Five former UK government ministers have explained to the state broadcaster why despite over a decade of promises immigration has only ever gone up, with the answer boiling down to tell the public one thing, do another.
The UK Conservative Party tells voters that it will cut immigration — sometimes quite considerably — because that is what voters want to hear. Meanwhile, it sticks to the real plan of growing the number of new arrivals to satisfy the Treasury, whose only goal is to see GDP growth, even if that means flooding the country with new people.
This is the story told to a top BBC journalist, they claim, by five former Home Secretaries — the UK title for the interior minister with responsibility for border control — who spoke to the broadcaster anonymously to explain why it is immigration only ever rises while the government publicly promises the opposite.
While their identities are cloaked and there is a not inconsiderable pool of 15 living former Home Secretaries going back to Douglas Hurd in 1989 they could have been drawn from there are some clues. The language of some quotes given to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg implies a sense of possession over recent policies, suggesting they will have been Conservative ministers publicly professing border control while privately practising liberalisation.
The BBC report will make galling reading for those UK Conservative voters who have put their faith in the ballot box over the past 13 years, if only because they were a less-worse option than the alternative. One of those cited makes an outright admission of lies told while in public office, quoted by the BBC as remarking “[we] said we’ll get the numbers down…but the country needs immigrants… I never believed in [promises to cut immigration levels,] I never thought that it was sensible.”
Another unnamed holder of one of the nation’s most senior — and theoretically powerful — political offices underlines this claim, reportedly having said: “We can’t be honest… want to give the impression that you can do something about it, but it is very, very difficult”.
These quotes seem to underline a key truth within the Conservative government, that even if a Home Secretary does genuinely want to cut immigration — as present incumbent Suella Braverman claims — this is a task they find impossible because their own considerable seniority is always trumped by an even higher authority, the treasury.
Ultimately, as one of those anonymous former Home Secretaries is claimed to have said, immigration to the United Kingdom is: “sky high because of deliberate Tory policy”. This has been achieved because, as another says: “We have put in place the most liberal regime ever”.
Illustrating the strongly held groupthink by those at the top of British politics, attempts to control immigration by deporting illegals are “ridiculous” and “insane”, it was said. Talking about taking on illegal boat migrants, as the government is presently focussed on, is nothing more than a “campaigning tool” that probably “won’t work” anyway. In any case, illegals are only a fraction of the number of migrants coming legally in all-time-record-breaking numbers now in that “most liberal regime ever”
While the uniformity and bluntly anti-democratic nature of these views presented in the BBC article may be shocking, it is not new. Expressing the same view, but from the Treasury-side, forcing these decisions was former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne who said the quiet part out loud in 2017.
Osborne, who had left government by this point after he and his boss and former Prime Minister David Cameron stormed off at having lost the 2016 Brexit referendum, said of the Conservative government’s long-held promise to drop immigration from the hundreds of thousands a year to the tens of thousands: “N]one of [the Cabinet’s] senior members supports the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back [of it]”.