The Big Tory Lie

They promised high-skill immigration. We got something else entirely

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In 2019, as he prepared for power, Boris Johnson promised the British people he would introduce an Australian-style immigration system that would, in his words, bring “the best and the brightest” to Britain.

This new, highly-skilled, highly-selective, and highly-paid immigration would turbo-charge Britain’s economic growth. It would flood the country with net contributors, people who paid in more than they took out. And it would bring the very best global talent into the country, improving schools, universities, hospitals and more.

“We will restore democratic control of immigration policy after we leave the EU”, Johnson confidently proclaimed. “We must be much more open to high-skilled immigration, such as scientists, but we must also assure the public we have control over the number of unskilled immigrants coming into the country”.

This promise — that Brexit Britain would be completely reshaped around highly-skilled, highly-selective, and highly-controlled immigration— has been repeated by countless Tories ever since and still guides Spectator-style Toryism today.

The only problem, as new data makes clear, is that it was a lie. A big, fat, barefaced Tory lie. The country, the British people, got no such thing.

Contrary to what Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak promised, Britain has not been transformed into an oasis of highly-skilled scientists and big tech entrepreneurs who are contributing more than they are taking.

Far from it.

Under the Tories, Britain has become even more a country of mass, uncontrolled, and unassimilated immigration —much of which is not high-skill or selective at all.

The blunt reality, as the always insightful Neil O’Brien has just pointed out, is that if you look at the very latest data on what is happening you’ll find a completely different story to the one many of his fellow Tories have been peddling since Brexit.

Consider just one of many mind-boggling statistics.

Over the last five years, about two million people from outside Europe arrived in Britain through net migration. But how many do you think came for work?

Just 15 per cent. That’s right. 15 per cent.

The rest entered Britain as the relatives of workers, international students, the relatives of these students, or as asylum-seekers and refugees.

But surely those workers have gone into the most highly-skilled, highly-paid jobs where they are earning more than their British counterparts, right?

Nope. Based on what limited data there is, we now know this is not the case at all.

Many of the rapidly rising number of immigrants who are coming to Britain from outside of Europe actually earn less than established British workers —including those who have been here for the best part of a decade.

Put simply, there is little evidence the Tories have rebuilt the immigration system around the most highly-skilled, highly-talented, highly-paid global talent.

Furthermore, this promise, that Britain’s new immigration policy would be based around the very best and brightest has also been completely blown apart by two other things Boris Johnson and the Tories have introduced.

The first — as O’Brien points out — was the reintroduction of something called the two-year post-study work visa, which was another major blunder by Boris Johnson who was always far more liberal than his supporters and critics thought.

The visa, reintroduced by Johnson against the advice of immigration specialists, not only allows international students to work while they are studying at British universities but to work after their study has finished and —get this— at any salary threshold, at any skill level, and to then stay without any sponsor. As O’Brien notes:

As well as allowing people to work while they are students, the graduate route enables them to work afterwards at any salary threshold, any skill level, and stay in the UK to look for work without any sponsor. In other words, it allows holders to circumvent all the salary and other requirements of normal work visa routes, which are supposedly there to make migration a bit more selective and, thus, more beneficial.

Highly-skilled, highly-selective, highly-controlled, high-wage immigration this is most definitely not. It is merely another example of how Boris Johnson and the Tories have, contrary to what they promised, completely liberalised immigration.

This is why the number of international students coming to Britain since Brexit has rocketed — along with the record number of their (typically adult) relatives, most of whom do not work or, if they do, tend to work in the low-wage “Deliveroo economy” and so therefore do not make a net contribution.

It is just more of the same low-skill, low-wage, non-selective immigration which helps big business keep profits high, consumption high, and labour costs low.

While they’re losing support to Labour and Reform, they’re also now losing an even larger number of their 2019 voters to something else -- apathy.

Many people in Britain are simply giving up on politics, no longer convinced any of the big parties can fix the big problems facing the country. And this is especially true for people who voted Conservative at the last election.

Most of the people who have abandoned the Tories in recent months have not gone to Labour or Reform. Instead, they now say they will not vote at all, do not know who to support, or simply refuse to answer the question from pollsters. And the number who now say this is not small. About one in three of them now say this.

Consider just a couple of statistics.