Immigration the Conservative Way

Having been one of the most consistent headaches for the Labour government throughout its reign, the contentious issue of immigration became a major flashpoint during the election campaign, both between the parties and amongst the public at large.

This is somewhat surprising in the light of the government’s recent moves to fill the gaping hole that Britain’s borders once represented - the success of Labour’s ‘Australian-style’ points system was evident in the cross-party consensus to retain it, however the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives advocated widely contrasting supplementary measures.

So one can imagine that the same impassioned arguments were had between the likes of William Hague and Simon Hughes during the coalition agreements as had been played out between David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the leaders’ debates. In the end, the Conservatives won a convincing and highly significant victory.

Earned citizenship – in other words, an amnesty – for illegal immigrants, a policy that Nick Clegg fought hard to stand by throughout the campaign but which proved his undoing in the later debates, was ditched. The policy of regionalised visas for economic migrants, to ensure that these new workers were channelled only to those areas that needed them and could accommodate them, was also excluded from the coalition agreement.

On the other hand, the Conservative-proposed cap on non-EU immigration whose practical operation Nick Clegg found so hard to comprehend, forms the solitary paragraph in last week’s coalition agreement document, with a provision to jointly consider the mechanism for implementation.

The Lib Dems did extract an agreement to end the detention of children in immigration centres, but it is hard to imagine that this met with much opposition from Tory negotiators, especially in the context of the victories they scored elsewhere on the immigration battlefield.

Finally, the coalition partners had long since agreed that plans for ID cards and biometric passports, together with the National Identity Database, were an unnecessary use of public money and these have been scrapped, while on related civil liberties issues, the children’s Contact Point database will also be ditched, and there will be safeguards on both the use of CCTV cameras and the storage of innocent people’s DNA; all of these policies were entirely consensual.

Overall, despite the likelihood of some limited Lib Dem input, UK immigration policy in the next five years will virtually resemble that of a majority Conservative government.