Cameron accused of migration cover-up

Bombshell from friend and close aide who spent years at Cameron’s side

DAVID Cameron was told four years ago that it would be ‘impossible’ to hit his immigration target while Britain remained in the EU – but he continued to make the promise regardless.

The bombshell claim is made today by the Prime Minister’s former closest aide Steve Hilton, who was at the heart of Government and attended the meetings with senior Whitehall officials.

He reveals that Mr Cameron was told ‘directly and explicitly’ that his ‘tens of thousands’ net migration target was not deliverable given the EU’s freedom of movement rules.

Despite this, the Prime Minister has restated his ambition to hit the target time and again – even including it in his 2015 election manifesto.

The claim comes after another dramatic day ahead of Thursday’s referendum:

A leading Nationalist MP broke ranks to signal that an independent Scotland could use the euro if Britain leaves the EU.

The Leave campaign

claimed that Scotland’s cashstrapped NHS will have to find an extra £600million-a-year to cope with inward migration if there is a Remain vote.

An election expert published a poll showing the contest ‘on a knife edge’ – though financial markets rose amid speculation of a Remain vote.

A senior figure in Britain Stronger in Europe was accused of trying to ‘cynically’ exploit the death of MP Jo Cox.

Business leaders said Brexit could jeopardise more than 70,000 new jobs in Scotland over the next 15 years.

Writing in today’s Mail, Mr Hilton claims Mr Cameron was warned by civil servants during meetings in 01 . He says: ‘We were told, directly and explicitly, it was impossible for the Government to meet its immigration target as long as we remained members of an EU with the free movement of people within it.’

This amounts to a charge that Mr Cameron has concealed the inevitable failure of his flagship policy from voters since the meetings were held in 01 .

It was included in the 010 and 015 Tory manifesto, and in the referendum campaign the PM has insisted it remains an achievable ambition.

Policy guru Mr Hilton, godfather to one of the Cameron children, also attacks George Osborne and the ‘political elite’ – accusing them of ‘playing with fire’ by demonising the public’s desire for control over our borders and destiny.

At no stage has Mr Cameron managed to cut net migration to below 100,000. The closest he came was in 01 , when the total for the 1 months to September was 154,000.

He was furthest away in 015, when the figure for the 1 months to June was an estimated 336,000. The latest ONS figures, for the 1 months to December 015, estimate net migration of 333,000. Just over half of this number came from EU countries.

Yesterday, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon refused to put a number on how many migrants Scotland should accept. But she said there was a ‘correlation’ between the strength of an economy and inward migration. ‘It would be a huge mistake for economic reasons, as well as for the message it would send of the kind of world we want to live in, if we were to close our borders and look inwards,’ she said.

But the SNP’s Remain campaign was dealt a blow when its home affairs spokesman, Joanna Cherry, said: ‘We probably wouldn’t want to be tied to the pound if it nosedives after Brexit.’

That puts her at odds with Miss Sturgeon, who insisted in recent days that a future separate Scotland would still use the pound, regardless of the outcome of the referendum.

Braden Davy of Scottish Vote Leave, said: ‘It seems the SNP is suggesting Scotland should adopt the euro. What an utterly ridiculous idea. We have seen the destruction the eurozone area has caused in southern Europe, leading to 50 per cent Greek youth unemployment.’

He added that the ‘only way to protect Scotland from economic disaster from the euro’ was to vote Leave.

‘It would be a huge mistake’

British decency and tolerance is being mocked

YOU may be surprised to read that I believe the Prime Minister has done everything in his power to control immigration. The problem is that as the leader of an EU member state, he doesn’t have enough power to control immigration.

That goes to the heart not just of the migration debate, but of this entire referendum campaign and the decision we need to make as a nation in two days’ time.

In all the years I worked as an adviser to David Cameron, he expressed a very clear point of view about immigration, one that I share. We believe that immigration has enriched this country’s economy and society. As the son of immigrant parents, I feel this particularly strongly; I will forever be grateful to this country for the incredible opportunities it has given me.

And now, as an immigrant myself — to another country that prides itself on its open, inclusive character, the United States — I am doubly grateful for the fact that we live in a world where people can move freely and put down roots in places far from where they were born.

On many occasions, in public and private, I heard David Cameron set out his belief that precisely to protect this proud British heritage of welcoming people to our shores, immigration had to be controlled.

