How May is playing the migrant numbers game

Since the EU referendum in June, few people seem to have noticed that the numbers applying for asylum have fallen sharply. Before the vote, a typical figure for applicants in the summer was more than 3,000 a month. The figure for July was 1,700. Over the whole year, it looks as though numbers will be about 30 per cent down on the average of the previous five years.

A friend in the refugee charitable sector tells me no one is precisely sure why this fall has taken place, but that one can make educated guesses based on what asylum seekers say. One is that Home Office procedures are, in general, tightening. Another is that the mood has changed, and the new arrivals feel they are less likely to be welcomed. The most significant, though, is that they know, if they are granted asylum in post-Brexit Britain, that it will carry no automatic right to settle in other EU countries.

If this last is the key factor, it probably applies to most other wouldbe immigrants, not only to asylum seekers. (And it confirms that Brexitvoters were reasonable to fear that large influxes into other EU countries – notably Germany’s one million refugees last year – would ultimately increase numbers in Britain, too.) The pressure on Britain will therefore ease and that on the borderless, Schengen countries will probably grow.

Whether one laments or welcomes a decline in migrant numbers, the politics of this are clearly good for Theresa May. If, after years during her time as Home Secretary of immigration numbers going up, they now fall with her as Prime Minister, people will believe she means business. Voters will be able to see a trend even before Brexit has actually happened. This, in turn, will make more of them believe that Brexit will be successful. At a time when short-term economic woes will make leaving the EU look less enticing, falling immigration rates will cheer up wavering Leavers.

Mrs May, of course, will have her eyes fixed on these figures. One must expect her to do everything she legally can to have them pointing at what she would see as the right direction at the right time – the next election.

Brexit remains a delicate subject for social conversation. At a recent party in London, I met several non-British EU citizens who spoke ruefully about not being wanted here any more (though none felt this strongly enough that they planned to leave). One man, who has lived in Britain for many years, told me that he was, as it used to say on jars of bargain honey, the “product of more than one country” through his parentage. I asked him how he liked to describe himself. “Only by using a word which we are no longer allowed to use, beginning with E,” he said.

I said that I, too, thought of myself as a “European” in a way that I could never think of myself as being an American, but it did not lead me to want to be in the EU. That is real, but hard to describe. I feel at home in Poitiers, or Padua, or even Potsdam, in a way that I do not – much as I love America – in Phoenix, Arizona. For me, Europe is a civilisation, not a political or economic union.

But my companion was not buying this. For him, as for many continentals, the EU seems a destiny which must not be resisted, whereas to most British people (even most of those who voted to Remain) it is no more than an option. This difference will not quickly go away. It means that the negotiations over our departure will not always be as rational as we would like.

Although he certainly has talents, Ken Loach, the film-maker, has long been one of the great bores of our time. In the many years since powerful television plays like Cathy, Come Home and films such as Kes, he has churned out propaganda for a 1945 version of hard-line socialism which is just as unreal and sentimental as the Quality Street tin is about Regency England. Yet he wins award after award at Cannes and appears on serious news programmes (last week, Channel 4 News) as if he has something important to say. His latest film, I, Daniel Blake, is, as usual, about warm-hearted working-class communities struggling against welfare cuts. A scene about a tin of beans in a food bank left the film critic of the Observer “a shivering wreck … awash with tears”.

One mustn’t mind too much. Mr Loach is entitled to his point of view. But imagine if there were a Right-wing film-maker, similarly polemical and weepily behind the times, who produced documentaries about wonderful, white workingclass neighbours whose lives were torn apart by mass immigration and political correctness. Instead of being feted at Cannes, he would be in prison.

In all the publicity about Donald Trump’s campaign stalling, not enough attention has been given to an important factor – Mrs Clinton’s improvement as a performer. She has increasingly succeeded in the television debates in being cool, quite humorous, even likeable. This is the right way for a small woman to make a big, shouty man look preposterous.

This is not only a matter of an improved style but of a changed attitude. Mrs Clinton’s career has been dogged by the impression of her paranoia against those who criticise her. Few ever doubted her abilities, but many doubted her grace under pressure, which is another way of saying that they felt she seemed unpresidential. Those doubts are diminishing.