The Guardian: David Cameron's immigration promises were desperate and self-defeating

By Richard Seymour, published in The Guardian (a British daily newspaper) on 6 September 2011

Torn between his business allies' enthusiasm for immigration and the Tory bedrock, Cameron has been left looking foolish



David Cameron delivering a speech on immigration in Woking in April. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA



David Cameron's pledge to cap non-EU immigration was followed this year by a promise to Tory activists to reduce net migration to the UK to tens of thousands. This now looks as foolish as it does desperate. Some of the greatest flows of immigration in recent years have come from the EU, especially the A8 countries, to which no cap could be applied. And the government has no control over outward migration. Unsurprisingly, then, a combination of continued migration from Poland and other EU countries, and a sharp decline in Britons moving overseas, has led to a 21% increase in net migration last year.

The pressing question is whether this is anything to be worried about. For the Telegraph, it is. Its recent editorial acknowledged the factors driving the net increase, and gave Cameron a partial pardon. But still, it thundered: "The annual addition to the country's foreign-born population is about 250,000 – by far the largest influx of overseas citizens in our history." In fact, net migration to the UK adds far less to the population than it does in other OECD countries.

But the assumption that an increase in the "foreign-born population" is a problem in itself depends on a couple of associated claims. The first is typically that migrants are a burden on public resources, while the second is that they fail to "integrate" to core "British values". Both come with a freight of resentful chauvinism. In reality, migration to the UK fuelled economic growth over the past decade. Without it, tax receipts would have been depressed, with fewer resources for all. As the Financial Times reported last year, immigration subsidises the public purse. In an era of reduced tax revenues, which the government claims justifies spending cuts, it is absurd to attack one of the major sources of income. As for the chimera of "British values", it is only fair to say that even the descendants of yeomen sometimes have difficulty internalising the vindictive, property-obsessed, and smugly insular weltanschauung that passes for Britishness in the reactionary press.

Cameron, being no fool, is aware of Britain's dependency on immigration, and of his inability to do much about it. His attempt to wax "tough" on immigration also poses a difficulty for the coalition he leads. The promise to reduce net migration to "tens of thousands" aroused the ire of Vince Cable, who deemed it a Tory policy not fit for the coalition. And the further Cameron travels down this route, the more he risks alienating centrist voters whose support he spent five years courting with an appeal to social liberalism. Much of his time in opposition was spent attacking New Labour over its "irresponsible" language on immigration, and promising a more humane approach to refugees. This was an essential aspect of decontaminating the Tory brand of its "nasty" associations. Above all, business needs immigration, especially EU migration. There are some areas where Tory EU "scepticism" can suit business. Tory attempts to water down an EU directive giving temporary workers the same rights as full-time workers follow business pressure over the likely effect on profitability. Yet the EU represents an irreversible trend in the global economy toward regionalisation, and offers a vast "free market" in goods and labour that business needs.

So why did Cameron make a futile promise that he knew would cost him politically? Partly, he is torn between his business allies, who favour a relaxed approach to immigration, and the lower-middle-class Tory bedrock, who would ideally like to inhabit the sort of all-white chronotope of modern Britain purveyed by Midsomer Murders. Cameron has attempted to manage this by triangulating. Thus, his cap on non-EU migration partially made up for his reneging on the "cast iron" guarantee to hold a referendum on the EU treaty. Similarly, he has made concessions to alarmism about immigration threatening "our way of life". Yet, under pressure from big business, he has relented, even promising last year to relax the cap on non-EU migration. Thus, while tending to give business what it wants, Cameron engages in strategic rhetorical tilts to one or other element in an unstable Tory coalition, in an attempt to prevent the whole from collapsing into fragments as it did over Europe in the 1990s.

Since being almost-elected, the emphasis in Cameron's presentation has fallen increasingly on immigrant-baiting rhetoric, from the attack on "state multiculturalism" to the "way of life" speech. Notably, his self-defeating promise to reduce net migration to a trickle followed a year of coalition. This reflects the electoral weakening of the Liberal component of the coalition, and the polarisation of British politics under austerity. The centre-ground is contracting, and Cameron knows he must fortify his rightist credentials if he is to avoid being this decade's John Major. This is why he makes promises he shouldn't make, and can't keep, to people who will never be content with him anyway.