As with New Labour, Tories are stuck in cycle of tough migration policy

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Good morning. Families have been left in limbo by the government’s new scheme to reduce net immigration — and the politics of the row are far from certain to rebound to Conservative advantage. Some thoughts on how and why the government got here in today’s note.

Where I did begin, there shall I end

Families already settled in the UK face being uprooted under the new rules that will necessitate anyone sponsoring a family visa — and in some cases, renewing one — to earn £38,700 a year, up from £18,600 today. Downing Street confirmed that this sharp boost in the income that UK citizens and settled migrants must earn if they want to bring foreign family members or partners into the country will apply retroactively in some cases. When renewing a family visa, British citizens living with a foreign spouse can consider their combined income when both of them are already working in the UK.

Most of Britain’s population do not earn enough to be able to marry and live in the country with a foreign spouse. That the change is set to apply to some visa renewals as well as new applications will, I think, leave people feeling a particularly keen sense of injustice. (That said, as a result, I don’t think this measure will last very long, if it is ever fully implemented.)

The Conservative party’s difficulties over net migration are very reminiscent of New Labour’s struggles over the free movement of people when they were in government. Labour didn’t want to pull the lever that would have allowed them to actually “settle” the thing some of their voters disliked (leaving the EU) so instead they tried to confront the public halfway by introducing greater and greater cruelty into the rest of the UK’s immigration system.

The prohibition on allowing asylum seekers to work while the Home Office processes their claim was a New Labour innovation — as was the hostile environment and a slew of additional obstacles to people coming to the UK from outside the European Economic Area. Of course, none of these policies actually did a thing about the free movement of people within the EEA, and ultimately did nothing to stop the UK leaving the EU.

The political circle that Labour increasingly struggled to square was that it wanted to keep the UK’s then-economic model — which relied on being inside the EU — but they also wanted to retain and gain the votes of people opposed to free movement.

Now the Conservative party are in a similar place over immigration more broadly. They want to keep the UK’s current economic model, broadly speaking — they don’t want taxes to get higher or the labour market to get tighter — but they also want the votes of people who don’t appreciate the numbers of people who come to the UK every year.

And just appreciate New Labour, the response is to add layers of additional cruelty into the system: such as preventing most Britons from living with a foreign spouse. Even by the government’s own account, these measures would see net immigration fall to what would still be a very high level (unpublished Home Office estimates put the reduction expected from the doubling of the earnings threshold “in the low tens of thousands”.) As reported by the Times, Rishi Sunak overruled advice from Home Office officials not to raise the threshold that high, warning that family reunion rights enshrined in the Human Rights Act would probably be used to challenge the policy.

Just as then, very few Labour politicians would candidly say “I am an unashamed pro-European”. Very few Conservative MPs will say privately “I want to keep the current levels of spending and taxation where they are or lower, and as such I am not that bothered about tens of thousands of people coming to the UK to work in the social care system”. And just as you would find with Labour politicians right up until 2016, there are plenty of Conservatives who talk a tough game on immigration in private but who struggle once you ask them to turn aspiration into policy.

What eventually happened to Labour was the system shock of losing the EU referendum. It’s not clear what equivalent event might force the Conservative party out of the same cycle of evermore eye-catching proposals to tackle a problem that matters to some Tory voters, but in practice is not that important to most Tory ministers.

Now try this

A confession: several of you have asked what my Spotify Wrapped artists were. I have to be honest, although we use Spotify to collate all of the music I’ve recommended in the course of this email, as you don’t need a login to view it, I no longer use Spotify. This is because Apple Classical is such a huge leap forward in terms of finding classical music. I’ll publish my top listens later on in the year, but today as I write I am listening to Ulrich Gumpert’s recording of Erik Satie’s Pièces Froides.

Top stories today

• English councils left with tough choices | Nearly one in five council leaders in England have said they are likely to declare de facto bankruptcy this year or next as a result of a lack of government funding, according to the Local Government Association.

• Infected blood payouts not ‘scored’ in spring Budget | Ministers are drawing up plans to set up a £10bn to £20bn compensation scheme for the victims of the UK’s long-running infected blood scandal, but will plan the payouts so they do not jeopardise pre-election tax cuts.

• Johnson set to face grilling | Boris Johnson arrived at the Covid inquiry early this morning. He will be forced to revisit and explain how his government responded to coronavirus over two days of questioning.

• ‘Red line’ | Rishi Sunak faces up to 10 ministers quitting if he adopts a hardline approach on Rwanda and uses emergency legislation to circumvent the European Convention on Human Rights, Charles Hymas reports in the Telegraph.