David Cameron’s speech today on migration is about pre-election ‘body language’ and political manoeuvring. His intervention a couple of months ago on multiculturalism was similarly timed to stop a spate of bad news. Now he is on the front pages sounding tough – perhaps with the aim of distracting us from those pictures of Andrew Lansley being humiliated at the Royal College of Nursing conference.
But Cameron is making policy promises, and the more specific they are, the bigger the gamble. He is taking sides in a tense intra-Tory party fight. Bankers and big corporations tend to the liberal view, free trade, free flow of capital and – not least because it helps cut wages – free movement of people.
Like his political mentor Margaret Thatcher, however, Cameron is choosing to go with the suburbs and Essex and promise to clamp down on the last of those freedoms, running the risk of decoupling the Tories from their business support. Essex man and woman aren’t keen on migrants, but they are not fond of bankers, either. They may say that as well as keeping people out, the state should be able to tax the wealthy and stop them sequestering their gains abroad.
Another risk in raising the stakes on immigration is whether government can actually deliver. Or put it more precisely: can the small state beloved of neo-liberals deliver the controls that are going to be necessary to cut numbers?
To control migration means some mix of the following: tighter border controls (including both longer queues at passport control and new huge state databases; re-re-regulation of labour markets (especially small business); and enhanced intra-European Union cooperation (the UK has an open land border with the rest of the EU).
Cameron accuses Labour – in the tabloid language he was evidently seeking – of ‘letting millions in’. Labour also enacted much tougher rules on benefits for asylum seekers and, on the back of expert advice, moved to introduce identity registration.
In other words, Cameron can only deliver if he pushes the boundaries of the state outwards and expands the Home Office budget. Traditional Toryism of this kind does not come cheap.
Then there are the foreign policy consequences to consider – British armed forces can hardly bomb Libya then the UK refuse the migratory consequences of anarchy in North Africa. A migration policy that could easily look discriminatory against people from Pakistan would affect security policy and, at one remove, UK participation in the Afghanistan operation.
Labour struggled with its own Human Rights Act, as judges (who would probably have followed the same jurisprudence even if the European Convention on Human Rights had not been enacted in UK law) upheld rights for families and individuals. Are the Tories really steeled to withdraw, an option they have only recently renounced?
Next come internal UK consequences. Assuming the Scottish National Party does reasonably well in the elections next month, will Scotland meekly assent to some tough policy on migration?
Cameron is unlikely to deliver quickly or easily. The danger here, as under Labour, is that loose policy diminishes public confidence in government. Some Tories have extolled ‘chaos’ in policy making as a way of softening the state up for shrinkage. But with migration, Tories need the state and need it to be strong. Elevating expectations in this way may end in weakening it.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission
