It is going to be nasty, brutish and very, very long. The general election is probably more than a year away, but the campaign has already begun. Sir Keir Starmer refettled his shadow cabinet with the main aim of having an election-ready top team. The Tories have spent the summer weeks straining – and failing – to induce voters to think better of them. Broken Britain was set to be a major electoral theme even before crumbling concrete in schools became so emblematic of the decayed state of the public realm. We head into the party conference season with Labour continuing to enjoy the double-digit poll lead that has been sustained for a year.
Seeking something, anything, to cheer themselves up, some Tories believe that they still have a few trump cards in their hand. Dog-eared political playbooks from past elections suggest to them that immigration can be weaponised to their advantage. So do memories of how the Leave crew in the Brexit referendum campaign exploited the issue with such toxic potency. There’s a belief that making immigration one of the defining dividing lines of the contest could serve the Conservatives and hurt Sir Keir’s party. Some in Labour’s high command turn a bit queasy at the thought.
Are they right to believe this, though? It is true that immigration has historically been regarded as a “Tory issue” because voters who wanted a restrictive approach outnumbered those who preferred a permissive regime. The perception, though often not the reality, has been that a Conservative government means less immigration. At the 2010 election, the Tories enjoyed a whopping advantage of around 40 points over Labour when voters were asked which party was “best” on asylum and immigration. This was far from the only reason why Gordon Brown lost that contest, but it didn’t help. This long period of Conservative rule began with David Cameron coming to office on a promise that he would limit net migration to the UK to “tens of thousands” a year.
He didn’t. He came nowhere close to meeting his target and nor have any of his successors as Tory leader. At the 2019 election, Boris Johnson issued one of his many dud pledges when he promised: “Overall numbers will come down. And we will ensure that the British people are always in control.” In 2022, net migration hit a record high of 606,000. That figure reflects exceptional international circumstances because it includes a lot of people who have come from Hong Kong and Ukraine. As flows from those sources diminish, most analysts think the total will come down, but annual net migration will still be running in the hundreds of thousands, not the tens of thousands. For 13 years, Tory leaders have promised to curb immigration and then presided over the opposite, a crowd-pleaser neither with those who wanted the numbers down nor with those who thought the targets were stupid. That is one reason to think that there is now more risk to them than reward in trying to use it as an electoral weapon.
More warnings to the Tories are to be found in insightful new polling and analysis that will be published this week by the thinktank British Future. Its findings strongly suggest that immigration is no longer a trump card for the Conservatives.
The first thing to note is that immigration will only be an issue with the potential to significantly move the electoral dial if a lot of voters really care about the subject. Psephologists call this salience. The salience graph over the past decade looks like a wonky mountain. The number of voters bothered about immigration started to rise from 2013 and reached a very high altitude in the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The Leave vote was part-fuelled by hostility to immigration. Given that Mr Cameron had so cynically stoked this when he thought it to his benefit, there was a poetic justice that it then cost him the premiership. Alas for Britain, everyone else is paying an enduring cost for his foolishness.
After the vote to leave the EU, the salience of immigration dropped steeply. Public concern has started to rise again over the past year or so, which most observers put down to the huge amount of attention on the people hazarding their lives to get to the UK by trying to cross the Channel and the government’s lack of control over it. This rise in how much migration is bothering voters can only be encouraging for the Tories if they can be sure that the issue still plays in their favour. The evidence suggests that it doesn’t. The typical voter is sceptical that either of the major parties have good immigration policies, but it is now the Conservatives who are the least trusted by the public and by a hefty margin. More than two-thirds of voters say they have little or no trust at all in the Tories. Their net distrust score is a crushing -46, which is more than twice as bad as that for Labour. That is a seismic shift in public attitudes since 2010.
This isn’t entirely surprising when Tory leaders have spent the past 13 years repeatedly claiming that it was desirable to reduce immigration and then repeatedly not doing so because they found the consequences too unpalatable. It is within the power of government to dramatically reduce the number of foreign students coming to the UK. But that would mean making the already fragile finances of many universities even more shaky. A Tory backbench groupuscule calling themselves the New Conservatives recently presented a “12-point plan” to reduce immigration that included removing care workers from the list of shortage occupations. That only makes sense if you think it a brilliant idea to make the staffing crisis in the care sector even more acute, which would then deepen the crisis in the NHS.
While a majority of people labelling themselves Conservative supporters want overall immigration to come down, support for reductions shrivels when they are asked about specifics. The British Future study finds that most Conservatives favour increasing the number of visas for doctors and nurses. On visas for fruit-pickers, just one in five Tories want them lowered. Fewer than one in five favour cutting visas for social care workers.
Though it is far from being the main source of population flow into the UK, the most visceral issue is what to do about people crossing the Channel. The gulf between partisan views is widest on this subject. More than two-thirds of Labour voters say they have a great deal or a fair amount of sympathy for the asylum seekers. Just a third of Tory voters share the feeling and the government’s inability to prevent the crossings is a major cause of anger among them.
That’s why Rishi Sunak made his reckless pledge to “stop the boats”. In doing so, he broke one of the cardinal rules of politics, which is that no sensible leader should ask to be judged on that kind of promise unless they are certain that they will be able to fulfil it. The government’s so-called “small boats week” in August saw more deaths in the Channel, the number of people crossing since 2018 topping 100,000 and the Tories’ deputy chair confessing that the government had “failed”. It is another rule of competitive politics that you should try to reduce the attention paid to your failures, not attract more of it.
The scheme to deport asylum seekers to Africa has so far brought satisfaction only to the Rwandan government, which is better off to the tune of £140m from the British taxpayer before a flight has taken off. If the supreme court rules that the scheme is unlawful, the Conservative party will be convulsed by division about whether or not it should go into the election with a manifesto commitment to rip up the UK’s adherence to the European convention on human rights, which would put us in the company of Russia and Belarus.
Winning in court could be even worse for the government. They’d then have to try to implement their costly and cruel scheme. The Home Office’s own assessment reckons the bill will be £169,000 per person deported (the true figure will be higher) and that “it is not possible to estimate” whether it will have any deterrent effect on those desperate enough to imperil themselves by crossing the world’s busiest shipping lane.
If the Conservatives seek to make a big issue of immigration at the election, they will be focusing attention on an area where they have relentlessly broken their promises, visibly failed and are deeply mistrusted. That doesn’t look like a winning card.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
