Of Boris Johnson’s many broken promises, his failure to “take back control” of immigration after Brexit is the one that Tory MPs believe matters most to their voters.
Johnson has long since fled the scene – instead, Rishi Sunak is taking the blame from his New Conservative backbenchers, who predict they will be punished at the ballot box in the “red wall” of the North and Midlands.
The former prime minister’s battle cry to “deliver Brexit” in the 2019 election went hand in hand with a manifesto pledge to reduce net migration from around 245,000 a year.
A tough “points-based immigration system” was to be introduced by the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, ostensibly to allow the UK, rather than Brussels, to control the numbers.
And yet the latest net migration figures of almost 750,000 for 2022 show that, far from falling, net migration has tripled. Many economists believe this level of migration is necessary, a natural consequence of a country facing staff shortages and high domestic wages.
But the political reality for Sunak is grim. While Liz Truss has shattered the Conservative party’s traditional claim to run a stable economy, the Prime Minister will now be unable to claim at an election that his is the party of tough controls on migration.
His tactic so far has been to focus attention on the problem of people arriving in small boats, claiming that his plan to deport those who have entered the country illegally back to Rwanda is being thwarted by the courts.
In reality, however, the bulk of migration has come through student, work and family visa routes, particularly in the health and social care sectors, as well as legal asylum routes from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong.
Sunak is looking at ways of restricting the number of family members brought to the UK and raising the salary requirements for new arrivals on work visas. But the measures could risk further staff shortages in critical sectors, causing further wage inflation and damaging the economy just before an election.
Sunder Katwala, director of the think-tank British Future, says: “Rishi Sunak won’t make the deep and rapid cuts that some are proposing because it would wreck what he wants to do on NHS waiting lists, economic growth and taxation.
His only strategy is to continue to blame ‘illegal’ migration – and if the pressure from the Tory right becomes too great, he has the nuclear option of an election promise to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
There is mixed evidence about how much the public prioritises immigration as an issue after Brexit, in the midst of a cost of living crisis and when the NHS is struggling. But polls generally show it is a much stronger issue for Conservative voters, who Sunak needs to motivate and Labour’s Keir Starmer wants to win over.
It’s highly debatable whether leaving the ECHR would help Sunak deliver his Rwanda plan, but there may come a point where he feels an election based on this issue – like Johnson’s 2019 contest, which is about Brexit and the people against the establishment – is his best hope. Part of the motivation would be to neutralise a threat from the Reform Party on the right, possibly backed by a resurgent Nigel Farage.
But focusing on immigration would still be a risky move. Labour would not back a withdrawal from the ECHR or the Rwanda plan, but there is no chance that Starmer’s party will let Sunak and the Tories escape the reality that net migration has tripled under the Tories.
