Author-Boris Johnson
It would be churlish to deny Boris Johnson some credit for abandoning the government’s “tens of thousands” immigration limit.
For a decade, since it was cynically engineered for the Conservatives’ 2010 general election campaign, it has become increasingly discredited.
The target has never been met, nor did it ever seem likely to be.
Ministers stealthily changed it from a limit to a target and then an aspiration. “Vain hope” would have been a more accurate label. Even if all EU “free movement” was taken out of the statistics, the net migration figure always ran far higher than the government’s target.
Only Ms May’s obduracy kept it in place. She even, as home secretary, resisted pressure from David Cameron and George Osborne, as chancellor, to soften it and take foreign students out of the numbers. She clung to the policy right to the bitter end.
Now the prime minister, on his first full day in office, has ditched it. Where once the government fostered a “hostile environment” towards illegal immigrants, now Mr Johnson wants to regularise their situation and grant a half million or so an amnesty. He didn’t tell the Tory grassroots he had that in mind during the hustings.
The Independent has campaigned to “Drop the Target” because it was immoral, impractical and unnecessary. It was immoral because it tended to discourage genuine claims for asylum. It was impractical because it could never be met. It was unnecessary because the problems of migration that supposedly gave rise to it were mostly illusory. The migrants arriving in the UK were on the whole young, eager to work and ready to pay their taxes. Many ended up doing the jobs other people wouldn’t do (as has always been true), and staffing hard-pressed public services rather than exploiting them.
So Mr Johnson has torn up the current approach in the government’s white paper and proposed a fresh policy based on an Australian-style points system. Importantly, Mr Johnson has refused to set any figures for his policy – he is not so foolish as to invite failure for his first concrete policy announcement.
An points system, as is sometimes argued, could mean an even higher level of migration than at present: it all depends on how many points are awarded for what skill. It is also a system that fails to recognise the reality of much migration, which is that it satisfies a demand for unskilled labour in lower-paid occupations, such as picking fruit; working in hotels, bars and restaurants; taxi driving; or in cleaning and ancillary services. The UK economy needs rather more of these than it does professional footballers or investment bankers.
Mr Johnson’s points system is also not an adequate substitute for the simple freedom of movement for labour endowed by full EU membership. This, after all, also allowed British nationals to seek work in Europe. Under Brexit that will now be lost.
Even so, Mr Johnson is marking out a clear dividing line between his politics and those of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. The prime minister has undoubtedly caused offence with some of his xenophobic articles and remarks, but it is also fair to judge that as Mayor of London he displayed a relatively liberal attitude on race and migration.
It is fanciful to think that this latest move suggests the emergence of a “new Boris”, but it is a welcome surprise all the same.
