Immigration policy can 'swamp' a party's message. But Cameron knows this
!AMES FORSYTH The government's failure to count up the number of foreign workers in this country rightly reinforces the public's fear that control of the borders has been lost, that an unstoppable tide of migrants is flowing into the country. It is in these circumstances that unsavoury politics flourish.
To Gordon Brown's immense discredit, he has expended more energy trying to capitalise on public disquiet over immigration than on trying to fa the problem. So Mr Brown talks of 'British jobs for British workers' and promises to deport migrants who peddle drugs to 'our children'. Short of promising to deport those who rape our daughters, he could not have made a baser — or more emotive — appeal. The utter cynicism of it all is demonstrated by the facts that 'British jobs for British workers', if implemented as policy, would be illegal, and that the deportation of foreign criminals is far from open and shut, as the case of the Italian-born murderer Learco Chindamo demonstrated.
Brown's nativism is based on the political calculation that he can say things which no Tory leader can. The legacy of Enoch Powell means that Tory politicians must always fight against the suspicion that their real immigration policy is to 'send them all home', which is why including the word 'racist' on Tory election posters in 2005 was such a disastrous idea.
David Cameron — to the trepidation of some in his inner circle — waded into the immigration debate this week. In a long and thoughtful speech, Mr Cameron argued that net immigration to this country is too high, something that he had already said on Newsnight in August. This is a dangerous position for any politician to take, especially one of the centre-Right. In essence, the leader of the opposition is arguing that it would be better if some people in this country were not here.
It also begs the question of what the ideal number of migrants would be, and on that there comes no answer from the Conservatives. Cameron would have been on far safer ground if he had stuck to a critique of the incompetence of the government's immigration policy, and the fairytale land from which many of the official statistics derive.
The question is whether Cameron's foray into the immigration debate is the precursor of a full frontal assault. The temptation is great. Immigration routinely ranks as one of the electorate's top two concerns and the Tory line on it was enthusiastically received in the press. The danger for the Conservatives is not that their immigration policy is unpopular, but that it is so popular that they will become as dependent on it as the Saudi Arabian economy is on oil exports. As the 2001 and 2005 general elections and the 2006 US mid-terms showed, immigration policy can drown out the rest of a party's message.
Tory high command is alert to this danger. This speech was designed to put on the record party policy and the thinking behind it. There will, however, be no repeat of the mistakes of the 2005 election campaign. Cameron himself realised the damage that the excessive emphasis on immigration was doing even before the postmortems of the campaign had begun.
There are, though, still dangers lurking out there from this speech. The licence this policy gives members of the party whose speaking style is more soapbox than soft soap could come back to haunt Cameron. It would only take a couple of backbenchers proclaiming the policy with inappropriate gusto to unpick the good work that the reasoned tone of this speech did. The Conservatives have earned the right to be heard on immigration, not to hector.
Another danger comes, oddly enough, from an albatross that Nick Clegg, the favourite for the Liberal Democrat leadership, has hung round his own neck with his ill-thought-out proposal for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. The danger is that this offers such a good stick to beat the Liberal Democrats with that the Tories forget how they appear to the public as they set about attacking it. The appointment of the mildmannered Damian Green to the immigration portfolio has so far guaranteed that the Tory party's policy is presented in a calm way. Whether the parliamentary party as a whole can continue to exude this sense of reasonableness is far from certain.
Any British government can now only control non-EU economic migration. In reality, this is about a third of the total. (Cameron claims that it is actually substantially more than a third; but his failure to show his calculations makes his answer all but meaningless.) Indeed, the biggest thing that any politician could do to reduce immigration would be to move the 15 per cent of the working-age population who are on benefits into work. Brits can be baristas too.
Britain will be a country of mass immigration for the foreseeable future. There is nothing any prime minister can do about this, unless they plan to pull out of the EU. The challenges that this presents are varied: the overqualified Polish plumber poses a very different set of questions to those posed by the young Pakistani spouse with little or no English. Yet two things are certain. First, public confidence will only be restored and the poison drained from the debate when the government can demonstrate that it is in control of the border and knows who is coming in and going out. Second, Britain can only succeed as a country of mass immigration if it develops a positive sense of nationhood that immigrant and indigenous populations alike can embrace. A multi-ethnic, multi-faith society cannot survive as a series of hostile camps eyeing each other with suspicion — which is what makes so worrying this week's revelation in a Policy Exchange report that one in four British mosques are giving house room to hate literature.
The real challenge for Cameron is not to reduce immigration but to come up with a compelling answer to the question that the Prime Minister has grappled with in public for so long: what is Britishness? Without an answer to that, and renewed public confidence in the sanctity of the country's borders, reducing net immigration by 10,000 or 20,000 a year will make no real difference.
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