How the Tory war on immigration backfired

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In his first major speech as UK prime minister, at the start of 2023, a hopeful Rishi Sunak announced “five promises” to show that his government would “always reflect the people’s priorities”. Alongside familiar pledges to reduce inflation and grow the economy, there was a bold new promise: to “stop the boats”.

“We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed,” Sunak announced. “No tricks, no ambiguity, we’re either delivering for you or we’re not,” he told reporters – in an upbeat mood and a crisp white shirt, a long way from the rain-sodden and crestfallen prime minister we saw announcing the election last month.

Colleagues were startled by his decision to stake so much of his reputation on a pledge that was clearly unachievable. “It was obviously stupid to say you’re going to stop the boats, when you’re very unlikely to be able to,” a long-term Home Office staffer told me, recalling his surprise at the announcement. “Call me cynical, but I assumed it was just a slogan to put clear blue water between him and the Labour party. I’m not sure he ever believed he could actually do it.”

But Sunak doubled down. By March 2023, he was standing behind a new branded lectern decorated with a “stop the boats” logo.

In May 2023, he said: “I’m relentlessly focused on stopping the boats. That’s one of my five priorities, and we’re doing absolutely everything we can to do that.” In August, he filmed a slick “stop the boats” video message, against a soundtrack of gently beating drums and the splintering noises of immigration officers breaking down someone’s front door with a battering ram.

Eighteen months on, tricks and ambiguity are all that remains of Sunak’s bold pledge. The number of crossings dipped slightly in 2023, but by 24 June the total arrivals by small boats this year stood at 12,901, higher than the total for the same period in any of the previous four years. Images of crowded, dangerous vessels making their way to the UK remain regular features on news bulletins, highlighting (depending on your perspective) that desperate people are prepared to risk their lives to travel to the UK or that the post-Brexit Conservative government has failed to take back control of its borders.

It has long been a trick of immigration politics for governments to signal their “toughness” with punitive commitments to crack down on illegal migration, in order to distract from parallel policies that have increased legal immigration numbers to meet the requirements of a growing economy. Under New Labour, tough talk about “false asylum seekers” was often an attempted smokescreen for rising figures of legal migration. But no government has fumbled the issue so dramatically as Sunak’s. As a result, the small boats debacle has become emblematic of this latest troubled chapter of Conservative rule.

Public dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of immigration is at a record high, according to the thinktank British Future, which has been running surveys on this question since 2015. Among the 69% of people who say they are dissatisfied, Sunak’s failure to “stop the boats” is the most cited reason for their disapproval.

Anyone who has looked at the Conservative record on immigration since 2010 will not be surprised by this breathtaking gulf between rhetoric and reality. The story of Conservative immigration policy is a tale of ambitious targets and harsh anti-immigration policies that have not resulted in reducing immigration – illegal or legal. Instead, immigration into the UK has climbed to record levels.

Most of this has been the result of legal migration, which in 2022 soared to an all-time peak, with net migration at 745,000, up from 184,000 in 2019. But because of the relentless political and media focus on stopping the small boats, polling shows most voters (once you strip out the “don’t knows”) think illegal migration is larger than legal migration. In fact, the numbers are not even comparable: an estimated 96% of immigrants are invited in, arriving legally to study, to take up jobs as skilled workers, or in the health and care sectors.

Some within the government have privately welcomed the post-Brexit increase in immigration, which has brought in foreign students to prop up an underfunded university system and much-needed workers to fill vacancies, primarily in the care sector. Others are proud that between 2021 and 2023, about half a million people have been given status in the UK under new, nationality-specific humanitarian routes: about 283,000 from Ukraine and 191,000 from Hong Kong. But with Nigel Farage declaring that this is the immigration election, Conservative ministers have preferred to avoid public discussions of how reliant Britain’s economy has become on rising net migration.

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Since 2010, Conservative ministers have consistently promised to cut immigration and immigration has consistently soared. The political sleight of hand whereby ministers focus noisily on harsh policies designed to curb illegal immigration, while authorised migration quietly increases, was first attempted by Theresa May with her “hostile environment” policies, which led catastrophically to the Windrush scandal. Under Sunak, the same distraction technique has been attempted with his relentless focus on stopping small boats, with similarly poor results – the small boats were not stopped, and the immigration commitments were not met.

