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The government this week released a White Paper (WP), on the failure of Britain’s immigration policies, and how they intend to fix it. As usual, it began with an attack on the Tories for screwing up on immigration (true). In introducing the WP, the Prime Minister made a lot of exaggerated claims about what the proposals would achieve, which, as ever don’t bear scrutiny, In fact, the whole of the paper is a fuzzy hodgepodge that will achieve very little and certainly nothing like the necessary “significant reductions” the government is trying to con us into believing.
The PM’s trick to hide the inconsequential impact the WP proposals will have was to come out with something he knew would become the focus and draw attention away from the limp of attention and away from the befuddled White Paper. We’ll come back to this.
Titled “Restoring Control over the Immigration System”, the paper actually does a good job of admitting what we at Migration Watch have been telling them for a long time: that mass immigration is not good for British workers or the British economy and drives irreversible and unwelcome change to our society. What the WP doesn’t do is provide answers and solutions.
Three central principles of the mass immigration orthodoxy – that it improves GDP, does not replace workers or undermine their wages, and that it allows the world’s “best and brightest” to come here – have been blown apart.
Concessions have finally been made that GDP per capita has actually fallen since 2022 and is now lower than pre-covid; that study visas typically mean students for lower-ranked universities and colleges, who in turn have brought large numbers of dependants with them, with 55% of visas for care workers between 2021-2023 going to dependants; and that “6 out of the 10 sectors seeing this highest change in payrolled employments of non-EU nationals have been correlated with declines in UK employment over the period”. In other words, mass immigration suppresses wages and displaces British workers.
The lack of detail means the government can claim even a modest reduction in figures as a victory. In fact, buried in on page 13 on an annex to the paper, the government’s own statistics concede that “measures in the White Paper could reduce inflows by up to around 100,000 per annum”. Given the record high in June 2023 of 906,000 is just over 10% an acceptable reduction? No, not even slightly.
Our President, Lord Green, made exactly this point in a debate in the Lords around this paper:
I make just one point to the Minister, which is that he is going to need a target. I understand very much the breadth of what he has covered and his reluctance to set a target, because it makes life very difficult in future years, but if he wants to persuade the public that he is serious about this, he had better have a target and get very close to it.
Then there was the PM’s apparent damascene conversion – as transparent as the paper itself – when he said,”we risk becoming an island of strangers”. Already nicknamed the “Island of Strangers Speech” for pointing out that integration has not only failed but also implying that the scale and pace of immigration has been too high and change too rapid.
Well yes, Sir Keir, but if you really believe this, you must know that the paper you launched on Monday contained little that would stop it happening. You also know that it is not what the British people want.
Remember, if net migration were to fall to, say, an annual 600,000 from 2028 that year, we would still be looking at a population increase of some 20 million people within the next 25 years. As a result, the ethnic minority proportion of the population would hover at around the 50% mark. Where will that leave integration? What will new arrivals be integrating with?
The PM went on to resurrect the phrase “take back control” in an attempt to make us believe that he has seen the light and will fix what the Tories (and Labour under Sir Tony Blair before them) broke. He continued:
And let me tell you why. Because I know, on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.
So it’s not because Reform gave both Labour and the Tories a bloody nose at the local elections? Or the fact that immigration is now the most important issue for voters, according to YouGov?
Pull the other one, Sir Keir – this goes nowhere near far enough.