Uk politics

How much do the net migration figures mean these days? The Office for National Statistics released its latest migration estimates today, which put immigration to the UK in the year to June 2016 at a record high of 650,000 - up 11,000 on the previous year. Net migration was at 335,000. That figure comprises 189,000 EU citizens and 196,000 non-EU citizens who came to Britain, and 49,000 Brits who left this country. But these figures mostly cover the period before the EU referendum. The ONS includes three months of data following June’s vote in today’s release. And the estimates for the year that follows will also reflect Britain’s current immigration arrangements, not the ones that Britons voted for in the referendum, whatever those arrangements may be.

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war. Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration at the moment.

The news that Theresa May offered to do a deal on expats – only to be rebuffed by Angela Merkel – is unsurprising. The Prime Minister has ended up in a pretty bad, unbecoming position on EU nationals using them as bargaining chips in a way that has appalled her critics (and even some of her supporters). So it’s not surprising that she wanted to get this awful business over with in her recent meeting with Merkel. She suggested: let’s just agree an EU-wide deal whereby everyone’s expats can stay where there are. But, again unsurprisingly, Merkel rebuffed her. Before their meeting, Merkel said publicly that they would not and could not talk about Brexit, due to the strict rule on not negotiating in any way until the invocation of Article 50.

When the pound plunged a few weeks ago, Andrew Marr opened his Sunday show by saying that this might be a good thing because ‘it had been too high for too long’. It was a minority opinion, and one not seen much in the hysterical reporting of the pound’s plunge. At the Spectator’s post-Autumn Statement briefing last week, kindly sponsored by Old Mutual Global Investors, we raised this a bit. The pound’s fall might make overseas holidays more expensive for Britons, but it also makes our goods far cheaper for the rest of the world. We worry about a worst-case WTO scenario of 10 per cent tariff on cars, for example, but a 13 per cent currency plunge rather makes up for that. So was the pound overvalued?

In the autumn statement, Philip Hammond chose to mock Boris’ failed leadership bid. This wasn’t the first time that one of the Foreign Secretary Cabinet’s colleagues had had a laugh at his expense. At our parliamentarian of the year awards, Theresa May joked that Boris would be put down when he was no longer useful. But Boris and his circle are getting rather fed up with him being the butt of the joke, as I say in The Sun today. Those close to Boris feel that these gibes undercut him on the world stage. 'If they want the UK to be taken seriously, they need to back him not mock him’ one close ally of his tells me.

'Theresa May and I have made it clear that we are very committed to returning the public finances to balance,' said Philip Hammond on the Today programme this morning. But his Autumn Statement did the reverse. It abolished the deadline for balancing the books, and talks instead about keeping the overspend to about 2pc of GDP. It’s a significant change, and a move away from austerity. The massive shift in debt, towards 90pc of GDP, is something he is choosing with his £23bn discretionary infrastructure splurge. To govern is to choose and as Nick Robinson rightly said, the Chancellor has chosen infrastructure over extra support for the ‘just about managing’.

Once, journalists trawled the Red Book (ie, the Budget statement) for stories. Now, the Office for Budget Responsibilities does this for us. There will be plenty in it for Brexiteers and Remainers. The former will be delighted that the OBR pretty much trashes the main assumptions made in HM Treasury’s now-notorious dossier on jobs, recession, house prices etc. But then again the OBR estimates a Brexit effect on the deficit: £3bn this year, peaking at £15.4bn in 2018/19. This has delighted Remain campaigners who now, at long last, have ammunition to write about the costs of Brexit - especially if you add the figures together and come up with a £50-odd billion Brexit effect. Expect plenty of this in the papers tomorrow.

This morning’s Marr show was something of a financial matter, with the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell sharing the sofa. As Andrew Marr pointed out, having the pair of Chancellors share a sofa is a ‘great tradition’, but one that had a stop put to it when George Osborne was in charge. Now the tradition has come back – but it this morning’s performance might be a good example of why Osborne chose to put a stop to it in the first place. The general consensus seems to be that McDonnell came out on top – with commenters saying that he ran rings around Hammond. Naturally, lots of the talk was about Brexit. But Hammond stayed fairly quiet on the topic, refusing to reveal the government’s negotiating cards.

Michael Gove makes a semi-persuasive case for patriotism in The Times this week. Brexit and Trumpism are largely just assertions of the basic, healthy human impulse to love one’s homeland, and to defy the international structures, and liberal sneering, that denigrate this impulse. The reality is that the moral status of patriotism depends on which nation you belong to. It depends whether your nation espouses liberal values. If it does, then your patriotism is linked to a wider-than-national creed. If it does, then your allegiance is also to an international cause: you respect and love your country as a particular expression of this creed. After fascism, the idea of national allegiance subtly shifted in the West.

Britain’s position heading into its Brexit talks is far stronger than it was a week ago, I argue in The Sun today. Why, because Donald Trump has changed the dynamics of global politics. Brexit’s critics used to claim that this country would be isolated after it left the EU. But it is hard to make that case when the president-elect of the most powerful country in the world is in favour of it. Indeed, the next US President is more enthusiastic about it than the British Prime Minister. He was for it before June 23rd. Theresa May now has a chance to create a strong relationship with Trump before other European leaders even start trying.

What worries government ministers, as I say in The Sun this morning, is not the actual vote on the Article 50 bill—voting against the bill as whole would be akin to rejecting the referendum result—but attempts to tie Theresa May’s hands ahead of the negotiation through amendments to the bill. One senior Cabinet Minister tells me that peers and MPs ‘won’t be able to resist’ trying to amend the bill. Though, it is worth noting that because of public concern about free movement there probably isn’t a Commons majority for staying in the single market, post referendum. Downing Street is adamant that they don’t want an early election, and that if they lose their appeal to the supreme court they can get this bill through clean.