For anyone interested in policy, this has so far been a very frustrating Conservative leadership contest. Half the candidates are making a point, even taking pride, in saying nothing at all about how they’d govern; when the other half do make suggestions, they’re often not very good.
Immigration is a case in point. In a speech on Thursday, Tom Tugendhat announced that if he became prime minister he would introduce a binding annual cap for net immigration of 100,000 people a year. This follows Robert Jenrick’s promise of a lower cap — and an annual debate in Parliament to set it.
On one level, this sort of thing is understandable: immigration was perhaps the single biggest policy failure of the last period of Tory government. In particular, Boris Johnson’s decision to use his post-Brexit freedoms to massively liberalise the system was an own goal of historic proportions.
A hard cap also has the advantages of being simple, both to communicate and to legislate for. But such a policy is extremely unlikely to deliver the promised results, as it does nothing to directly tackle the various ways in which parts of the British economy are dependent on imported labour. As a result, the likely consequence of introducing a hard cap with no warning would be that every vested interest would start screaming at the same time.
That would be a very difficult thing for any government to face down, and both universities and employers know it. As a result, they would be more likely to play chicken with ministers than take the Conservatives at their word and begin voluntarily preparing for a difficult adjustment.
Alternatively, the headline cap could remain in place but become an administrative fiction. Consider the way that Conservative ministers would boast about historically low unemployment rates, without accounting for the fact that we now have lots of categories of person (collectively known as the “economically inactive”) which are no longer counted in the unemployment figures.
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