Population problem

Labour is seeking a population plan for the next election—not about birth control, but immigration. Insiders tell me that the government, aware of the popular Tory plan for an annual immigration cap, is preparing to retreat from its laissez-faire approach to the size of Britain’s population.

Labour has been jolted by the success of lobby group Migrationwatch, which has popularised the idea that Britain’s population is heading to 70m (from 61m today) in the next 20 years. Government insiders now concede that overall numbers do matter. You will hear more on this from ministers in the run-up to the election.

The government is probably right to reject an annual cap, because two important parts of the inward flow—asylum seekers and arrivals from other EU states—are not subject to its control. But it knows it has a very mixed record to defend on immigration and has alienated much of its core support by presiding, almost by accident, over the single biggest wave of immigration in British history. So expect Labour to accept that overall immigration numbers should fall, and that there should even be some overall population target.

The second great postwar immigration wave, which began in the mid 1990s, has been far bigger than the first, post-colonial one and has also affected more parts of the country. There are two aspects to immigration: the turnover of people who come to work or study for a few years and then leave, and the flow of people who come to live here permanently. Since 1997, 5.4m foreign citizens have come for at least a year, and 1.6m people have been granted permanent right of residence, mainly from developing countries. Numbers are now coming down due to the recession, but also because more effective controls are in place. There is a points-based system that should restrict economic immigration to those people the country really needs, and we will soon have electronic border controls that will help to more accurately count people in and out.

Why did the great migration happen in the first place? Britain is a magnet thanks to the English language, its deregulated labour market and London’s global pull. But the inflow was also due to several liberalisation decisions made by the new Labour government after 1997.

There was no liberal conspiracy to make Britain more diverse, as has been alleged by Migrationwatch and newspapers like the Daily Telegraph. But it is true that almost everyone involved in the decisions would have been predisposed to welcome high levels of immigration. Many of them had cut their political teeth in the anti-racism and equality battles of the 1970s and 1980s. As socialist economics imploded, and the voice of the white working class became weaker in Labour circles, cultural liberalism and an embrace of minorities loomed larger in left of centre thought—this was Cool Britannia, after all.

A series of small decisions from 1997 to 2003 led to an unexpectedly big outcome. All seemed reasonable at the time; most had non-immigration rationales. For example, more student visas were going to help pay for the expansion of higher education, and more work permits helped bring in much-needed nurses and doctors. The decision to open to eastern Europe (which led to 1m-plus workers arriving) was in part a geopolitical one: Britain was the main promoter of EU enlargement.

For a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme, I recently spoke to officials and advisers involved in those decisions. And many now admit that the thinking at the time was unbalanced. Not enough account was taken of the costs of mass immigration—the downward pressure on wages and extra demand for public services—especially to poorer Britons. “The view was that economic need was overriding and all citizens would benefit: anyone challenging that would have seemed a bit odd,” said Will Somerville, an immigration expert in the cabinet office in the early 2000s.

The decisions were the subject of intense lobbying, too. Employers’ organisations pushed hard for liberalisation, as did the treasury. Meanwhile a network of NGOs and legal campaigners used the Human Rights Act to prevent more restrictive legislation—especially regarding asylum, the one area in which the government did try to clamp down hard. It was a classic example of pressure group theory: the diffuse opposition to mass immigration of the majority was trumped by well-organised groups who were passionately in favour of it.

Meanwhile, nobody, it seems, was doing a proper cost-benefit analysis with the whole country in mind, and there was no strategic discussion in cabinet about opening up to eastern Europe or, more generally, what mass immigration was for.

So a distinctively new Labour combination of economic and cultural liberalism was the backdrop to Britain’s great opening of the late 1990s. Both forces are weaker today, and the once dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy now works better too. But Labour’s reappraisal of mass immigration may be too little, too late to win back former voters.

This is the background to the coming election debate over immigration, in which the Tories will argue for annual caps while Labour favours population targets. In fact, this election could be the first one in which there is a heated but largely rational argument about the subject. In recent years the inflow has been so large, and the migrants often white Caucasians, that immigration has become—notwithstanding the BNP—largely decoupled from the issue of race. It is now not just a concern for xenophobes and cosmopolitans, but for everyone.