Cameron knew his migration pledge was unachievable
WE HAVE become desensitised to politicians making promises which they know they cannot meet. But none stands out so brazenly as the promise David Cameron has made repeatedly over the past few years, including in the 2015 Conservative manifesto, to deliver “annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands”.
As if it was not already obvious that a Conservative government had no prospect of realising this target so long as Britain remains in the EU, the Prime Minister’s former director of strategy, Steve Hilton, confirmed yesterday that David Cameron was warned by his advisers that it simply was not credible.
Sure enough, the figure for net migration to Britain for 2015 was 333,000, more than three times the Government’s promise.
Britain is powerless to change the principle of free movement enshrined in the EU’s Treaty of Rome, Cameron was reminded during his renegotiations. So long as citizens of other member states enjoy the right to travel to any other member state to look for work setting a target for net migration to Britain is meaningless.
The Government’s promise has become even more infamous than Labour’s estimate that only 13,000 eastern Europeans would take advantage of the right to look for work in Britain in the first year after the accession of former Soviet bloc countries to the EU in 2004. In the event, half a million turned up.
BUT at least the Blair government didn’t turn their 13,000 figure into a manifesto promise. It becomes a much more serious issue when a party stands for office on promises which it knows it cannot meet. If the Conservatives were an investment fund and its manifesto a prospectus promising returns that it knew would be impossible to deliver it would be facing prosecution.
David Cameron tries to explain his failure to reach his migration target by saying that Britain’s economy has been so much stronger than other EU countries and that it has therefore proved an unexpectedly strong magnet for job-seeking foreigners. That is a feeble excuse. It was clear well before