It is interesting that CCHQ put up Brandon Lewis, a Home Office minister, to give interviews this morning defending what is the Conservative party’s overnight attack line against Labour – the claim that average net immigration would rise to 840,000 a year under Jeremy Corbyn – and not his boss, Priti Patel. Patel, the home secretary, is very popular with with rightwing Tories and Brexit party supporters, but she is not one of the cabinet minister most skilled at dealing with forensic questioning.
Here is the extract from the Conservative news release explaining how the party justifies its claim. (Bold type in the original document.)
New analysis released today, using official figures and based on HM government’s own methodology reveals:
Maintaining free movement with existing EEA members would result in average net immigration to the UK of 260,000 per year over the next 10 years. This is equivalent to a city the size of Brighton moving to the UK every year. Labour’s policy of maintaining EU free movement would lead to 2.6 million more people moving to the UK over the next 10 years. This scenario is a minimal interpretation of Labour’s policy and represents a slight increase based on current immigration levels.
Extending free movement to the rest of the world would result in average net immigration to the UK of 840,000 per year over the next 10 years. This is equivalent to the combined populations of Manchester and Newcastle moving to the UK every single year. This means that levels of net migration would more than treble if Labour introduced their proposals for completely open borders.
This analysis is deliberately cautious and is likely to provide a significant underestimate of net inflows from non-EEA countries under Labour’s plans.
This claim is that it is based on a motion passed at Labour party’s conference. But there are two problems with citing it as evidence that Labour would allow annual net immigration to rise to 840,000 a year. First, the wording of the motion was very generalised (the full text is here), and it was not clear what it would mean in practice. And, second, Labour is only committed to implementing policies in its manifesto, not motions passed at conference.
Today Labour is arguing that, when the conference motion demanded a manifesto pledge to “maintain and extend free movement rights”, this was not a reference to allowing non-EU nationals to come and live in the UK freely. “There was no mention [in the motion] of geographically extending freedom of movement to other countries,” a party source said. Instead this was a reference to extending the rights that already apply to British citizens and others with the right to live in the UK, for example by making it easier for spouses to join them, the source argued.
This may be a fair way to interpret the motion passed by Labour conference, but this is not a point that the party made particularly forcefully at the time.
Today Labour has dismissed the Tory claims as “fake news”. In a statement Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said:
This is more fake news from the Conservative party’s make-believe research department. Unlike the Tories we won’t scapegoat migrants or deport our own Windrush generation citizens. The damage done to our society has been through damaging Conservative cuts to our public services, not by EU nationals coming to work in them.
What is true, though, is that Labour has yet to say what its immigration policy would be. Jeremy Corbyn and others have said things that imply that they would like to keep free movement for EU nationals after Brexit, but during the campaign Corbyn has tended to sidestep questions about what Labour’s exact policy will be, saying details will be given in the manifesto. But Labour does want to negotiate a soft version of Brexit with the EU, keeping the UK aligned to the single market, and Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has admitted that negotiating this would involve a negotiation about whether or not the UK would maintain EU free movement rules.
