Calm is slowly returning to the debate about Britain and Europe. The shrillness of the referendum campaign, and the hysteria from people who ought to have known better, is giving way to an acceptance that the end is not nigh and that things could be as good, if not better, than before. The idea that the British public had somehow voted for a recession is being steadily abandoned. The next stage is to accept that Brexit was not a populist yawp about protecting our borders. It was not a demand to stop immigration, but to manage it better.
So when Theresa May rejected an Australian-style points-based immigration system this week, it did not mean that she had betrayed Brexit or shown her desire to water down the whole process. That was the suggestion of Nigel Farage, but the Australian system was at best an example of what countries do when they have the power to control their borders. There are other ways of doing that, as James Forsyth details in his piece this week. Mrs May has accepted the most important point: that migrants from the EU will in future have to come through the same controlled immigration system.
Migration from within the EU only became an issue in Britain in 2004 when eight relatively poor, former Soviet bloc countries joined the union. That led to an influx of Poles, who have turned out to be the best immigrants that any country could hope for. In the past few years, however, the number of eastern Europeans arriving has levelled off — and the surge in immigration has come from people fleeing Spain, France and Italy and the economic chaos of the eurozone. The negative effects on housing and the availability of public services have been enough to underline a belief that it was time for the process to come under some control.
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