If the Conservative Party is going to demand new immigration data, it must endorse the policy implications

A good rule of thumb is that a state which would be severely imperilled merely by having various aspects of it, or their consequences, scrutinised is not a state in good health.

By way of recent example, one thinks of Lord Hermer’s suggestion that gazing too long under the hood of judicial decision-making poses a risk to the “fabric of society” – and, more recently still, to complaints that Labour’s decision to start breaking down crime data by nationality will trigger riots and other disorder.

In fairness, they are only applying the same logic that the British State otherwise employs on such matters; barrister Michael Reiners recently set out on this site how such information is kept out of news reporting on individual crimes by a legal obligation not to risk provoking a hypothetical racist.

Nonetheless, one cannot pivot easily between the usual claim that the United Kingdom is an immigration success story one moment and shrieking the next about the dangers of looking behind the curtain and actually checking.

Yvette Cooper’s decision is another win for Robert Jenrick, who naturally feels the Government has not gone far enough. There are other places he can take this campaign, too – countries such as Denmark collect and publish the data necessary to break down the average net economic contributions over time from migrants from different parts of the world.

Britain does not. Yet, anyway. Indeed, until now the trend here has been in the opposite direction, with government departments and parliamentary bodies quietly discontinuing such datasets. Apparently even this very limited step in the other direction saw the Home Secretary having to overrule official snivelling that collating the information would be too difficult.

We should expect more such steps. Whilst the state may for a while yet be able to suppress such information where it can refuse to collect it, the days when it could do that by refusing to collate it are probably drawing to a close. The internet simply makes it too easy for private individuals to do, at least if the raw data is published or FOI-able.

But there is one big question for the Conservatives on this, beyond the usual “weren’t you guys in office until last year?” one, and that is: once the state starts collecting and publishing this sort of data, what do you expect it to do with it?

Ever since the first government decided to conduct a census, official data has been about informing – and in a modern democracy, very often driving – state policy.

This was certainly the case in cases where the Tories did mandate the collection of new data over the past 14 years, such as Theresa May forcing companies to publish their overall pay bills for male and female employees and calling the difference, disengenuously, a ‘pay gap’.

Whilst it might be tactically advantageous to pretend that state data collection is a neutral act, at least for the purposes of inducing this government to do more of it, the expectation – not least on the part of the electorate, presumably – must be that new information will lead to new and better policy.

Party that might simply be a general shift towards a more restrictive system. But the obvious follow-up to this sort of move, and presumably what Jenrick has in mind, is a shift towards an immigration system which is much more selective about where people come from, rather than just what skills they bring as individuals.

That is perfectly defensible. Of course so too is the counter-argument: that it isn’t fair on an individual would-be migrant to freight their application in this way. But why should the state disregard clear statistical evidence, let alone refuse to collect it, on that basis? The immigration system is supposed to focus on benefiting the nation, not the applicant.

Moreover, the fairness claim cuts both ways. Consider last year’s furore over changes to spousal visa requirements: even before James Cleverly proposed raising the threshold, it had been imposing substantial costs on any British national trying to bring a spouse into the country. Why? Because of a specific problem of visa abuse involving a handful of countries. But as we do not currently target policy on that basis, the costs were imposed on everyone – hardly fair.

So if the Conservatives intend to ford this Rubicon, they probably can. But they should ensure they are actually prepared to do it, and have sold in such policy internally. It wouldn’t do to collect all this new data and then fail, once again, to deliver meaningful immigration reform – but it also wouldn’t be the first time the Conservative Party has dashed itself on a reef of its own creation.