In politics, as indeed in most things, it is very seldom a good idea to concede your opponents’ premises whilst asking the voters to reject their conclusions. For all that, it remains very common.
For it example, it was for some 20 years the only strategy employed by successive British governments to try and stave off the SNP. Time after time, act of parliament after act, professedly unionist politicians would make great show of what latest chunk they were carving off the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, conceding the central tenet of their case over and over again did not weaken the Nationists.
The same thing happened with Brexit, when David Cameron talked himself into a corner on a referendum and then found himself facing a steep uphill struggle to overcome the accumulated effect of his and his party’s posturing on Europe.
Now, Sir Keir Starmer looks to be once again teeing himself up for a command performance in the traditional ritual suicide of a British political consensus: opening the Overton Window real wide and then hurling oneself out of it.
That he made that immigration speech at all is significant; there may be no feeling behind the movement of a weathervane, but it does tell you where the wind is blowing. And parts of it were solid enough – the “nation of strangers” line, for example – to imply that some advisor or other believes it, at least.
But this is not a government that is grabbing the migration bull by the horns. It would be too dramatic a shift for an already unhappy Labour Party even if the Prime Minister and Cabinet were completely sold on it, which they are not.
Instead, what we are likely to see over the next few years is an incremental collapse of the status quo on immigration as a worried and reactive government makes piecemeal interventions which concede the premises of a new regime, but fails to follow the implications of its policies through to their conclusions.
Consider one example about which we wrote last month: the Home Office’s decision to start publishing league tables of foreign national offenders by country of origin. In itself, collating this data is simply pointless busywork on the part of the Government; the critical question is what do ministers do with it?
The logical next step – and what the people who advocated for this policy actually want – is for the information to be factored into the broader immigration regime, for example when setting visa policy. But even though Starmer has now opened the door to a more nationally-selective visa regime, there has been no commitment to use the data he has now tasked the Home Office with publishing.
What happens next is predictable enough: once this data starts coming out, Reform UK (or perhaps, in a happier world, even the Conservatives) start capitalising on it. Eventually, the Prime Minister makes some sort of policy on the basis of it. But he will arrive at that place with the minimum possible credit, because he visibly had to be dragged there.
Nor is that close to the end of it. My colleague Tali Fraser yesterday set out many more cases of where the British State could collect data on immigration, but doesn’t (or in some cases, more suspiciously, has stopped). Having sold the pass on the crime statistics,t will be very difficult for Starmer to resist the understandably-energised campaigners on the rest of it – and every dataset published will have its own policy implications.
That’s the tricky thing about data collection, at least by the state: it seems neutral, but it never is. Anything can be grist to some campaigner or other, and a political class of generalists and humanities graduates (of which I am one) is too easily bewitched by anything which can be put in a graph, however specious.
So the interesting thing about a state is which data it does and doesn’t collect. It says a lot about the UK (albeit nothing you didn’t already know) that the government mandates utterly tedentious “gender pay gap” reporting, which tries to present the mere fact of different employment patterns as a priori evidence of discrimination, but very little on the impact of immigration.
Likewise, it is no coincidence that the various devolved governments have made a point of changing how they collect data on things such as public service performance to make cross-border comparisons difficult or impossible to make, and past time HM Government mandated it be collected in a uniform manner. Such a policy would be difficult for the Nats to oppose – it sounds so neutral! But it would not, of course, be so.
But the biggest problem facing Starmer, and everyone else who finds themselves entrenched around this country’s collapsing immigration consensus, is the reason that nothing has been done about it before: it involves difficult trade-offs.
Remember, as I wrote on Friday, that the reason the Conservatives never managed to get sustainably ahead of Nigel Farage on immigration is that they never tried to. Instead, the invariable practice was to put a right-winger (real or nominal, vis. Priti Patel) in the Home Office to sound beastly and then let the Treasury, Business, and Education departments endlessly bid up the numbers.
More immigration is the policy equivalent of another hit for an opiod addict: it’s easy, it’s painless in the short term, and it postpones all your problems to another day. And like opiod addiction, it is a spiral, where the hits get shorter and shorter as the long-term toll gets more intense.
But the cruel irony is that the deeper you are into that spiral, the harder going cold turkey gets. The pain and misery of withdrawal is very real. In this case, we have an economy which has geared itself around the mass import of labour (or of clients, in the case of universities).
Employers (who responded to the creation of the Shortage Occupation Scheme by pleading more and more shortages) do not want to pay higher wages, or reinternalise the costs of training their workforce, no more than universities want to admit that there is no economically-viable or -useful way to put half of British school-leavers through a model of tertiary education evolved in the last century to cater to a single-figure percentage of each age cohort without the exponential import of students.
Meanwhile the Treasury, greatest and most terrible of all Whitehall powers, will never be sold on the logic of wasting 18 years gestating a taxpayer when you can just import one ready-made. Not only do you get a warranty on its access to public funds and save on all the schooling, but it avoids another labour unit (which we might call a parent) being taken off the GDP treadmill too!
Not for nothing do hold-out advocates of the status quo maintain that the ease with which the state can import-substitute the next generation of its own people is a very good thing indeed.
In each case, the alternative to hitting the “more immigration” button is initiating some extremely complex and difficult policy debates. Arrayed against any minister who tries will be energetic and well-funded lobbies, armed not only with more- and less-spurious charts but a knack for exploiting politicians’ greatest weakness: a deep unwillingness to be the bad guy in a meeting.
So good luck to the Prime Minister. Really. The course-correction upon which he has embarked is the right one. But I suspect the outcome of leaning this far out of the Overton Window will be his looking up at someone else’s grinning face from the very hard landing which awaits him beneath it.
