Has a three word slogan ever caused more political turmoil for its authors than Stop the Boats has caused Rishi Sunak?
The greatest trick of populist governments the world over is to take a deeply serious and complex issue and present it as simple.
Donald Trump wanted to build a wall, Boris Johnson wanted to get Brexit done.
Apparently so easy it’s astonishing it hasn’t happened yet and it definitely isn’t their fault.
This week was full of announcements from the UK Conservative Government on immigration.
It was the first set of interventions from the more centre ground Home Secretary James Cleverly who had only just taken over in post from the fire brand darling of the Conservative far-right Suella Bravermen.
Some thought, including this author, that his appointment and indeed the appointment of David Cameron, now Lord Chipping Norton, as Foreign Secretary together signalled a more moderate approach to the thorny issue of immigration.
By moderate I mean sensible, compassionate and factual in response to the issue at large. Alas, no.
The first move from the Home Secretary was to announce a series of measures designed to make it harder for people to come and live and work in this country.
In truth the number of non-EU migrants has tripled since Covid and stands at over half a million people.
That’s people who have travelled to the UK to work and often do so in the health and social care system, in our hospitality industries or as is often over-looked in our university and science sectors.
‘Conservatives’ immigration policy is bonkers’
The Conservatives approach to driving this figure down is both two fold and bonkers.
Firstly it involves raising the minimum salary level of the job you are coming here to do from £26,200 a year, just a little under the median salary for you average citizen, to £38,700 a year.
An almost 50% increase which will almost certainly do its job and successfully deter people from coming to the United Kingdom.
The second major change in the policy was to review the right for some workers to bring their families with them.
The Conservatives’ analysis was simply that a well-paid worker was welcome but their family, whether that be their wife or child, are a burden on the state and therefore not.
The worker will never need to use public services like the NHS, but their family would be a drain upon it.
‘Banning families is anti-British’
This is in my mind was the most anti-British thing to do. This country was rebuilt after the second world war by migrants and we asked for their help to do so.
We promised jobs yes, but also a new life. A new place to call home, abundant with opportunities.
The policy is bonkers because we need immigrants to come and work in Britain.
In fact, this government has been actively relying on them to do so in order to cover up the fact they’ve failed to address the structural inequalities in our economy for so long, that the only short term solution is foreign labour.
Look at the state of the health and social care system. An industry, for much of it is provided by private care providers these days, whose biggest cost is wages.
Keeping them low aids the profit margin.
An industry that is also set to boom in years to come because all the evidence says we’re living longer lives, there are more old people proportionately to young because people have been having smaller families for decades and we’re also sicker – in part because we’re older, yes, but also because inequality is widening.
We needed people yesterday to work in health and social care but we’ve told them to all intents and purposes not to come tomorrow.
Our message now is if you are coming, come look after our family members by abandoning yours. It beggars belief.
We don’t have too many migrants in our country, we’ve got too little investment in our public services.
They’re not taking all the social housing, we haven’t built enough. They’re not jumping the waiting lists in the NHS, they are the very nurses who are running late and exhausted because they are over worked and underpaid.
What we desperately need is a grown up conversation about immigration that deliberately chooses not to boil the issue down into the contents of a five-years-olds word tin.
The second big intervention of the week was the proposed legislation to deal with all the loop holes in the court ruling about deportation flights to Rwanda.
Even if these measures do the job, and planes start leaving, they will at best, only ever handle a few hundred people.
Defenders will cry next that it’s not about the numbers on the runway, its a deterrent!
Given the prospect of crossing the Channel in a rubber dingy in December doesn’t put folk off, I’m not buying that.
Labour are complicit in this too incidentally. They might tut and shake their heads from the sidelines as the Conservatives lurch from infighting to resignations, but they won’t deviate from these plans. Not really.
Not for fearing of opening up a dividing line with their main opponents, assuming that’s what they really want.
What a shame.
I actually think the public are crying out for a proper conversation and a serious plan about how to fix this country’s economy and its immigration system, so it’s once again a proud place we can all call home.
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