Immigration

Jeremy Corbyn went on The Marr Show this morning to talk about Jo Cox’s tragic death and the EU referendum. Corbyn talked movingly about Cox and how MPs don’t want to be cut off from the communities that they serve. The conversation then moved on to the EU referendum. Andrew Marr asked Corbyn if he thought there should be an upper limit on immigration. Corbyn replied, rightly, 'I don't think you can have one while you have free movement of labour'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6joUzXHwE8 Now, this is true. But it very much isn’t the Remain campaign script; David Cameron has even refused to admit that his ambition to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands is undeliverable while Britain is in the EU.

One consequence of David Cameron’s refusal to take part in any ‘Blue on Blue’ debates is that he and Michael Gove are appearing several days apart on BBC Question Time. Tonight, it was Gove’s turn to face the studio audience. In reply to the first question, Gove made clear that—in the event of Britain voting to leave—he wouldn’t support the so-called ‘punishment Budget’ that George Osborne set out today. Gove said that the Remain campaign were ‘turning it up to 11’ on the scare stories as polling day approached. Though, interestingly, he studiously avoided any personal criticism of Osborne. With the polls tightening the Remainers are getting more passionate, and Gove faced some fairly hostile questions from the audience.

Tom Watson’s comments today that a future government would have to try to reform freedom of movement rules in the European Union are clearly a last-ditch attempt to show the party’s voters that it is taking their anger about immigration seriously. But they are also strange, for three reasons. The first is that it is strange to be talking about a future renegotiation when the Remain campaign does still occasionally try to persuade voters that they are voting to stay in a reformed European Union. By talking about what more needs to be done, Watson is effectively dumping all over the renegotiation that David Cameron has already carried out, saying that there will need to be another one.

Gordon Brown’s intervention in the EU referendum debate was meant to be all about putting forward the positive case for voting ‘Remain’. But not for the first time, the former Prime Minister appears to have fallen flat on his face over immigration. It wasn’t quite as bad as Brown’s Gillian Duffy moment in that he didn’t call anyone ‘bigoted’ for holding a view on migration. Instead, though, the message to those worried about migration was…you’re worrying about the wrong thing. Brown told John Humphrys on Today that: ‘The biggest problem is illegal immigration.

The Leave campaign have had their best week of the campaign this week. After months of being battered by the Whitehall machine, they’ve taken advantage of purdah silencing government departments to get themselves onto the front foot. As I write in The Sun this morning, even IN supporting Cabinet Ministers admit that Leave have had a good week. But they argue that they won’t be able to ride the immigration issue to victory on June 23rd. One argues that you can’t focus on immigration week after week, or ‘By week four, you end up sounding like Nigel Farage’. But Vote Leave think their trump card is the link between immigration and people’s pay packets. That is the economic argument they are confident they will win.

The absence of an outline of a post-exit immigration regime is a serious gap in the Referendum debate. That need not be so. There is a fairly clear way ahead: to minimise disruption, while achieving control of numbers. The key element that needs to be controlled is migration for work (which accounts for the bulk of net EU migration). This could be sharply reduced if EU immigrants were subject to the same requirement for work permits as now currently apply to non-EU workers: the aim would be to reduce the overall scale of immigration without losing the economic benefit of highly skilled immigration. By doing this, net migration – 330,000 last year – could be cut by about 100,000 per year.

The Lincoln-Douglas debate it was not, but we have just had the first prime time TV debate of this EU referendum. With Alex Salmond and Alan Johnson for In and Liam Fox and the UKIP MEP Diane James for Out speaking to an audience of 18 to 29 year olds in Glasgow. Many in the audience wanted to complain about the tit for tat tactics of the two sides in this referendum campaign or to condemn the scaremongering by both sides; interestingly, they seemed very sceptical of the Treasury’s forecasts of economic pain if the UK left the EU. One audience member, though, seemed to object to the idea that he would have to think about the issue at all.

A while ago, I promised to write about my response to allegations by Andrew Neather that the government had covered up immigration. I got waylaid a bit, but in my Daily Telegraph column today I explain why I’m not convinced by it. To believe that mass immigration was a deliberate policy to screw up the Tories would imply that someone in power had a clue what was going on. No one did. It was a massive accident: the arrival of four million more people over 15 years. But here’s the thing: have the shops run out of food? Has M&S run out of underwear to sell? Has Ryanair started to ration flights? Has there been any rise in crime or anti-immigration sentiment? Have employers run out of vacancies? Not at all.

This morning's national insurance figures have further stoked the debate about immigration, and the extent to which leaving the EU would make a difference. Many British people are concerned that high levels of immigration have hurt their jobs, wages and quality of life. This anxiety is understandable as workers have had a rough ride in recent times. Allowing for inflation, average wages fell by 8 to 10 percent in the six years after the global financial crisis of 2008. Such a sustained fall in pay is unprecedented in British post-war history. Alongside falling wages, immigration from the EU has been soaring. Between 1995 and 2015, the share of EU nationals in the working age population more than tripled from 1.8 per cent to 6.

According to David Cameron this morning, if Britain votes to ‘Leave’ the EU on 23 June, the Germans will invade Belgium, the Russians will invade Crimea (again), and we’ll all have to spend the coming years re-learning the finer details of the Schleswig-Holstein question. The Prime Minister’s latest attempt to warn of apocalypse in the case of Brexit has one huge flaw.  In his latest scare-speech this morning he said: ‘Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash as to make that assumption.’ Well nothing is ever assured.  But how could anybody still think that peace and stability in Europe are remotely assured by the EU?