Farming out the development of post-Brexit UK migration policy to a professor from the LSE was a political masterstroke by the former Home Secretary Amber Rudd. How much harder it will be for Remainers to condemn the government’s position on migration as some kind of racist, xenophobic exercise knowing that it has been formed in one of the liberal establishment’s favourite seats of learning.
Yet there is nothing in Sir Alan Manning’s report which could not have come from the pen of a ‘populist’ politician trying to satisfy public grievance on migration. While it is no doubt true that some people voted Brexit in the hope of stopping all migration, for the vast majority of Leave voters – and this came up time and time again during the campaign – the issue was not a desire to keep all foreigners out of the country but the quality and quantity of migration.
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