April 26 2025 - 12:30pm
When Tony Blair blocked the Scottish Parliament from acquiring powers over immigration in the 1998 Scotland Act, he knew what he was doing. New Labour may have been ideologically committed to substantially higher levels of immigration than previous governments, but it did not want that increased by Scotland providing a back door to England.
Ever since, the Scottish National Party has been demanding that power over immigration should be devolved to Holyrood in order to address labor shortages in social care and agriculture, and to compensate for Scotland’s rapidly aging population. The Quebec province of Canada has power to set its own levels of immigration, the argument goes, so why not a country like Scotland? Before the Brexit referendum, Michael Gove, then Justice Secretary, suggested that Scotland could have its own immigration policy if the UK left the European Union.
This week, the SNP MP Stephen Gethins cited Gove as he introduced his Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill in the Commons. He wants a special Scottish visa to allow more workers to staff Scotland’s hospitality industry and care service. But would they stay there? Most migrants to the UK want to live and work in the great cities of England, London especially, where there are already large immigrant communities. How would Scotland prevent them relocating south? There may be ways of using Scotland’s taxation system to block this, but the UK Government isn’t taking the risk.
Keir Starmer has been almost as hostile towards mass immigration as the Tories, rhetorically at least. Last November, he even accused Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak of conducting “an experiment in open borders” after it was revealed that annual net migration to the UK had hit a record of nearly one million. Allowing Scots to offer a more liberal visa system, perhaps lowering the income threshold or permitting migrants to bring family members, as Gethins proposed, would not fit well with that stance. Labour MPs ensured that Gethins’s Private Member’s Bill was duly talked out.
But does Scotland really want mass migration? After all, those small Nordic countries, like Denmark and Sweden, to which the SNP always aspires have turned militantly against migrant influxes. In Denmark’s case, this extends to bulldozing areas deemed to have become “parallel societies”, ethnic ghettos ridden with crime. Indeed, this week John Swinney hosted a summit in Glasgow to combat the rise of the “far-Right”. If he is genuinely afraid of the rise of far-Right politics in Scottish society, surely more immigration is not the answer.
Scotland is generally more positive towards immigrants than England, at least according to surveys. But Scotland remains 95% white and has not bristled with much of the fast social change many English cities have. Instead of accusing Westminster of depriving Scotland of immigrants, Gethins might have asked his own Scottish government why, after 17 years in office, it has failed to attract more of the record numbers who’ve come to Britain. In 2022, out of 745,000 net UK migrants, only 22,000 made it to Scotland according to the ONS.
There was never any “white Scotland” policy. Nor has England been greedily hogging those who have come here. It is simply that the Scottish economy has for many decades failed to generate sufficient numbers of well-paid jobs to attract migrants. But, as we have seen in the UK in general, immigration increases GDP but pushes down GDP per capita, while putting excess strain on creaking services and infrastructure. Perhaps, instead of berating Westminster, the SNP should be thankful it has dodged a bullet.
Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.
iainmacwhirter