Vince Cable finally goes nuclear

By Claude Moraes MEP

After 11 months of hinting, David Cameron has finally – and spectacularly – laid into immigration. Yet business secretary Vince Cable, demurring completely, has been swift to describe the Prime Minister as “very unwise”.

It is important to consider why Vince Cable has chosen immigration as the bridge he will not cross. Simply put, Cable understands the reality of a UK Prime Minister saying what he said today. If Vince Cable, a member of the government, can link Cameron’s vocal attack on immigration to a risk of “inflaming extremism” in the UK, then the rest of us, without the burden of collective cabinet responsibility, should also be under no illusions.

What Cameron has done is not bravely tackle the subject no one wishes to talk about. Our daily newspapers and politicians talk of nothing else. The problem instead is that at the heart of this speech, Cameron does everything but deliver the big cut to immigration (as promised) and is simply blowing a dog whistle before the toughest set of elections his party and the Liberals have yet to face.

Vince Cable is a decent politician. He knows that there is abuse in the system and that some non-EU immigration is important. He also understands that there is nothing the government can do to stop the EU’s free movement of workers. At the same time – let us be clear – the number of EU workers coming to the UK is dropping dramatically as we move into austerity. Cable knows this too, hence his instant reaction to the deft and dishonest way Cameron has shaped his speech today.

Where is the fundamental dishonesty in Cameron’s speech? On the one hand the vast majority of the ‘mass immigration’ he criticises between 1997 and now came after 2004 from the EU’s free movement of workers. Yet in his speech, he quotes the latest net annual figure of EU immigration to the UK, which is relatively small. This is because the UK economy currently needs fewer workers, and so number of EU workers coming to the UK has plummeted.

Cameron claims therefore that EU immigration to the UK is less overall than non-EU immigration to the UK, and will slap transitional measures on any new EU members. He doesn’t describe how the ‘mass immigration complaint’ originated from EU migration and that those numbers are now dramatically falling.

As any new members of the EU likely to join in the next few years consist of the tiniest countries like Croatia, his speech today doesn’t amount to the halt of ‘large scale migration’. Nor does it affect the free migration of workers from any other EU country at any time in the future should our economy grow.

This con-trick allows Cameron to dismiss the largest component of migration, that from Europe, which amounts to the most significant pressure on our resources, and yet still the biggest contribution to our economy in recent years. Instead, using this trick, Cameron is free to move on to addressing non-EU migration. Here he goes through a set of policies – clamping down on ‘forced marriage’ (an awful but ultimately small scale phenomenon), tackling sham marriages and increasing enforcement of deportation and removals. If people feel they have heard this list before, it is because the last government also concentrated on these areas.

So was there anything new? Perhaps it is fair to talk about how seasonal workers and other migrants – who take jobs which British workers don’t want to do – is an issue related to the UK benefits system i.e. that it simply doesn’t pay to do certain lower skilled work. But in terms of announcing a major change to the benefits system, there was nothing in today’s speech.

At a time when asylum applications are at an all time low, and the areas of ‘abuse’ such as student visas and skilled worker visas have a flip side (we often need their labour and their revenue), we should have heard some new concrete proposals from Cameron. To the policy minded, however, the speech amounted to calling for an enforcement of existing rules.

An adult debate about migration would have addressed the integration challenges we face, the benefits versus costs of immigration, how we can manage migration better and how we can control some migration – and non-EU migration – but have no entry control in other areas – EU migration. We needed an adult debate on migration. Today was slick, but it wasn’t grown up.