Stop the Boats: A Policy as Thoughtless as it is Heartless

The last time the Conservatives sought to fight an election with Immigration as their number one issue was 2005; for the less historically informed, that didn’t end particularly well. Michael Howard ran with such slogans as ‘It is not racist to impose limits on immigration: Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ The British electorate were clearly not, and the Tories won only 198 seats to the Labour Party’s 355. Rishi Sunak’s pet phrase ‘Stop the Boats’ may benefit from brevity and certainty, but the overall strategy seems strangely repetitive. We might, quite reasonably, ask the following question: have we not learnt the lesson of 2005?

In fact, we have done far worse than failed to learn from history, we have doubled down instead. For a start, CCHQ has disregarded Maurice Saatchi’s musings that ‘I DID NOT dispel the illusion of research, which said that, as immigration was the number one issue in deciding how people vote, it should be the number one topic.’ What is worse, however, is the context in which this strategy is now being employed. Back in 2005 we had been in opposition for seven years and a year before ten new countries had been allowed to enter the EU, including eight from the remnants of Yugoslavia and the Ex-Soviet Block. Perhaps there was some legitimate scope to blame Labour back then; there isn’t now. We have been in power for thirteen years and have won four elections promising to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. When we entered government, it was at 256,000 people a year, under the Conservatives it has doubled to 606,000.

The purpose of this article is not to discuss the merits of immigration or indeed the current British policy. Clearly migration is responsible for filling vacancies in the job market, particularly in the NHS, and for bringing new talent and skills to the United Kingdom, but it also puts immense strain on our most deprived communities and public services. To present analysis of such a complex and multilayered issue is beyond the scope of this article and a topic which befits far more nuance than I can give it here.

Instead, the point is that the focus on ‘stopping the boats’ distracts from wider public debate about future the future of our immigration policy. Illegal immigration makes up less than 5% of the total number of immigrants and most of the ostensible negative consequences of immigration are a result of perfectly legal migration. Moreover, the complete lack of compassion for individuals vulnerable to the predatory practises to people smugglers seems entirely deplorable.

Recent efforts by Robert Jenrick to paint over murals of Mickey Mouse and Baloo in an immigration reception centre are as heartless as they are ineffective. Are families fleeing from the Taliban in Afghanistan really going to be put off from coming because they worry about the decor? More importantly, many of the illegal immigrants are exactly the sort of people to whom we have at a minimum a Samaritan obligation. 40% of illegal migrants hail from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan, all five of which countries have over an 80% acceptance rate in asylum applications. In the case of Afghanistan and Syria, these refugees are largely a result of (largely justifiable) Western intervention, which imposes a moral obligation upon us to deal with the consequences of it. Equally, Sudan and Eritrea are locked in bloody civil wars characterised by large scale massacres, sexual slavery, and summary executions. I’m sure I don’t need to lecture the reader on the woes in Iran. After Jenrick’s intervention, what are we going to do next – appoint the Child Catcher as Home Secretary?

Even if, dear reader, you are unmoved by my moralising arguments or my Thucydidean truisms about the lessons of history above, there is a more expedient and cynical reason which might persuade you. This policy isn’t even achieving CCHQ’s primary objective: public support. For well over twelve months, we have brought this issue to the fore of public outrage, yet the opinion polls remain as stagnant as ever. We remain on 26% support and are failing to break through with traditional Tory voters: the Reform party is polling at 6% and the Lib Dems at 10%. Amongst more socially liberal traditional conservative voters, particularly in comparatively affluent areas that have seen minimal negative impacts from illegal migration, this policy is more likely to be a seat loser than a vote winner.

This is a mixture both of the toxic effect this policy has on the doorstep even amongst solid blue voters, a phenomenon I have seen myself while campaigning, but also, more significantly, this isn’t the issue hurting people at the moment. At a time of rampant inflation, on the verge of a recession and with the constant whiff of industrial unrest ever-present, people simply have bigger concerns which are not being adequately dealt with.

Instead of dealing with more pressing issues such as economic growth, and the housing crisis (both of which ranked higher on a recent YouGov poll of the most important issues facing the country), CCHQ seems to be fixated on driving media attention towards this largely peripheral issue. Quite simply put, we are perpetually flogging the same dead horse under the deluded assumption that at any moment, like Lazarus, it will rise from the dead and then immediately go on to win us the Grand National. Not since Don Quixote charged at windmills has a strategy been more misguided.

This article, however, is not meant as a criticism of the government as a whole; it has achieved and continues to deliver many good policies. We might take the recent legislation aimed at clearing up our waterways, alongside the faster than expected decrease in inflation as but a couple of examples in the panoply of good measures introduced over the last few years. Instead, however, of emphasising our tangible successes, we are distracting public attention away from them to a complex and controversial issue. The unfortunate and perhaps preventable cost of this will be borne by the hardworking MPs who lose their seats; the Tory councillors working hard to improve their local communities; and, most importantly, the British Public who will be exposed to five years of Labour government.

Peter Walker (The President, Merton College) is a Classicist going into his fourth year.

Image Credit: Holiday Gems on Flickr, License