There was one moment in last night’s election interview of Rishi Sunak which stood out. It was when host Beth Rigby asked the prime minister what the net migration figures for the last three years were. He couldn’t say. The answer is 1.9 million people. Then she asked what the net migration figures for the three years before the 2016 Brexit referendum were. He didn’t know that either. It was 836,000 people.
There were audible cries of “wow” from the Grimsby audience. Even as repeated polls have shown that immigration is once again becoming a key issue for the voting public, other polls have shown that they still widely underestimate the scale of it. That is beginning to change, as election campaigns increase the level of scrutiny.
Many in the media sense how weak the Conservatives are and, in response, are sharpening their claws. One internet wit dubbed it the Bacon Sandwich Threshold, after the way the media sensed that Ed Miliband’s failure to eat a bacon sandwich meant that he would never be prime minister. At that point, the delicate balance between politicians and press is over, with journalists looking hyena-like to score as many hits as they can before their wounded prey succumbs.
That’s how you end up with even a Left-wing outlet like Channel 4 News attacking the prime minister over the way immigration has exploded since 2019, despite them generally being in favour of mass migration. That date is important, because it was in 2019 that we achieved Brexit and with it the ability to control our own borders.
This was a long-standing desire of the British public. Immigration was the most important issue during the Brexit referendum. No party had ever won an election by promising more immigration and the Conservatives had said they’d reduce it to the tens of thousands. At one point, under Theresa May and her advisor Nick Timothy, the Home Office actually got close to that figure. The 2019 Conservative manifesto was skimpy on detail, but clear that there would be less low-skilled immigration.
Instead, the new Australian-style points-based system seemed to be set at the lowest level. Even as EU citizens left in large numbers, net migration continued to grow, piloted largely by immigration from poor non-EU countries. This was heavily driven by allowing international students on one-year post-graduate courses of dubious quality to work for two years and by introducing a visa for care workers, with both groups allowed to bring dependents until very recently. The result is that, nearly a decade after Brexit, there has been a huge increase in exactly the sort of low-skilled immigration which the British people had thought was over.
Certain parts of the Conservative elite had thought that immigration was ultimately a public relations issue. All that was needed was to show the British people that they were listened to. Brexit was seen as a way to smooth over these concerns. Without freedom of movement to rouse passions, the issue would disappear.
Initially the polls seemed to support this, with the issue seeming to decline in importance. This misunderstood the British public though, who had trusted in the political class to act on the issue and focused their attention elsewhere, especially with the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. But with nearly two million people added to the country over the last three years, helping cause rents to rise and making getting medical care on the NHS even harder, it has become impossible for them to miss that their trust has been abused.
Even as Grant Shapps has been reduced to asking voters to support the Conservatives to prevent a Labour “supermajority”, it seems there may be further polling depths for the party to sink to as people begin to realise the true scale of the great immigration betrayal. Some are briefing that they think Reform might even overtake them in the polls. It didn’t have to be this way: they could have listened to the public and done what they were asked to do. If, as polls suggest, they suffer a record defeat then no subject should demand more post-election self-examination than their failure on immigration.
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