Yesterday Kemi Badenoch said the Conservative government “got it wrong” on immigration, and promised a “strict numerical cap”.
We’ve been here before. In the summer of 2010, I was chief economist at the Cabinet Office. Not long after the election, I sent David Cameron an unsolicited paper about his pledge to reduce migration to the “tens of thousands”. It said that this would almost certainly present him with the unpalatable choice between deliberately damaging the UK economy and labour market, and conspicuously failing to deliver a high-profile political commitment. I suggested, gently, ways in which the target could be modified.
A brief note from his private office told me that Damian Green, the new immigration minister, had advised the prime minister not to worry – he (with the assistance of Migration Watch UK) had run the numbers. Unfortunately, their calculations were a combination of elementary errors and economic illiteracy. When asked about this on a recent BBC documentary, Cameron responded: “Jonathan Portes is a very intelligent man – but he didn’t agree with anything the government wanted to do, so he wasn’t the first person I was going to listen to.”
His loss, as it turned out. It was true I didn’t share his objectives – but I genuinely thought that, as a civil servant, it was my job to advise him that there might be better and less risky ways to achieve them. The rest of the story is well known: forced to choose, just as I had warned him, between economically damaging restrictions to........