Immigration: not very Cleverly

By Richard North - November 28, 2023

Given the furore over the annual migration figures last week, you would have thought that the first appearance of James Cleverly, the new home secretary, at the despatch box yesterday might have been a significant media event.

After 14 days in the job, this was his chance to shine, the occasion being oral questions to the Home Department, recorded in Hansard for posterity.

But, for all that the event is barely worth reviewing, so thin was the content. In fact, it was something of an insult to the British public that there wasn’t a special session on immigration, with a full debate in which the annual statistics were discussed, with the secretary of state called to account, but things don’t work that way anymore.

Much of the time was spent on the Rwanda policy and the one question that had any relationship with the legal migration figures addressed only part of the issue, dealing with temporary visas to the dependants of visiting students and academics, but focused on cases where dependants were living in conflict zones.

This question wasn’t even answered by Cleverly – he handed it to the minister for immigration, Robert Jenrick, and the response was only of significance because Jonathan Gullis, Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, tucked in a supplementary.

Last week’s net migration figures, he said, “were completely unacceptable to the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, which is why the New Conservatives, helpfully, have a 12-point plan that the Minister for Immigration could copy and paste to ensure we get those figures down”.

Then came the softest of questions, rolled out for the minister: “Will he extend the closure of the student dependant route to students enrolled on a one-year research master’s degree?”

Jenrick seized the opportunity to tell us the “we” – the government – “believe that the level of legal migration into this country is far too high”, speaking as if this had suddenly dawned on them and was nothing really to do with government policy.

As if we didn’t know already, that he said, “has very profound impacts on access to public services, the productivity of our economy, and the ability of the UK to be a socially cohesive and united country”. Then to stave off any suggestion that the home office team was not on the ball, he grandly declared: “That is why we need to take action”.

Getting into his stride, he then airily informed the House that, “We have already announced a specific policy with respect to dependants, which comes into force at the beginning of next year”, adding, “We think it will have a substantive impact on the levels of net migration”.

And, for his finale, he told the few who were in the chamber to listen: “But, as the Prime Minister said, we are keeping all options under review and will take further action as required”.

And that was it. There was no follow-up, and there were no further questions on the legal migration issue, other than a muddled point from Jill Mortimer (Hartlepool Con), who asked: “What progress he has made on stopping small boats transporting migrants across the English channel”.

It was her supplementary that mattered, when challenged Jenrick with the observation that the figures on Thursday has “revealed that immigration to the UK is skyrocketing”.

As if it had any relevance to this issue, she then went on to ask: “Is it not time to realise that those well-intentioned international treaties and conventions agreed 70 years ago are no longer fit for purpose?”, then stating: “We simply cannot accommodate all those who would qualify for asylum under existing rules”.

The figures, of course, had been primarily about legal migration, but that point seems to have escaped Mortimer. “The world is facing troubled times and more mass migration”, she trilled, asking Jenrick to “do all he can to raise the bar for those migrating or seeking asylum here and look at other solutions to stop people leaving their homelands”.

She wanted “those countries” to “make better futures for themselves without the loss of so many of their young?”, adding the throwaway line that: “Much of Europe is in a dire state because of mass immigration”, with caution that, “We cannot let the United Kingdom go the same way”.

With such a muddled question, Jenrick was able to get away with a muddled answer, burbling something about reducing Albanians and generally waffling about not wanting “to create any additional pull factor to the United Kingdom”.

The government had been completely let off the hook by the MPs who were clearly unwilling to address public concerns, and get down to the nitty-gritty as to why the government had allowed the figures to rise to such a high level.
In fact, the only real note of concern on the day came from Sheryll Murray, Tory MP for largely peaceful and horribly white South East Cornwall. During the recent protests, she noted, “we have seen politicians hounded out of their offices and even needing a police escort at a train station”. What more can we do, she asked, “to ensure that people who make decisions are doing it fairly and not from intimidation?”.

That went to the minister for security, Tom Tugendhat, to answer. “My hon. Friend makes an excellent point”, he purred. “That is exactly why we are having an emergency meeting of the Defending Democracy Taskforce tomorrow to assess these issues”.

There were, of course, to be no emergency meetings on bringing down immigration. That could wait as there was a real issue to deal with. “The incidents that we have seen in this country since 7 October – absolutely hateful incidents -have left some people feeling unable to make the arguments that their constituents would expect them to make because they feel vulnerable, or they feel threatened”.

To deal with this cataclysmic situation, Big Tom had been “engaging on a protective security review”. And this was not just for the government, but for all Members of this House, and for other elected officials around our country.

It is completely wrong, he stormed, “for our democracy to be silenced by anyone, and it certainly should not be silenced by cowards”. Doubtless, a massive order for armoured Range Rovers is to follow, while the Met Police ramp up their own hate crime task farce to prosecute anyone who dares to talk to an MP.

As for the legacy media, one need hardly bother. Rather than tackle Cleverly and the MPs in general for their almost total lack of engagement with the substantive issues, the journalist collective seems mainly to have played it for laughs, although John Crace’s headline in the Guardian did at least hint that something was amiss.

“Let off lightly on migration, Cleverly is brought back for a sorry farce”, we read, with a reference to the home secretary’s recent comments about Stockton being a “shit hole” being the main focus.

With that in mind, the sub-heading had it that, “Jimmy Dimly” was “prepared only to apologise for things he hadn’t said – how dare anyone doubt his word”, as Crace dealt with Labour attempts to get an apology from the home secretary.

This came up not in the oral questions but in the points of order which followed, Crace having noted that “Jimmy D” had “got off quite lightly” during this questioning as “no one on either side of the house wanted to raise the migration statistics”.

I can’t be bothered with the ins-and outs of this, which occupies so much space in Crace’s piece. We also get a similarly lightweight, jokey approach in The Times, as well as the Mail and elsewhere. A sample from The Times tells you everything you need to know:

He (Cleverly) has admitted that it is his voice saying the word “shit” in an audio clip in which the word directly after “shit” really does sound a lot like “hole” and nothing like “MP.” He got self-righteously angry about that on Monday afternoon, repeating with as much studied pomposity as he could manage, that he “did not, would not and would never make such comments”, despite the recorded evidence appearing to not entirely agree. This kind of practice, at that dispatch box, possibly got someone in a fair bit of bother not that long ago.

What he has not denied, though, is calling the Rwanda policy “batshit”, but now it’s his job to make the “batshit” happen. We may soon find that sensible people being brought in to do batshit things is rather more discombobulating than when it was left to the batshit ones.

This almost takes on the character of fiddling while Rome (or Dublin) burns. Here is a knife-edge issue which, out in the real world, has people at each other’s throats and the nation on the brink, with the social contract on the point of collapse. And we get the MPs and the media ducking the issues, descending into their usual refuge of frivolity and triviality.

But if this is how they want to play it, then they are looking at another Brexit moment, when the voters come out of nowhere and give them a kicking in the ballot box. When they express their shock, asking “where did that come from?”, it will be times like this that will come to mind.

When we see the highest UK immigration figures on record, and the collective cannot act to address the issues, or even act with any gravitas, then they have it coming. They had their chance, and they blew it.