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Who should bear responsibility for the repeated failure to fulfil immigration pledges? Since 2010, Britain has had five Conservative prime ministers, all promising to reduce immigration, and seven Conservative home secretaries, one of whom served only six days. (The total could actually be considered to be eight if you count Suella Braverman’s second period in the role separately.)

There have been at least 11 immigration ministers and an innumerable cast of young and influential ideologues serving as special advisers. Most concerningly, there have been six Home Office permanent secretaries. The civil servant leaders are called “permanent” secretaries to emphasise that they offer continuity in the face of the endless merry-go-round of political reshuffles, resignations and sackings. In the Home Office, there has been no continuity.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, says David Cameron should take a large chunk of responsibility for setting the administration on the wrong course with his 2010 pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands, from the then record level of 252,000. Cameron told voters: “I don’t think that’s unrealistic; that’s the sort of figure there was in the 1990s and I think we should see that again.” A year after winning office, he repeated the pledge: “Our borders will be under control and immigration will be at levels our country can manage. No ifs, no buts. That’s a promise we made to the British people and it’s a promise we are keeping.”

Cameron’s repetition of the net migration reduction target crystallised a growing belief that high numbers of people arriving in the UK were obviously a bad thing. Oliver Letwin, who was then minister of state for government policy in the Cabinet Office, later acknowledged that this rhetoric proved hugely problematic. “We completely failed to explain the countervailing benefits of migration, so the whole argument was won by default by those who argued that migration was a bad thing,” he said. “We completely lost the argument that it was sustaining our economy and much of our public services.”

Net migration had increased to 379,000 by the 2015 election, and the ambition to cut annual net migration to the tens of thousands was restated in the next Conservative manifesto: “That ambition remains the right one.” Theresa May also made the same commitment, while Boris Johnson said he wanted to see overall numbers fall from about 245,000. None of these promises were met and, like the “stop the boats” commitment, they became embarrassing failures, regularly flagged up with the publication of quarterly migration statistics.

Portes was chief economist in the Cabinet Office in 2010 when Cameron became prime minister, and advised him to step back from the tens-of-thousands commitment, urging him to embrace the economic advantages of immigration. “One of the first things I did was to write a note to Cameron saying: ‘The problem with this is that unless we stay in a severe recession for five years, the choice you’re going to have is between either breaking your promise or doing things which are economically negative.’ The response was: ‘Don’t worry.’”

Because EU free movement meant there was no lever to reduce the biggest inflow of immigration, much of the rhetoric shifted from curbing legal migration (which ministers couldn’t control), to introducing a series of hostile environment measures so the government could make a show of tackling illegal immigration. Actually being robust on immigration numbers was impossible and enforcement by deportation expensive, so the Home Office was instead under instructions to do everything it could to be seen to be tough. It rebranded its vehicles as “immigration enforcement”, trialled driving vans with the message “go home or face arrest” around areas of high migration and began sending out pointedly hostile tweets, such as its 2013 Valentine’s Day offering: “#Rosesareredvioletsareblue, if your marriage is a sham we’ll be on to you #happyvalentinesday.”

The message of fierce enforcement seeped through the department, from ministers at the top, to the most junior officials. For years, no one blew the whistle as what would become known as the Windrush scandal brewed unnoticed, with thousands of legal long-term UK residents complaining they were being misclassified as illegal immigrants.

Portes says: “Cameron backed himself into saying migration is bad, we want less of it, and found himself boxed in by EU free movement and rising EU immigration, and pushed into the Brexit referendum, without a defensible position. He was saying we need to stay in the EU, and at the same time saying we need to reduce migration, while it was clear you could not, in the short term, control migration properly while you were still in the EU.”

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Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory, which provides analysis of migration in the UK, says the past 14 years have seen “a boom and bust cycle – a lot of policy change. We had a crackdown, then we had liberalisation, then another crackdown.” With cool understatement, she adds: “When the rules change, it creates unpredictability; that’s not necessarily optimal.”

The immigration lawyer Colin Yeo notes that in the past 14 years there have been repeated policy initiatives that make life harder for migrants without succeeding in the repeatedly stated goal of reducing net migration. “Being tough on migrants is not the same as being tough on immigration. It has minimal effect on numbers but a significant adverse effect on integration,” he says.

