By HARRY COLE, Political Editor
Last week, the Home Secretary dedicated time to composing a powerful introduction to an 80-page plan designed to tighten immigration, intended to make a significant impact.
She is focusing on those exploiting the legal migration system in the university and care sectors, and is putting an end to feeble excuses—like “my kids don’t like foreign chicken nuggets”—which criminals and illegal immigrants have used to avoid deportation, aided by the unreasonable European Convention on Human Rights.
All good stuff, if Labour can get it through the legion of wokies and hand-wringers on their own backbenches.
However, Yvette Cooper views another obstacle to immigration reform: Chancellor Rachel Reeves and two decades of unified thinking within the Treasury.
She certainly had something to get off her chest on the eve of publication, taking aim directly at the fairy tale belief that more foreigners is a magic pill for Britain’s economic woes;
“If that approach was right we would have seen, when we saw that soaring level of net migration, that soaring level of overseas recruitment, well surely we would have seen soaring growth alongside it and we didn’t.”
She told the BBC: “Actually what we saw was the economy flatlined because by failing to invest in UK workers that also undermines productivity, it undermines the ability to get people back into the work who are currently not working, so alongside those record highs of overseas recruitment, we also have this big increase in people just not working here in the UK. Those things are linked.”
By jove, I think she gets it.
Finally someone in this Government is willing to shoot some sacred cows of the progressive mind.
No one ever leaves the Home Office more left-wing than they entered, so like Tory Home Office minister Robert Jenrick before her; it appears Cooper has been on a bit of a journey in the last ten months.
Long may it continue, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and there are plenty of battles for the Home Secretary ahead.
I hear there has already been significant kickback from the Treasury at today’s Immigration White Paper that will now go through months of consultation and yabber before being legislated over.
A good opening salvo from Cooper, but one already attempted to be strangled at birth by the Treasury still addicted to the sugar rush of cheap imported workers as they battle to breathe life into already anaemic growth forecasts for the coming years.
And the Treasury has other plans for growth too, namely unpicking Brexit in return for better access to European markets.
Yesterday the Home Sec was talking in terms of tens of thousands for what these new plans could do to reduce legal migration in the coming year or so… just as the Government finally admitted – after months of lying – that they will offer up similar numbers to the European Union.
In a bid to unblock the PM and Chancellor’s quest for a Brexit reset and a new defence and security deal with the bloc, free movement is back on the table.
Ever since the EU’s request for a Youth Mobility Scheme for the under 40s were revealed last August the Government had insisted they had “no plans” to engage with such a proposal.
A return of free movement for the under-40s is the basic gist, allowing younger Europeans to once again pour into the UK to study and work.
Again and again ministers and spinners insisted on the record there were “no plans” for such a scheme, yet all the while they were secretly and misleadingly building negotiations with Brussels around accepting it.
Now they tell us “a smart, controlled youth mobility scheme would of course have benefits for our young people”.
The plan all along.
Leaving aside the rampant dishonesty, what is this going to do for legal migration figures?
What is the point in taking away with one hand, only to dish out tens of thousands more visas with the other?
No10 insiders insist that such a scheme will be tightly capped, but we all know the British state is pretty useless at keeping a track of this stuff.
Remember when we were told there were only three million EU citizens in the UK during Brexit, only for closer to SIX MILLION to apply to stay after the Leave vote.
The bungling Office of National Statistics has no idea how many foreigners are really here, dramatically scaling up their predictions last year after finding an extra 166,000 migrants down the back of the sofa.
Or what of the news that the bill for asylum hotels was actually not the £4.5 billion projected, but was some £10 billion more?
The British state is crap at counting this stuff, so be very wary of promises of strict oversight, control or watchful eyes and caps.
Yvette Cooper may be on the right path, but her biggest fights are still to come.
If we are simply going to cave to Brussels and let tens of thousands of Europeans back into the country, this must come at the price of even tighter restrictions on visas elsewhere.
Anything less than that renders today’s migration “clampdown” purely performative.
Someone better tell the Treasury though…
