ERIC KAUFMANN: Suddenly, the Tory party is once again run by a progressive elite whose views on immigration fail to reflect public concerns

And so it begins. Just two weeks after getting his feet under his new desk at the Home Office, James Cleverly has begun gently but firmly chucking what were once key ambitions of the Government’s immigration policy into the wastepaper basket.

He has told interviewers he is ‘frustrated’ by the Press and political class’s ‘fixation’ with his predecessor Suella Braverman’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda for processing.

Furthermore, Cleverly — who is said to have privately described the Rwanda project as ‘bats***’ — also publicly insisted it was ‘not the be all and end all’ of what passes as the Government’s strategy to ‘stop the boats’.

And all this in a month that has seen the figure for net migration in 2022 revised up to a record 745,000.

Needless to say, Cleverly’s softer rhetoric on migration has moved pro-immigration liberals to ecstasy. They regard all talk of getting tough on people-smugglers or dissuading migrants from risking their lives in cold winter seas as barely disguised racism.

The truth is the Rwanda debate is even more vital than it seems. It marks the battle lines in a brutal fight for the intellectual soul of the Conservative Party.

Just two weeks after getting his feet under his new desk at the Home Office, James Cleverly has begun chucking what were once key ambitions of the Government’s immigration policy into the wastepaper basket

I suspect history will judge the firing of Suella Braverman earlier this month as a disaster entirely of Rishi Sunak’s making

I suspect history will judge the firing of Suella Braverman earlier this month as a disaster entirely of Rishi Sunak’s making.

She had shown that she understood the central concerns of the millions of voters who coalesced around Brexit and elected Boris Johnson on a promise to wrest back control of our borders in 2019.

These people — many of them former Labour voters — can’t be dismissed as knee-jerk racists.

They have experienced rapid cultural change: an ever-growing population that has increased demand for houses, schools and healthcare, with a vast resulting impact on waiting lists and travel times.

Recent YouGov and People Polling surveys show that 87 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters want less immigration. But Tories are not the only people to view the latest figures with mounting concern. More than four in ten Britons rank immigration as a top issue, close to the level in 2016 when concern over this question led to the earthquake of the Brexit vote.

In this febrile context, the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary and James Cleverly as Home Secretary shows the Prime Minister has comprehensively failed to listen to voters.

Under his leadership, the Conservative Party is now — once again — run by a Westminster elite whose progressive social values are much closer to their so-called ‘opponents’ on the Labour benches than their own members.

As well as being tone-deaf to the social concerns of most of the electorate, these economic liberals are also in hock to big business, who — in turn — are addicted to the profits that can be made out of cheap labour.

Well-paid, private-sector lobbyists ply their trade, bending ministers’ ears to favour companies that rely on foreign students, care workers, hospitality staff, agricultural labourers, City and IT professionals… the list goes on.

Many in the Cabinet seem to think that if the Government could only solve the small-boats crisis, all its problems will go away.

This is a delusion. Some 96 per cent of the 745,000 net migration figure from last year was legal, not illegal. The theory that mass migration turbocharges economies and solves the thorny issue of growth has long been exposed as a fallacy.

In this febrile context, the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary and James Cleverly as Home Secretary shows the Prime Minister has comprehensively failed to listen to voters

That’s why Suella’s sacking was such an own goal. She more than anyone was seen to be listening to voters’ concerns and proposing concrete policies to address them

I have been a professor of politics since 2011, and I can tell you that study after study has shown that immigration isn’t an economic magic bullet. Depending on age, salary and type of work, new immigrants may add a little — or even subtract a little — from GDP per capita, the average value of goods and services produced per person each year.

Forget, too, the idea that immigration can solve the problem of an ageing population. You might stock the economy with younger workers for a decade or two, but immigrants get old as well. They then need other immigrants to look after them in old age, in even larger numbers, perpetuating the crisis.

And even if the economic case for mass migration did hold water, most voters don’t care about GDP measures or macroeconomics. Instead, they get angry because their lives are being made more insecure by the influx of newcomers and because they know that business liberals who make up most Tory MPs are offering them no help.

That’s why Suella’s sacking was such an own goal. She more than anyone was seen to be listening to voters’ concerns and proposing concrete policies to address them.

She understands that a disconnect between ordinary people and the political elite has fuelled populist and extremist movements throughout Europe and the West. After all, the dizzying pace of immigration was one of the triggers for rioting on the streets of Dublin last week, as well as the electoral success of the anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

Wilders’s message is that Dutch voters feel neglected. Sunak needs to listen. His own party is languishing in the polls, with disillusioned voters eyeing up the nascent Reform UK party to their Right and Labour to their Left.

Why are ordinary voters threatening to desert the established parties?

Because they no longer share their values. Sunak, Cameron and their fellow social liberals — including Keir Starmer’s Labour — have been captured by a progressive orthodoxy that insists that even to talk about immigration is racist.

When the elite believes that globalisation and immigration inevitably lead to prosperity and success, and when voters clearly see that they don’t, tensions arise. Sometimes they spill out into violence.

Though her language could be crude, Suella Braverman understood this, which is why her defenestration was such a mistake.

If the Rwanda plan is shelved and a credible alternative isn’t put forward, this Government risks creating a vacuum of ideas — into which a shadow minister has already stepped this week, to propose that Labour would cut net migration to 200,000 a year.

With perhaps a year to go until a general election, it’s not too late for the Tories to turn things round. After 13 years of failing to deal with immigration, they must be bold.

This means raising minimum-salary requirements for immigrants, as well as limiting the right of foreign students to bring dependants and tightening up the number of graduates permitted to work here after completing their studies.

Crucially, employers must also be weaned off their addiction to cheap foreign labour.

When it comes to illegal migration, ministers must also act decisively to tackle the small boats crisis.

By listening to their voters’ concerns, the Conservatives could frame a new vision of hope for the future and win back support from both Left and Right.

If they do not, then I’m afraid they will deserve their inevitable annihilation at the polls.

Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced A Cultural Revolution, by Eric Kaufmann, will be published next year by Forum Press.

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