An immigration apology

On behalf of The Conservative & Unionist Party

Dear British public

I write with a heavy heart and a deep sense of regret. Today, the ONS revised net migration figures for 2022-3 upwards to 906,000 and 728,000 for 2023-4.

These figures are a punctuation mark on a sentence that was already written. For the last 14 years we (The Conservative Party) have consistently promised, and consistently failed, to reduce migration.

When running for office in 2010, we promised to reduce migration to ‘the tens of thousands’, and ran numerous times on a repetition of that number. Had we achieved that pledge within two years and stuck to it, then migration in our remaining 12 years in power would have been 1.3M at most. But instead, it has reached 4.5M. We promised to bring numbers down; they quadrupled.

This is a day for Conservatives to hang our heads in shame.

We were entrusted by the public with the sacred honour of government, and with it the duty to act on the concerns of our citizens. And we failed you.

Once in government, we should have made reducing immigration a central pillar of our government. Instead, it became a tool to fix other problems; a short-term stopgap to help us avoid politically costly decisions on the long-term problems that were holding the economy back. We preferred to ‘support’ our economy by suppressing wages, rather than delivering growth.

I have previously written about the need to restructure our economy to reduce our need on this Human Quantitative Easing at great length, but I will repeat here;

The cycle is brutal, but simple; low-wage en-masse immigration acts as a break on productivity because, whilst migrants themselves may be as productive as UK-born workers, the constant influx of cheap human capital disincentives investment by substituting for capital and energy inputs. This then allows both businesses and governments to ignore underlying capital and energy problems deriving elsewhere - such as the planning system, tax regime and monetary policy. The resulting weak productivity results in flatlining wages, which cannot sustain the increasing demands on the welfare state. The government, faced with the choice between difficult and costly long-term fixes to improve productivity or a short-term fix to suppress increases in public spending & boost GDP figures, chooses the latter. GDP is artificially boosted by an increase in population, whilst costs of delivering public services are suppressed by the insourcing of workforces from increasingly low-wage economies.

But importing cheap foreign labour is like drinking saltwater; it only makes the thirst worse. We ignored the rising economic and social costs of immigration - including the reduced proportion of people arriving to work - because reducing it was an exercise in will, and our will was weak. Our horizon was too short-term, our commitment was insufficient, our thinking was too disjointed and the alternatives deemed too costly.

Unwilling to resist but loath to comply, we took to commentary pages, radio slots and TV interviews to complain about immigration, rather than instituting policies that would have reduced migration to the levels we promised. Instead of facing the realities of governing, we mastered learned helplessness; we throw up our hands. The burden of effort falls away.

There were, certainly, challenges and complexities that would have seen migration rise in this period – for instance, the Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes. But these should have been swells in a low tide, not the crests of great waves. And certainly, there were legal and administrative obstacles we faced. But we did not tackle these. And there were figures and policies that were serious about reducing immigration. But these did not win out. None of these absolves us of the responsibility we bear for this failure.

Immigration became – and will remain - a totemic issue. It is representative of our wider failure, of the disappointment many felt and the erosion of their trust in us. I believe that restoring that trust must begin with an apology over our failures, not in attacking our opposition for theirs or trying to ignore our own. Nothing inflames people as much as hypocrisy

Going forward, we must place reduction of immigration at the centre of our offering to the public. But winning back trust will require policies not just to prevent further failure, but to mitigate our past failure too.

Winning back that trust is going to be a long road. But the longest journey starts with the smallest step, and so we must begin with an apology – and a thank you.

Thank you for holding us accountable to the promises we made. When a government no longer works for its people, it is their duty to remove it. This is no small service - to the nation or to us. May our failure, and the result of our failure, remain ever before our eyes.

Yours,
Tom