Immigration: no magic wands

I’ve not been making very many friends on X lately. It seems I’ve made it my job to tell people things they don’t want to hear. The basic thrust of my argument is that hardline rhetoric has to be underpinned by workable, credible plans and policies. More and more people are talking about mass deportations and even the Tories are now saying all illegal immigrants must be deported, but nobody is giving any real thought as to how that is to be achieved. And that’s a problem.

Every Prime Minister since Thatcher has talked tough on illegal immigration, and the tougher their rhetoric, the greater the let down. There's a reason for this. None of it gets fixed at the wave of a magic wand. They've each had to learn this the hard way, and through experience they now know they are hamstrung by the Refugee Convention, the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. Sunak toyed with disapplying some of it, but ultimately bottled it. Starmer thinks he can do the job within these artificial constraints, but the blob will hand him his arse on a plate if at any point he does get serious.

If there is one thing Starmer and Badenoch should have learned from the Rwanda debacle, it is that legislative half-measures are not going to work. Moreover, after thirty years of broken promises, nobody is going to believe any party or prime minister's rhetoric unless they are willing to put the ECHR etc in the bin where it belongs.

Still, though, that's not the magic wand people believe it is. Official estimates reckon there are 1.2m illegals in Britain, but the Home Office is wholly dysfunctional and it's not unreasonable to believe the real number is likely double that. Removing them when they do not want to be found or removed is no small task. It's going to require a raft of legislative tweaks on everything from housing to taxation, and defunding the blob. If you're imagining a fleet of deportation vans speeding out to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries, then you're just not serious.

This is why any party or movement needs to have a comprehensive plan of attack. It will fail otherwise. This, I believe, is why Reform (in particular) would falter in its first year.

The first problem they have is with leaving the ECHR and repealing the HRA. Quitting the ECHR has consequences of its own. None of them are insurmountable, but they are not trivial. Handled incorrectly could collapse the EU-UK TCA. It's something that could be mitigated, but you'd have to be prepared for it.

The more tricky one is the HRA, in that the repeal of the HRA and ECHR is essentially removing the entire basis of the post-thatcher British constitution. the likes of Ben Habib et al think it's just a matter of rolling back legislation to 1997 and see how it pans out. If you're going to do it, you need to have a replacement in mind, or at least be able to spell out how individuals can bring rights issues to court.

This alone is enough to tie up parliament for an entire term. In legislative terms, it's almost as technically significant as Brexit. You then have all the second order practicalities to consider, such as reforming laws around HMOs, care homes and the gig economy. Not forgetting the process of securing return agreements and the sometimes hostile diplomacy it's going to take for other countries to take their garbage back.

When you start putting it all together, there's quite a large to-to list before you even see the slightest effect on immigration. You also need interim measures in recognition of the fact that some sectors are reliant on foreign labour and that won't be fixed until you have skills and training schemes up and running (which you have to legislate for).

As I understand it, absolutely nobody is doing this prep work. There was a time when an incoming government could afford to leave a few policy questions open in that there used to be a vibrant think tank scene around Westminster which had policies sitting on the shelf waiting to be dusted off, but many of them are now degraded and mainly serve as jobs for political hacks. I think the CPS is possibly the last remaining think tank of value on the right.

So having made big promises, believing the job is far simpler than it actually is, any Reform government is going to be in over its head very soon. Reform has pledge to create a minister for deportations, which I think is probably the wrong approach, but if it stands any chance of working at all, then you are going to need a root and branch clear out of the Home Office. That's a major restructure and it's going to take two years at least to recruit the kind of people you need. This would be challenging even for ruthlessly competent people. Which Reform are not. As such, setting targets and making bold claims is a fool's errand.

Any party called Reform, really should have a reform plan, and something a little more persuasive that its "contract with the people". It will find, very soon, that it has bitten off more than it can chew.

Many people have said to me that's it's just a matter of political will. That has been much of the problem for the last thirty years. Every PM has expressed their desire to get a grip on it, but has never been quite willing to go up against the media and opposition form within their own parties. They've tried to do the job with one hand tied around their back and failed time after time. But even with the political will, reality can be quite uncooperative - especially if you haven't explored, even on a surface level, what the complexities are likely to be.

I can quite understand why an angry and disaffected voter base would be less interested in the details of how it is done, just so long as it is done, but if a party wants to be more than a protest movement, they themselves have to take an interest in the details. This is the problem with protest parties though. They're very good at complaining, but they're still delegating the mechanics of fixing things to others. You could give them power, but wouldn't know what to do with it.

The danger here, is that a Reform government would make such an odious mess in their first term that they wouldn't get another chance to finish the job. We would very rapidly see the establishment parties taking back control, just as they did after Brexit. In all probability, and Farage administration would crash out in the same manner as Liz Truss, having collapsed market confidence. The bottom line here, is that unless you can supply policy that can deliver on your rhetoric, you will over-promise and under-deliver. It's the oldest lesson in politics. Don't write cheques that you can't cash.

Everybody on the right says that poor old Liz Truss was stitched up, and they're probably not wrong about that, but her ultimate downfall was the failure to anticipate the opposition she would face, and the importance of establishing her own personal credibility. That latter score was always improbable in that she was and is a ridiculous figure. It is likely then that Farage's party would face the same trial by fire and fail on the same basis. Everybody recognises Farage's abilities as a showman and an entertainer, but nobody seriously thinks Reform is the basis of a viable government. The ambush is set, and Reform will walk right into it - and as with Brexit, they will blame everyone but themselves.