy crisis.
Nonetheless, even for those of us who suspect Britain’s response to climate change can involve little more than promoting the English sparkling wine industry, the target’s popularisation has promoted a metric by which other policies can be judged. Indeed, elements of the right have already seized upon another area where reading Net Zero should be an immediate Tory priority: immigration.
As if climate change wasn’t a hot enough potato to be juggling on a Sunday morning.
Last year, 1.2 million people migrated into the UK. 508,000 people emigrated from it. That leaves a net migration figure of 672,000. In simplest terms, reaching Net Zero immigration would require balancing those numbers. Since one has little desire to turn Britain into Albania, that means reducing migrant numbers – even if it would be rational for us youngsters to follow Sunny Jim’s advice.
Why? Because immigration is the area where politicians – and especially, alas, Conservatives – have most blatantly betrayed voters. From David Cameron’s “tens of thousands” and Boris Johnson’s pledge that “overall numbers will come down”, via Brexit and an “Australian-style points-based system”, we have failed wretchedly to fulfill promises of controlling and reducing numbers.
Pax Matthew Goodwin, contrary to those who believed Brexit had killed immigration as a voter concern, soaring levels of both legal and illegal arrivals in recent years have driven it back up the agenda. It is the third most important issue for all voters, most important for 2019 Tory voters, and the most important for switchers to ReformUK. And why not? We Brexiteers had one job.
To suggest this anger is only directed at small boats in the Channel is ludicrous when legal inflows are running at over 25 times the level of illegal ones: 1.2 million versus 46,000 in 2022. The palpable ineffectiveness of the Rwanda scheme and Labour’s pledge to copy the Tory policy minus a deterrent will do little to soothe voters’ anger without a rapid and visible reduction in legal numbers.
As I have written, the Rwanda scheme is a necessary but not sufficient step towards confronting our biggest Channel crossings problems since William the Bastard fancied an autumn holiday. I pointed towards Stopping the Crossings – a paper from the Centre for Policy Studies, co-authored by Nick Timothy and Karl Williams – as an example of what was really required to halt the boats.
This paper now has a spiritual sequel. Taking Back Control, in which Neil O’Brien and Julius Robert Jenrick join Williams as co-authors, seeks to explain not only the scale of our legal migration betrayal, but the hollowness of claims that the unprecedented recent levels have been, on balance, economically beneficial. Apologies to the OBR, but surging migration is not a necessary evil.
The report is stark. Historically, Britain was a country of net emigration, not immigration. Net migration only exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 1998. In the 25 years up to New Labour’s election, cumulative net migration totalled only 68,000. From 1998 to 2022, it was at least 5.9 million. Meanwhile, our long-term growth rate has halved to only 1.2 per cent. It has not made us better off.
The causes of Britain’s anaemic productivity are multiple, and a confluence of surging migration and depressed growth does not make the latter a consequence of the former. Indeed, one might argue that our experiment in human quantitative easing has prevented our growth from greater stagnation. But, even then, mass migration makes many of our economic problems worse.
The social and impacts of immigration are unevenly spread, but immigration-driven population growth has outpaced our ability to build houses, roads, railways, grid capacity, and GP surgeries. The laws of supply and demand are inescapable. Prices have risen, queues lengthened, and congestion has built. And don’t forget – immigrants get old too! Should we just keep doubling down?
The report also makes clear that not all immigration is equal. Out of the net migration of two million non-EU nationals over the last five years, only 15 per cent came principally to work. Massive differences exist between migrant groups. Indian migrants earn around 70 per cent more than those from Pakistan and Bangladesh, but 15 per cent less than those from France and America.
Jenrick, O’Brien, and Williams note that, unlike for many of our European friends, we lack the readily accessible data required for proper life-cycle fiscal analyses of different migrant groups. But examples – like working-age migrants from the Middle East being twice as likely to be economically inactive as the domestic population – make it clear that not all migration is equally productive.
Of course, arguments for and against migration are not solely economic. Undoubtedly, Britain is more culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse than it would have been without mass migration. Even if high levels of migration are a new phenomenon, the habitual liberalism of the English character leaves a cordon sanitaire around the topic. We struggle to be honest about trade-offs.
