As they headed into the autumn, Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives needed a gamechanger. Their gradual recovery in the polls from the dog days of Liz Truss had stalled not very far from base camp and began sliding into reverse.
Destroying what was left of the party’s reputation on the most important issue to its 2019 voter coalition was not the gamechanger many people had in mind. But that is what has occurred following the sacking of Suella Braverman and subsequent developments on both legal and illegal immigration.
Since 2010 the Conservatives have gone into every election promising voters that immigration will come down and then broken that promise in every governing term
After the devastating Supreme Court verdict on the Rwanda plan and then scarcely believable official statistics documenting the vast scale of legal immigration taking place on his watch, there was Braverman blowing the whistle on Sunak’s refusal to implement effective measures to bolster UK borders.
Not only has Sunak been outed for failing to live up to his promise to ‘strain every sinew’ to stop the boats, but also now for reportedly rebuffing six times in a row Braverman’s policy packages for reducing legal immigration. The Prime Minister took office knowing that Boris Johnson had broken the 2019 manifesto promise that ‘overall numbers will come down’ and decided to do nothing to remedy the situation.
Given the weight of vested interests in favour of running a very relaxed migration regime, embracing corporate employers, business lobby groups, the university sector and migration-orientated charities, it would have taken a fiercely determined premier to turn things around. But Sunak was never that man, as he showed in an interview with Paul Goodman of the Conservative Home website back in April. He told Goodman that it was the small boats rather than overall immigration volumes that was the big issue for most people.
This is what Sunak and those around him wish to be true. The former Spectator political editor James Forsyth, now one of his key advisers, set out the thesis in a blog for this website in March 2021 that was headlined: ‘Immigration is no longer a political problem’. That has turned out to be an incorrect theory.
The political issues index run by the pollster YouGov shows us just how incorrect. Its series on the most important issues facing the country is broken down by categories including how people voted in the 2019 general election. Among 2019 Tories, immigration and asylum is currently the number one issue by 11 clear points, ahead even of the state of the economy.
There is no reason to suppose it is merely the 5 per cent or so of incomers who arrive illegally that these voters are bothered about. The vast scale of legal immigration may be slightly less of a direct insult to the patriotic sensibility but is a far bigger driver of problems ranging from housing shortages to the rationing of public services, wage compression and loss of community cohesion.
For a political generation this has been the Achilles’ heel of Labour – ever since former Labour adviser Andrew Neather claimed in 2010 that there had been a plot to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’ and then Lord Mandelson admitted three years later that the Blair administration had sent out ‘search parties’ for immigrant workers.
Since 2010 the Conservatives have gone into every election promising voters that immigration will come down and then broken that promise in every governing term. Under David Cameron and Theresa May net immigration was supposed to be reduced to the tens of thousands, but never fell below 200,000. The 2019 manifesto merely promised an overall fall and yet the last two years have seen record levels by a distance.
Suddenly it is Labour now saying they will aim to get annual net migration back in the ball park of ‘a couple of hundred thousand’ and that the Tory levels of recent years are ‘shockingly high’.
For his part Sunak appears blithely unaware of the trouble he is in on the issue and this week contravened Denis Healey’s law of holes (‘when you are in one, stop digging’) by taking to a public stage to extol the fabulously liberal nature of the UK’s visa regime.
There is only a year at most to wait before the voters give their verdict at a general election. Almost every habitual Tory voter I speak to is furious and now positively yearns for the party to suffer an epic defeat. Several have switched their support to the Reform party.
Mass immigration is a strange hill for the Tories to die on. But under this party leader the cortege is assembling and the bells are starting to toll.
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