The government
claims that its proposed changes to the rules for legal migration into the UK
will reduce the net total by around 300,000 per year. If they fully implement
what they have announced, that may well turn out to be an underestimate; their numbers
are based on the English exceptionalist belief that people are so keen to come
to the UK that people will leave their families behind and come to take up
low-paid jobs as carers, and that the brightest and best post-graduate
researchers will similarly abandon their families and come to the UK alone, at
least until their salary crosses an arbitrary threshold. It’s a big ‘if’ though; and the chances of the Tories fully implementing the plans are vanishingly small, not least because it will take time to draw up the detailed rules and
procedures and process all those applications already in the system whilst the clock is
already ticking down to the next election.
However, that isn’t
the only reason for doubting whether they will ever do more than talk about the
plans. Assuming that potential immigrants will happily leave their families
behind as well as paying increased fees for the privilege of coming to the UK
is only one of the silly assumptions that they’re making. They are also
assuming that the electors whose votes they are chasing would either prefer to
see the social care system go into meltdown than have immigrants working in it
or else don’t understand the degree of dependency on those immigrants. The
reality will become obvious at some point. It’s not a crisis which would hit
social care overnight, of course – but like Hemingway’s description of
bankruptcy, it’s something which will happen in two ways: slowly, and then
suddenly. Perhaps there are some people who really would be happy with that –
but it’s unlikely that those whose relatives are dependent on that care will
agree. And as things slowly get worse, the government will inevitably be
tempted to reverse its policy, albeit as quietly as possible. Hopefully before
the collapse enters the sudden phase.
Labour’s response
has been little better. Equally convinced that the population are demanding an
immediate halt to immigration, they have come up with an entirely arbitrary proposal
to cap net migration at 200,000. Why 200,000? Why not 250,000? Why not 150,000?
These are not questions to which they have any sort of rational answer; they’ve
simply produced a figure from thin air which they think might be acceptable to
the racists and xenophobes whose votes they seek, with no real thought given to
the implications. Yet still they are likely to win the next election. Suella
Braverman has said
this week that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if the government’s
Rwanda legislation fails. In a rare moment of consensus, I agree. But then I’d
also agree if she’d said that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if
the government’s Rwanda legislation succeeds. Saying that the Tories face
electoral oblivion is one of those sentences which currently works perfectly
well without any qualifying clause.
There is one policy
change that they could make which might actually get the net migration figure
down without the performative cruelty which they both seem to think is
essential politics. Mathematically, in any ‘net’ figure there are two factors
involved – so increasing emigration would have the same effect on the net
numbers as decreasing immigration. It’s unfortunate that they shot themselves
in both feet by removing freedom of movement, but if the financial incentives
were good enough, there might be quite a few people willing to help the
government out of its troubles by emigrating. It’s not a solution that’s ever
likely to occur to them though: from their exceptionalist position, they would
never understand why anyone would ever want to escape the dysfunctional rogue state which
the UK has become.