The Conservatives are talking a good game on immigration reform – now they must walk it

As with the last time the Conservatives announced a new immigration policy, I will take a moment to point out that CCHQ has once again pre-empted the grand policy review that was supposed to be deciding this stuff. But that said, the latest announcement – a hard crackdown on foreign offenders – is a welcome step in the right direction.

Such a programme ought to be something which unites sceptics with sensible immigration advocates. Even if you subscribe completely to the idea that our economy depends on imported labour, it ought to be obvious that the status quo, in which the system bends over backwards to prevent the deportation of rapists and other serious offenders, is not sustainable.

In fact, those who don’t want a sharp overall turn against immigration ought to be especially agitated by the corrosive drip-feed of stories about the courts blocking the deportation of the least-desirable people imaginable, which provide grist to the mills of immigration sceptics without being of any benefit whatsoever to the nation.

Fortunately for the Conservatives, few of their opponents seem to be in a mood to pick their battles yet. It is especially difficult to imagine Sir Keir Starmer, humans rights lawyer par excellence, being prepared to cross the Rubicon of, say, allowing a sex offender to be returned even though “his “risky behaviours” would expose him to “ill-treatment” in Afghanistan”.

On paper, the Tories’ new approach to this is also much better-judged than the usual fixation of wholesale withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Even those who think that a good long-term objective must concede that it makes the job as hard as it could: it mobilises the broadest possible opposition and maximally exposes advocates to the complexities of leaving.

It also allows defenders of the status quo to campaign where they are most comfortable: in the abstract, long on invocations of Winston Churchill and short on any detailed accounting for how the Convention has metastasized since the 1940s.

A much more sensible strategy would be to take inspiration from the battle over prisoner votes, and seek case-by-case exemptions on the most favourable territory possible, e.g. foreign rapists.

This is perfectly constitutional. The United Kingdom has what is called a ‘dualist’ approach to international law, meaning that it is only considered national law if specifically enacted as national law. The legislation which does this is the Human Rights Act, and that can be amended by subsequent acts of parliament in the same manner as any other law – as the Blair Government did when it stood by Britain’s restriction on prisoners’ right to vote.

Superficially, this seems to be what the Conservatives are implying they’re doing in this tweet:

I say ‘implying’ because the amendment paper has been published, and whilst there are eight tabled by the Opposition (all in the name of Matt Vickers), none of them add up to the policy commitments listed in the graphic under ‘Our Plan for Immigration’.

That isn’t to say they aren’t sensible. Allowing the authorities greater access to mobile phone data to trace illegal migrants (NC22) and disapplying data protection laws from illegal migrants and Foreign National Offenders (NC23) are both good policy shifts. So too would forcing the first-tier immigration tribunal – which recently allowed a couple from El Salvador to remain in Britain because its gang warfare might imperil their relationship, despite their not speaking English or being self-sufficient – to sit in public (NC24).

But unless there is something I’ve missed, the above tweet is at the very least rather artfully crafted. It could be argued that the amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill are in pursuit of the Conservatives’ plan for immigration, which has been helpfully appended for reference. But a lay reader could be forgiven for thinking the amendments would deliver it, which they will not.

This is not the only area where Kemi Badenoch seems to be steering the Party towards a much more muscular stance. Chris Philp has been tweeting about the extraordinary distribution of social housing in London, a point which is only going to get more salient as the housing crisis deepens and working, net-contributor citizens in the capital get squeezed tighter and tighter.

(As I’ve written before, even if you think the UK has the right level of social housing (i.e. many times more than neighbouring countries), using some of the world’s most valuable real estate in our most productive regional economy to store huge numbers of economically-inactive people at the taxpayers’ expense is insane.)

Yet the fear must be that the Party is developing policy in this area in part because it is proximate to the leadership’s preferred, ‘cultural’ lens for why the Tories were routed at the last election. It also involves asking fewer (although not zero) awkward questions about the Conservatives’ record in government, which is likely why Robert Jenrick also placed a much stronger emphasis on the ECHR than the economy in his own leadership bid.

But no volume of good policy on immigration, policing, and the constitution can spare Tory MPs the need to face the brutal reality of Britain’s economic and fiscal position: that a stagnant tax base plus uncontrolled entitlement spending means that the State is simultaneously taxing the economy into the ground and presiding over collapsing public services, and breaking out of that doom spiral will require serious, strategic spending cuts on a generational level.

That and building millions of houses, of course.