When James Cleverly, the home secretary, claims that the government’s latest proposals will cut
immigration by 300,000, that huge number won’t even take the annual inflow back to where it was when the Conservatives first entered government.
This is why Sunak keeps focusing on Rwanda, and the broader question of asylum, despite the enormous difficulty the government is having getting the scheme off the ground: to try to use it as a shorthand for being “tough on immigration”, without having to admit that since 2019 the
Conservatives have been running perhaps one of the most laissez-faire immigration policies in modern British history.
This problem predates Sunak. But the fact is that that neither he nor his predecessors wanted to confront the hard choices that reducing the UK’s reliance on imported labour would entail. They have instead repeatedly talked tough, and installed a rightwinger at the Home Office with the impossible task of sorting the issue out, while allowing other departments such as education, business, and the Treasury to keep pushing policies that drive the numbers ever higher …
Focusing on the troubled Rwanda scheme is the closest Sunak has got to answering an impossible question: how do you campaign on being tough on immigration when your record says the opposite? I suspect that next year he will learn the hard truth: you can’t.
