Ted Grainger: Brexit handed the Conservatives the machinery to tackle high immigration, and we didn’t use it

Ted Grainger is Head of External Affairs for Popular Conservatism.

Back to the days of Tony Blair, successive governments have had, a mostly unstated, policy of propping up the economy – and suppressing wages – through immigration.

Unsurprisingly, the cultural and economic outcomes became increasingly unpopular. In 2010, the country elected a Conservative-led government that promised to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands. The Cameron government started by making good on this commitment. In 2010, the year they took office, net migration was 256,000. By the end of 2012 this figure had almost exactly halved to 177,000.

Despite this early promise, by March 2015 it had soared back up again to 330,000 breaking the record which had been set in 2005. There is no other term to describe this than a complete failure. Not only had they failed to cut immigration at all, but they’d also actually seen it smash the record high. This was in the year ending March 2015 and despite this utter failure to deliver, the Conservatives won a general election just two months later, this time without needing the support of the Liberal Democrats.

How is this possible?

Concerns about immigration are getting worse and worse and yet the country decides to vote back in the government that oversaw levels never seen before. It was not as if there was not another option. Even the Labour Party had binned their support of mass migration. Ed Miliband literally etched in stone that he wanted to cut immigration.

The Conservatives were re-elected because there was a bogeyman responsible who simply wouldn’t let the Conservatives do anything about immigration.

The monster of the EU and its Single Market apparatus meant we had to take every Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Croatian that wanted to come here. Therefore, what we’ll do, the Conservatives said, is recommit to reducing immigration, but this time we’ll offer you an in-out referendum on EU membership as well. The British people accepted this proposal.

Why then was David Cameron so shocked a year later when, after his failed attempts to renegotiate our relationship with the EU, we doubled down on that deal and voted to leave?

Once the country had called Cameron’s bluff, every man and his dog (usually on Question Time) tried to diagnose what had caused it. The biggest contention was obviously whether it was immigration. Theresa May convinced herself that she could deliver the most half-baked, BRINO deal imaginable, so long as she ended freedom of movement. This deal was so great that it achieved near unanimity in Parliament.

Unfortunately for May it was near unanimous in rejection.

Throughout the years and general elections that followed as an unruly Parliament tore itself to pieces trying to reach any kind of positive consensus, immigration remained way above the tens of thousands. Of course, we had not left the EU yet, so the Conservatives were able to remain the largest party through 2017 and 2019 because they promised they would cut immigration, once we had finally left.

In the end, a different Brexit deal was reached, but this time delivered by Boris Johnson. This deal wasn’t really very different from May’s. However, because it altered the Northern Ireland backstop, and it was presented by the Brexit hero Boris with the support of a new thumping majority, it passed. From here it should have been plain sailing. The Conservatives were in government with their largest majority since Thatcher and divorced from the EU. There was nothing that could stop them from finally delivering on lower immigration.

I wish I was able to end this article here but it probably wouldn’t be much of an article if I could.

Like the 2010 Conservative government, Boris Johnson made great strides on immigration to start with. Fantastic even. In 2020, net migration came all the way down to 33,000. I hope you will forgive me for not giving Boris Johnson too much credit however, given the backdrop of a global pandemic. I’m inclined even less to cut him any slack once it boomed again two years later to 764,000, which very much made up for the pandemic induced drop.

Despite now being unshackled from the EU, the political class’s addiction to cheap labour to artificially prop up the economy was too strong. It didn’t matter that they were now led by a Brexiteer for the first time since Iain Duncan Smith. The lure of the cheap labour opiate was too strong.

This addiction had of course always been the real reason why immigration was continuously in the hundreds of thousands.

Yes, freedom of movement was a very real constraint on being in the EU. In 2010, 60 per cent of all immigration came from the EU. As soon as we left the EU though, we simply replaced the EU immigrants with the rest of the world. In the record-breaking year of 2022, EU immigration had fallen all the way to 10 per cent.

This was one reason why so much of the Conservative parliamentary party supported Remain. From their perspective, they had the best of both worlds. Whilst in the EU, Conservative governments could continue to import vast amounts of foreign workers on cheap wages. It didn’t matter that this was highly unpopular with the public because they could get away with it by insisting that it was the EU’s fault.

So long as the public continued its ignorance towards GDP per capita, this accounting trick would keep everyone thinking the economy was doing well. Why on earth would a government want to end this perfect situation and become responsible for its own decisions? Is it any wonder that so many of them fought vociferously in the aftermath of the Brexit vote to prevent it from coming to fruition?

As tragic as the Conservatives’ failure to deliver on immigration is, we must not fall into the trap of thinking that this has rendered all the effort that went into Brexit moot.

In fact, the opposite is true, only because of Brexit are we now in a situation where we are finally talking about the immigration problem. The pendulum of public debate has swung so far since last July as a result of the Conservatives’ realisation that they lost the election because of immigration. Even the sensible ones in Labour seem to be aware that if they fall into the same immigration traps as the Tories, they will be voted out next time round. None of this would be happening now if we’d never voted to leave.

The Conservatives might still be in government but still overseeing record levels of immigration and blaming it on the bogeyman.

What we have now, even with a Labour government, is a beautiful thing.

It is a beauty called self-determination and accountable government. In Westminster, there is a government that was elected by the people of this country, and it cannot get away any longer with passing blame to external forces. That is what Brexit was about. We haven’t solved the immigration question yet, today Keir Starmer unveiled his ‘plan’ to do it, one that is far from certain to work and will do nothing to stop record numbers of illegal entries by small boat.

The main thing that Brexit gave to us was the direct accountability of government. The only thing we have to do now, is to ensure the Conservatives renew, reform, and refocus in order to offer the electorate a government worthy of representing them.