Migration

Labour wants to ask the Government 170 questions about its plan for Brexit. Yet when it comes to answering questions themselves, it seems the party is much less willing to give an answer. Emily Thornberry, in her new guise as shadow foreign secretary, was quizzed on how Labour would handle migration from the EU after Brexit on the Today show just now. And in typical fashion, she did her best to dodge the question. Here’s what she said: ‘Our position is that we need to be open to the idea of reasonably managed migration. And we need to have it as part of a larger negotiation but we are open to

A year from now, 60 million Germans go to the polls in the most important general election in mainland Europe for a generation. The result will define German — and European — politics for the next four years. There are huge questions to be resolved, from the refugee crisis to the financial crisis, but right now the question in Germany is: will Mutti run again? Angela Merkel’s nickname, Mutti (Mummy) is a memento of happier times. A year ago, her position as matriarch of the Bundesrepublik seemed unassailable. And then, last September, she opened Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of fleeing Syrians. Over a million refugees arrived last year.

 Ravenna At a car park a short walk from Dante’s tomb, one of the gang of illegal immigrants who tell motorists where to park and hound them for cash agreed to talk to me for €20. His name was Billy, he said, and he was 22. He was from Senegal and a Muslim. He had come to Italy by fishing boat 14 months ago from Libya, where he had arrived via Mali and Algeria. He paid €200 for the trip (the going rate is said to be at least €1,000) and his boat landed at Lampedusa, 160 nautical miles from Tripoli. ‘Why did you come?’ I asked. ‘In Senegal, no

The British public are clearly dissatisfied with the way our immigration system currently works. One of the main reasons that motivated people to vote for Brexit in the recent referendum is the hope that Britain could better control immigration by ending the free movement of people from the EU. For years now, immigration has been one of the issues that the public are most concerned about. But there is hope: now, more than ever, the cynicism can be cracked. There is an exciting opportunity, thanks to Brexit and the appointment of a new Cabinet, for the Government to introduce significant reforms to our immigration system to increase public confidence in

Is the new government under Theresa May going to ditch the target to drive net migration into the tens of thousands? Amber Rudd and Boris Johnson signalled a change of policy from the back-of-a-fag-packet plan yesterday by saying the aim was to ‘bring migration down to sustainable levels’, though Downing Street insisted that this was not an end to the target, saying ‘the Prime Minister does see sustainable levels as down to the tens of thousands’. It would be odd, given May’s personal commitment to the net migration target, and her personal frustration (and that of her aide Nick Timothy) that it wasn’t met as a result – in her

It is now almost three days since David Cameron announced his resignation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been in hiding ever since. And the Parliamentary Labour party is revolting against its own leader and members. It is one thing for the whole political class to be in disarray. It is quite another for the government to be missing in action. Obviously we are waiting for the Conservative party leadership contest to get going and swiftly resolve itself. But that will take months. In the meantime the country is still here. And a number of things need to happen fast. Since Mark Carney’s intervention early on Friday there has been

So long as the economy was at the top of the agenda, ‘Remain’ will have felt safe in the knowledge that ‘Leave’ could do little to win over the public’s trust. But today, the Prime Minister has his former aide and friend Steve Hilton to thank for bringing the issue of migration soaring back into the headlines. What’s particularly dangerous for the Government about what Steve Hilton had to say is his claim that the PM was directly told in 2012 that meeting the promise to bring net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ was impossible. Here’s what Steve Hilton told the Daily Mail: ‘We were told, directly and

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.’ So the essence of Brown’s message was not to speak to the many Labour voters who genuinely

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

Ever since David Cameron declared he wanted to get net migration down to below 100,000 the migration figures have caused him a headache. Today’s are particularly sensitive given that they’re out just a day before the EU referendum purdah period starts. Confirming net migration more than three times Cameron’s supposed maximum, and half of the rise being EU nationals, the data will help the Brexiteers argue that we need to leave the EU to restore border control. The potency of this argument has resulted in a subtle shift in the Brexit campaigning strategy, which appears to have placed immigration (not the NHS or the economy) at the centre of their argument. The ONS release shows that net

I open a dusty binder and look at my yellowing Spectator articles from Poland, Germany and Russia in the dramatic 1980s. And here’s one from Brussels in 1986, suggesting that Britain was edging towards finding its role in the European Community. Ho ho. Back then, Charles Moore was the editor and I was the foreign editor of this magazine. He shared my passion for the liberation of eastern Europe, while becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the western European Community, but he let me make the case for it. Now, 30 years on, Charles and I stand on different sides of a historic national argument. This makes for a curious role reversal.