But there also comes a point at which one becomes concerned about increasingly conspicuous failures of integration, about a reduced willingness to take legitimate asylum seekers, or wonders if Wetherspoons are sufficiently proficient at making curries that we no longer need to import Bangladesh’s best and brightest. And even then, these anxieties do not change the economic realities.
Or the political ones. As Taking Back Control makes clear, the consensus that migration is has been too high and ought to be reduced is one shared across party allegiances, age groups, and parts of the country. 64 per cent of voters – including a majority of Conservatives, Lib Dems, Labour, Leave and Remain supporters, Londoners, and 18–24-year-olds – think it has been too high.
In a heartwarming fashion, at a time when we so often worry about intractable divisions, reducing immigration stands out as a unifying national crusade. Yet reducing it seems like a Sisyphean task, especially for a government trying to bat out time nine wickets down on Day 5 of the parliamentary cycle. Fortunately, our intrepid co-authors are on hand with recommendations.
The report has over thirty recommendations, designed to shape a new approach to migration policy while reforming existing visa routes. Most can be implemented before an election, without new legislation. They have three overarching ambitions: an overall cap on numbers, a greater transparency of trade-offs, and an aim to make Britain the grammar school of the Western world.
The suggested policies – including an annual migration budget, voted on by parliament, an end to the Shortage Occupation List, and a phasing of the Graduate visa – are sensible. Without them, annual net migration is still predicted to fall to 315,000. With them, the authors hope Cameron’s “tens of thousands” pledge can finally be met – only fourteen years after it was first made.
Yet for all my sympathy with the author’s aims and recommendations, they do not go far enough. After we have so consistently failed to reach the “tens of thousands” target for so long, why would voters believe a Tory promise to do so now? The phrasing has become discredited. Implementing the report in full tomorrow would start bringing numbers down. But isn’t it all too little, too late?
Fundamentally, our migration crisis is the fault of the Conservative Party. A slavish dependence on record arrivals is yet another Blairite inheritance that successive Tory governments have failed to break from. Indeed, we have made it worse. Rather than using Brexit to tighten up criteria, the post-2021 system has significantly loosened controls for those arriving from outside of Europe.
Who is to blame? Cameron, for making a pledge he couldn’t deliver. Johnson, for pledging one policy, and delivering another. And us – members, voters, and supporters – who allowed ourselves to be made mugs of by believing endless empty promises to reduce numbers. On an issue existential to the future of the Conservatives, we have been disgraced. We won’t get fooled again.
If Nigel Farage stops playing footsie, if Dominic Cummings claims the mantle of Britain’s Bukele, or if a more effective vessel than either steps into the wide open political space, we will be on course for Canada 1993. If so, this is a fate we have brought upon ourselves. If so, Net Zero immigration should not only be an ideal, but a necessity. It might be the only way to regain credibility.
It would have to come after the rapid implementation of the recommendations of Taking Back Control, and after a collective mea culpa as to our party’s collective culpability for our current plight. A few readers might be squeamish about nicking a policy previously adopted by ReformUK. They would be a lot more squeamish about a future with Farage as Leader of the Opposition.
Going cold turkey from our migration addiction won’t be easy. But that is only because we have chosen to take the path of least resistance: to import cheap labour rather than invest in automation or pay Brits more; to traduce critics as racist or economically illiterate; to believe the laws of supply and demand are suspended when it comes to rapidly expanding our population. All must end.
For Rishi Sunak, an honesty about our migration failure and a genuine attempt to further reduce numbers before the election would provide a legacy far more worthwhile than signing Britain up to an agenda of national pauperisation that he would never have to worry about implementing. It might not stave off the coming electoral Götterdämmerung. But it would be the least he could do.
Going forwards, it is for the next generation of Tories to follow the work of Taking Back Control and display a realism about immigration and its consequences – economic, social, and political – this one has lacked. If they do not – and who believes that Labour will? – then the path is open to the real revolutionaries. British politics will become much more European. Oh, the irony.