Short of adding a grateful note of thanks to Nigel Farage to its White Paper on migration next week, it’s hard to think how much more the Government could do to acknowledge the effect of Reform on its policy proposals. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has announced measures to reduce abuses of the asylum system as part of the plans. So applicants from countries whose citizens have a record of overstaying their visas, notably Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, may find their visa applications refused if they conform to a pattern of those who claim asylum after being admitted to the UK on a work or study visa – a low engagement with their university course could be one indicator.
Yvette isn’t talking enormous figures here, but of the 40,000 asylum claims lodged last year by people who had held a UK visa, 16,000 were originally foreign students, 11,500 had a work visa, 9,500 had a visitor visa and the remaining 7 per cent had other forms of leave. And 40,000 is even more than the number of people coming on small boats, which everyone gets so worked up about. And that emphasis on people overstaying their visas and on abuses of the asylum system is, I surmise, the result of one thing: Reform’s inroads into Labour’s home territory which we saw last week. This isn’t a genius insight but a statement of the obvious. Any Labour bigwig with sense, and that means Wes Streeting, is admitting that the party has a Reform problem.
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If you’re wondering about the pressures on housing and public services, these are the figures you should be worrying about
But the new initiative, however worthy, looks as if it’s more about signalling intent to potential Reformers, than a real bid seriously to reduce numbers. If you consider that official net migration last year was 728,000, that’s not going to make much of a dent in the overall total. And let’s not forget, the year before, an astonishing, eyewatering 906,000 people came here, over and above Brits leaving. That’s nearly a million people in a year.
What is net migration?
Net migration is the difference between the number of people arriving and leaving the country.
A total of 1.2 million people are estimated to have arrived in the UK in the year to June 2024, while 479,000 are likely to have left.
Even the reduced figure last year is nearly three quarters of a million, almost three times the number pre-Brexit. If you’re wondering about the pressures on housing and public services, these are the figures you should be worrying about, attributable to legal migration, mostly from outside Europe. Yet the number of 16-24 year-olds here neither in work nor education is approaching a million.
The new initiative looks as if it’s more about signalling intent to potential Reformers, than a real bid seriously to reduce numbers
I don’t think, then, there’s much mystery about why the Government is getting tough on asylum seekers. It’s easier to identify abuses of the system than the fact that so much labour is being imported into the country. But fair play to Yvette Cooper; she is sending out the right signals. And that’s more than you can say for her colleague, Lucy Powell, Leader of the Commons, who dismissed Tim Montgomerie raising the issue of the Pakistani rape gangs who preyed on young working class girls on Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 thus: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we?...Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we, yeah?” Later, she clarified her position, saying that she regarded child abuse “with the utmost seriousness”. Except these patronising comments suggest she doesn’t, when it’s this particular form of abuse. If the Government did take it seriously, it would initiate an inquiry into the phenomenon, which wasn’t confined to Rochdale, but took place over the whole country.
If Labour wants to steal more of Reform’s clothes, that would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage can congratulate himself that even before the next general election, he’s managing to get his party’s priorities on the Government’s agenda. That’s quite the feat.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