The Conservatives’ record on immigration has been a failure on its own terms – with its spectacular and chronic missing of targets. More significantly, the party’s rhetoric has shifted the immigration narrative decisively towards a much wider demonisation of people who have travelled to the UK in search of work and better lives.

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Few people blame the Conservatives for the emergence of the small boats phenomenon, which came about when people-smuggling gangs realised in about 2018 that it was actually much less difficult than previously believed to transport people 20 miles across the Channel in inflatable dinghies. Since 2018, almost 120,000 people have come to the UK this way, although many of these might previously have travelled by different unauthorised routes – in lorries, cars, trains, shipping containers; options that have become less favoured because of increased border checks, intensified security in Calais, and the construction of fences and walls around the port, funded by British taxpayers.

There has been huge frustration within the Home Office at politicians’ responses to the crisis, as successive ministers’ have searched for flashy “silver bullet” solutions to the rising number of crossings. Since Sajid Javid, when he was home secretary, was forced to fly back from his family Christmas holiday in 2018 after 82 people crossed the Channel in the space of a few days (a relatively small number compared with what followed later), the Home Office has contemplated, in defiance of legal advice, bringing in the navy and the military to push boats back to Calais and has discussed wave machines and a sea fence. (These last two ideas were swiftly dismissed.) More money was sent to France to fund extra police patrols, drones and infrared night goggles.

In the UK, jet skis were bought and training sessions for staff were held in Portsmouth harbour. “The plan was that they would be used like sheepdogs, rounding up the boats, herding them together and turning them around,” a source close to the Home Office said. Lawyers repeatedly told the Home Office the tactic was unsafe and illegal, and the jet skis were abandoned.

Backlogs within the Home Office’s asylum-processing department were allowed to build up. “They thought that if people were promptly rescued, promptly processed, promptly put into accommodation and promptly had their asylum claim reviewed, that that would encourage further arrivals – so there was a benign neglect of the system,” the source said. “They wanted people to feel that they would be generally mucked about and left stranded when they got here – as a deterrent.”

However, as Yeo notes: “It is inherently unlikely that desperate people with literally nothing to lose, who are willing to repeatedly risk their lives, can be deterred.”

Officials suggested a quieter and more pragmatic approach including swifter processing of asylum claims, in order to move people out of hotels faster. (Last year, the government was paying £8m a day on housing asylum seekers in hotels, but says the figure has since been reduced.) They also suggested that the arrivals should be seen in a context of increased global migration and that voters should be told the numbers of small boats were not particularly high when compared with refugee arrivals across Europe. “This is not just the Brits being useless; Biden and Trump have faced similar problems. This is a really tricky global problem that no one’s found the answer to,” the source said. “But they set themselves up to fail with that promise.”

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Sunak hoped his Rwanda plan would be operational before the election campaign, and that boat numbers would drop once people saw that deportations of asylum seekers were happening. Instead, as the election approaches, those who came to the UK after 7 March 2023 – the date from which Sunak’s Illegal Migration Act barred all boat arrivals from being granted residence – remain in a state of limbo. By the end of 2023, of the 77,000 individuals identified for removal under the new legislation, only 25 had been deported.

Disagreements about Rwanda and small boats policy marked the fiercest part of the final leaders’ debate last week. Keir Starmer highlighted that 50,000 people had arrived in small boats since Sunak became prime minister, and promised that Labour would increase international operations to prosecute people-smugglers – offering “smash the gangs” as an alternative to the “stop the boats” slogan. Sunak pledged to get his Rwanda scheme working in July and repeatedly demanded clarity from Starmer about what his approach would be towards people who arrived in the UK, asking: “What would you do?”

Once again, the heat and fury over this relatively small element of policy occupied a disproportionate amount of airtime, and wider immigration issues were barely broached.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, says the Rwanda policy is the most extreme embodiment of the hostile environment policies that caused the Windrush scandal. “[Sunak] was simply overpromising and was inevitably going to underdeliver in a catastrophic way,” Solomon says. “It is playing politics in a way that will ultimately have a very detrimental impact on the lives of people who come here as refugees, seeking asylum and seeking safety.”