by For months now, Keir Starmer has been trying hard to tell the country that there are no easy answers to our problems. There is no magic money tree. We can’t spend what we don’t have. We have to be realistic about the scorched earth that a Labor government would inherit. This deliberate lowering of expectations doesn’t exactly make the heart sing, but it beats promising the earth that you will be chosen and then clumsily trying to wriggle out of it. What is disconcerting, however, is that this policy of brutally bursting voter bubbles never seems to apply to immigration.
Last week’s Office for National Statistics figures, revising the net number of people arriving in Britain in 2022 to 745,000, were always going to send the Conservative Party into apoplexy, followed by the usual rhetoric about cutting the numbers in some draconian way. But this time, the Labor Party has caught them halfway. The relatively new shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, suggested last weekend that Labor would “probably hope” to reduce immigration in his first term, and when pressed on what would be a reasonable level, he spoke of “normal levels.” around “a couple of hundred thousand a year.” It wasn’t exactly an ironclad commitment, but it’s still depressing to hear Labor backtrack on the kind of promises that have backfired for the Conservatives since David Cameron promised to cut immigration to “tens of thousands”. It’s true that luck may be on Labor’s side here: if the 2022 figures turn out to be exceptional, reflecting a labor market that is recovering after the hiring and travel freeze during the pandemic, Labor could see immigration fall naturally. under his watch anyway. But it is nonetheless a wasted opportunity to open up to the public about the real options facing a small country with an aging population and a stagnant economy.
“Stop small boats, somehow” is now virtually the entirety of the current government’s immigration policy, to the point that voters could be forgiven for thinking it is the Channel crossings that are driving up numbers so much. . But the vast majority of the 1.23 million people who arrived in this country last year did so with the blessing of the government that now feigns a pantomime of horror at their existence: they were granted permission to work, study, reunite with their families or seek refuge through compassionate routes such as that offered to Ukrainians fleeing an invasion. Ministers approved two and a half times as many work visas last year as in 2019, almost 40% of them for health and social care jobs, for perfectly valid reasons. These positions needed to be filled and voters would not have liked the consequences of them remaining empty. But the ministerial reluctance to defend or explain those decisions has left the Conservatives in the ridiculous position of furiously trying to divert attention towards their own Achilles heel, namely the small minority who came here illegally (85% of them in small boats).
Whether they like the idea of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda or not, polls suggest that most voters do not believe that will ever happen. The fact that the cabinet is now openly divided over this policy only reinforces the impression of helplessness and increases public anxiety, while obscuring the small gains that Rishi Sunak’s government has actually managed to achieve. Interior Ministry figures show that the number of Albanians arriving by small boat fell from around 11,500 in 2022 to the end of September to just 860 in the same period in 2023, suggesting that the policy of rapid returns to Albania could have borne fruit. Consequently, channel crossings have decreased, even as illegal immigration is increasing in the rest of Europe. Yet by banging its head loudly against a brick wall marked Rwanda, the government has somehow managed to make even this modest success look like a failure, which helps explain why the new Home Secretary, James Cleverly, maintains Now what matters is stopping the boats, rather than obsessing over how exactly it’s done. But even if ministers had somehow managed to turn around every boat that left a French beach last year, legal migration would still have reached record levels.
So this is what a future government would say if it were really honest: that the vast majority of immigration to Britain is the result of conscious decisions to deliver things that people actively want, such as an NHS that has a good chance of not collapsing. this winter or Universities that do not go bankrupt due to lack of foreign students. Of course, stopping it is technically possible, but the price will be a decline in public services and another depressing decade of low or no economic growth.
Do you want a radical immigration strategy? Here’s one: adequately fund social care, so that healthcare workers earn the kind of wages that make this emotionally demanding, physically strenuous, technically skilled job attractive. Better yet, create career paths to progress in care as a profession. Not only would it greatly improve the continuity of care for vulnerable people, while preventing several councils from going bankrupt as a result of rising social care bills, but over time ministers would not have to issue 77,700 work visas of care per year to close the gaps (although, of course, it would still take years to build a local workforce).
But if that’s too radical – if you’d rather have tax cuts today, pretend the welfare crisis isn’t happening, and simply roll the dice on what will happen to your parents in old age – then you’ll need cheap foreign labor. to Come and shore up the system. Of course, Jeremy Hunt did his best to pretend otherwise in his autumn statement, suggesting that somehow the long-term ill could be forced back to work as an alternative to increased immigration under the Labor Party. It is hard to believe that the kind of measures ministers suggest – asking disabled people to look for jobs they can do from home, for example – are in any way a viable alternative, even if they could be achieved without the cruelty that some consider inevitable. (How many welfare jobs do you imagine can be done from the end of a phone? Who will provide them with the routine medical treatment that, in some cases, prevents them from returning to work?) There is no magical third way. Those are the options.
At a time when the far right is on the rise across Europe, British politicians remain understandably nervous about spelling out such domestic truths. The Labor Party’s traditional aim in the run-up to an election is not to outright win the argument over immigration, but rather to change the subject. But in government, that’s not going to be enough. If it is serious about power, sooner or later the Labor Party will have to fight.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a columnist for The Guardian.
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