Unpopular with voters, the opposition and his own MPs alike, Sunak’s immigration policy has always been misguided, writes Josh Williams.
A tourist, hopelessly lost in rural Ireland, stops a passerby and asks for directions to Dublin. “Well,” the local answers, “I wouldn’t start from here.” Rishi Sunak has much to learn from the wisdom of this old Irish joke. While the Prime Minister might think he has a Rwanda problem, in fact he has an Irish problem. His options are all unappealing because he started, by his own design, from entirely the wrong place.
That Sunak should be spending so much time talking about immigration is itself a bitter mistake. The established wisdom is that you ground a political campaign on an argument that does three things. First, it should be about the issue that matters most to your voters. Second, it should be an issue where you know that you have the stronger policy and the public’s backing it. And third, that your side is united on this issue and your opponent is divided.
Speaking yesterday, the esteemed pollster John Curtice dispatched the first of these criteria with abandon. If you want to understand why the Conservatives are 20 points behind in the polls, he noted, “immigration is not the central issue”. The debate is, he says, “an irrelevance”. Far more important to voters are the things that are immediately affecting their lives, with Curtice citing a failing economy, a crumbling health service and an absence of political leadership.
But if immigration isn’t the central issue, then presumably it is one where the Conservatives have an advantage over Labour? For almost all of our political history, this would have been a safe assumption to make. Today, it is not. Remarkably, Labour currently tracks six points ahead of the Conservatives on immigration.
Rwanda has not helped. It has now become clear that some £290m will be paid to the Rwandan government. To place in some context, that figure is equivalent to a quarter of Rwanda’s entire annual exports. It could also be used to fly some 77,000 commercial passengers to Kigali Airport. To date, not a single refugee has landed there and it is quite possible that none ever will. Never in the field of international diplomacy has so much money been given to one country for so little.
Unsurprisingly, people don’t really like the Rwanda plan at all. At Labour Together, we polled Conservative migration policies with and without the Rwanda Agreement included. Mentioning the involvement of that authoritarian East African state saw approval for the policy fall by six percentage points.
This is brought into even sharper relief when Conservative and Labour plans are placed before voters, side by side. When Labour Together did that, we saw support for the government drop by three points and the opposition’s support rise by two points. Interestingly, we also saw a three-point bump for Reform UK, the right-wing populist group formerly known as the Brexit Party and perhaps soon to re-house its prodigal son, Nigel Farage.
This draws us to the final test of a good political argument. Does it divide your opponent more than it divides your own side?
The Labour Party has stuck consistently to its “five-point plan on asylum and migration” for months: a sensible set of policies that aim to get control of the problem via sensible dialogue, negotiation and partnership with international allies.
Rishi Sunak must dream of such discipline. After his initial plan was rejected by the courts, who deemed Rwanda too unsafe a country, he has softened his proposal. In doing so, he has managed to alienate everybody.
The only people who were ever enthused by the prospect of flying refugees to Rwanda sit on the Conservative back-benches. There, they inhabit a series of drinking (sorry thinking) societies that they have now taken to calling, ludicrously, the “five families”. By softening the policy, Sunak has lost their support.
Meanwhile, the more sensible centre of the Conservative Party, united in its One Nation faction, has only ever given support grudgingly.
By focusing so much of his premiership on this issue, Sunak has quite perfectly found a dividing line. Unfortunately, rather than dividing his opponents, it has cut his own coalition in half. How Sunak gets out of this is anyone’s guess. All we can say, with some certainty, is he should never have started from here.
Unwanted by voters and MPs, Sunak’s Rwanda policy fails every basic political test
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13.12.2023
Unpopular with voters, the opposition and his own MPs alike, Sunak’s immigration policy has always been misguided, writes Josh Williams.
A tourist, hopelessly lost in rural Ireland, stops a passerby and asks for directions to Dublin. “Well,” the local answers, “I wouldn’t start from here.” Rishi Sunak has much to learn from the wisdom of this old Irish joke. While the Prime Minister might think he has a Rwanda problem, in fact he has an Irish problem. His options are all unappealing because he started, by his own design, from entirely the wrong place.
That Sunak should be spending so much time talking about immigration is itself a bitter mistake. The established wisdom is that you ground a political campaign on an argument that does three things. First, it should be about the issue that matters most to your voters. Second, it should be an issue where you know that you have the stronger policy and the public’s backing it. And third, that your side is united on this issue and your opponent is divided.
Speaking yesterday, the esteemed pollster John Curtice dispatched the first of........
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