Upping the stakes

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President Trump has been widely (and justifiably) mocked for his promise to reduce the price of medicines in the US by up to 1,500%. It’s an illustration of his somewhat shaky grasp of elementary mathematics, although I suppose it helps to explain how he managed to bankrupt casinos. By and large, UK politicians have not shown themselves to be quite so mathematically challenged as Trump, and the argument about the extent to which immigration should be allowed has largely stayed on the positive side of zero. Until last week.

Robert Jenrick has now attempted to trump Labour, Reform and his own party by calling for a ten year period in which net migration to the UK should be negative. It’s a reduction of more than 100% in the level of immigration, even if it’s not yet quite in the Trumpian league of 1,500%. Give him time. But given what we know about the falling birth rate, he is effectively demanding that the population of the UK should be cut as a deliberate act of government policy. To say that it puts him somewhat outside the normal range of political consensus is an understatement: other politicians (including both Farage and Badenoch) have recently been calling for measures to increase the birth rate to tackle the potential problems associated with a declining population (even though that rather ignores the fact that using an increased birthrate to fill gaps in the UK economy has a rather lengthy lead time). But being outside the consensus is probably what he’s after.

The consequences of a falling population would be significant, not least because those being driven, or encouraged, to leave are likely to be of working age and therefore making a positive contribution to the productive economy. Unless, of course, he wants to offer incentives – which an increasing number of us might even be willing to consider, with madmen like Jenrick and Farage in danger of leading a government – for UK pensioners to emigrate. I suspect not, however: something tells me that predominantly white UK-born people aren’t the ones he wants to get rid of. He hasn’t yet offered a solution to that economic conundrum, and probably won’t. Not only because there isn’t a simple one, but also because spelling out the consequences might somewhat undermine the blatant appeal to prejudice.

It would also be seriously at odds with the rest of his political philosophy. Actually, a reduced population would not, in itself, be an entirely bad thing, ignoring for a moment that merely moving people from one country to another doesn’t exactly achieve an overall reduction. It would reduce the demand for finite resources which is hardly a poor idea, but it would also require a significant rethink in the way the economy works to ensure that economic benefits are shared more equally rather than being increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. That, or force an increasing proportion of the population into poverty, which is not an obvious election-winning strategy, particularly if the deliberately-impoverished come from the voting demographic being wooed by his rhetoric. As they inevitably would. We shall have to see who will attempt to out-compete him, by assigning a hard number to the target for exporting residents in a government-sponsored people trafficking scheme. The way things are going, I wouldn’t put it past Labour to open the bidding.