Our arrogant establishment has given up on solving immigration

Revised figures for net migration to the UK suggest that in 2022, 745,000 people arrived here legally. That’s an increase of 139,000 since the last estimate provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in May.

Let’s put that figure in context: the population of my own home city of Glasgow is 635,000. The population of Manchester is 535,000. We have not (yet) reached the point where a figure equivalent to the population of Birmingham (863,000) is arriving here every year. But give us time.

We are a long way indeed from the early 2010s when the Conservatives were promising to reduce net migration to below 100,000 annually.

It would make no sense to claim that this historic increase in our population is in any way sustainable. How could that be the case, given the housing shortage (and our politicians’ refusal to take steps to address it), the constant pressure on the health service, on local schools and on other local services? We must assume that our political parties’ point-blank refusal to acknowledge concern about unprecedented levels of immigration is based on complacency; after all, no explicitly anti-immigration party has ever caused much trouble for our political duopoly, so why should that occur in the future?

Meanwhile, in entirely unrelated news, the party of Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Right-wing populist, has won most seats in the Dutch elections and looks set to govern. That could never happen here, of course, this being Britain and British voters being so much less excitable than our European neighbours.

In fact, that assumption is probably correct: it is very unlikely to happen here, not least because of the electoral system used to elect MPs, the same system so denigrated by exactly the same people who embrace “open door” immigration and who would most deplore the increase in far-Right representation that proportional electoral systems tend to facilitate. Remember the Olympic levels of pearl-clutching that followed the election in 2009 of two British National Party candidates to the European Parliament, an election run on a proportional basis?

But just because voters will be hard pressed to express their dismay at high levels of immigration through the ballot box does not absolve our political leaders from doing something about it. Increasing disillusionment with democracy is something we might agree should be tackled by everyone.

One tactic often used by those who are wealthy and privileged enough not to care too much about the mammoth scale of new arrivals is that immigration is great for economic growth. Indeed, that was one of the core arguments used against a Leave vote in the 2016 EU referendum. The abolition of EU freedom of movement, in fact, failed to halt a seemingly relentless rise in new arrivals from across the world. So, are we all enjoying the fruits of that promised economic growth that has resulted from historic levels of immigration? What will you do with all that extra tax revenue, Chancellor?

In the absence of that link between immigration and growth – if national self-interest is no longer a plausible excuse for welcoming the equivalent of the population of Manchester (or Glasgow) to our shores every 12 months – then what arguments are left to justify it?

Naturally, those who raise concerns about record levels of immigration are dismissed and smeared as racists; that is simply part of the political process these days and that’s unlikely to change (although the currency of the word “racist” itself is constantly devalued through overuse and it no longer has the power to silence that it once had).

But name-calling is boring as well as pointless. Only if immigration becomes a salient issue – that is, if significant numbers of voters choose to place it at the top of their personal list of political priorities, to make it something that will decide or change their voting intention – will our leaders focus their minds on addressing the issue.

In government the easiest thing to do is to do nothing; the levels of inertia and number of hurdles in the way of developing policies to reduce immigration, the sheer self-interest of various institutions, including educational ones, will always deter even the most radical and imaginative minister from moving too quickly or forcefully.

The revised ONS figures represent a major failure of this Government. Will this be pointed out by Labour? Will Keir Starmer seek to exploit it, as he would any other failure in health, the economy or education? To do so would place the onus on him and his party to come up, not just with new policies, but to state unequivocally that this level of immigration is unwelcome and bad for the nation.

Let’s not hold our breath.

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