He spoke approvingly of the fact that in the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher’s governments got the balance right on immigration, and that this contributed to the important and unequivocally positive fact that no party of the extreme Right ever managed to win significant support for a xenophobic anti-immigrant agenda.

He deplored the fact that subsequent Labour governments lost control of immigration, and was determined to get a grip. In office, I saw at first hand how seriously he took this responsibility. He had announced a clear commitment — to reduce the overall level of immigration to the tens of thousands annually — and understood very well that the public would rightly hold him to account for such a clear promise.

Immigration, alongside the threat of Islamic terrorism, was one of the policy areas that, in my observation, most occupied his time and focus. If anything, there were times when I wished he would focus more on other priorities; things that were perhaps closer to my heart.

But as the elected Prime Minister, he rightly got to call the shots.

At the time, one of the main ways we assessed the success of our most important policies was through ‘stock take’ meetings. These involved ministers and civil servants responsible for a particular policy coming to No 10 for a long session, chaired by the Prime Minister, during which we could really get stuck into the details of how a particular reform was going.

I remember the meetings on immigration towards the end of my time in Downing Street. Everyone around the table, in some way or another, was working hard to try to deliver the government’s commitment.

We were presented with analysis of the numbers of people coming to Britain through various routes, the impact of policy changes we had already made, and projections stretching into the future.

The news was not good. We were way off target; indeed, the numbers were going in the wrong direction. We explored various policy options — and I’m sure that process continued after I left the government in May 2012. But I recall very clearly one of the points that was made to us by the expert officials in the room.

We were told, directly and explicitly, that it was impossible for the government to

meet its immigration target as long as we remained members of the EU, which, of course, insists on the free movement of people within it.

Now let me make one thing clear. The Remain campaign and its supporters say that leaving the EU will not on its own solve our immigration problems, and they are right about that. Leaving the EU is not a silver bullet. But, as we were advised in government, it is impossible for the ‘tens of thousands’ target to be met unless we leave — or negotiate an end to, or exception from, the free movement rules, which is an option Brussels has always refused to countenance.

In my view, the target itself is set at the wrong level. I would actually like to see more entrepreneurs, engineers, computer scientists — as well as those in genuine need of refuge — welcomed to Britain. I think that would help boost our economy and strengthen, not weaken, our society.

Others might take a different view: you could judge the Prime Minister’s target to be about right. Or too high. That’s what elections are for, to debate things like that.

But the point is, whatever the policy, whatever people vote for, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the Prime Minister of the day is able to deliver it. That is simply not possible in the current, unreformed — and in my view unreformable — EU.

You don’t need to sit in a ‘stock take’ meeting at No 10 Downing Street to see the obvious truth: our immigration system is completely broken, and as long as we’re in the EU, our elected governments are powerless to fix it. Here are the ways in which this is a disaster.

It’s an economic disaster because it means we have to clamp down on immigration that could benefit our economy (skilled labour) in favour of immigration from the EU that often doesn’t (unskilled labour).

I remember fighting endless battles with the Home Secretary Theresa May simply to get her agreement to the introduction of an Entrepreneur Visa that would allow people from overseas with real potential to start their businesses here. It happened in the end, but only after massive internal opposition and watering down.

More broadly, almost every day in government we heard complaints about incredible individuals, whom we ought to have welcomed with a red carpet, being harassed and treated like second-class citizens by our immigration authorities.

Such people included Nobel Prizewinning scientists from Russia, some of our biggest investors from India, or even high-spending shoppers from China.

Our broken immigration system is a social disaster because the decency and tolerance of the British people, virtues that our politicians so love to talk about when it suits them, are mocked when they see their local communities and public services overwhelmed by sudden and unplanned-for arrivals of people in large numbers — the kind of dramatic changes which, needless to say, don’t affect the neighbourhoods inhabited by our insular ruling elite.

And, of course, all this is a political disaster because, as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson have said, when politicians make promises they can’t keep, it undermines not just faith in individual politicians but everybody’s faith in the democratic process itself.

In the 2015 Conservative manifesto, the Prime Minister re-affirmed his commitment to the immigration target he had been told was undeliverable. When I saw that, I assumed this was either because he was certain he could negotiate a solution within the EU, or was assuming we would leave.

For the Government to continue to make the promise today, after no negotiated solution was achieved and while campaigning to stay, is, I think, what Gove and Johnson meant when they described this as corrosive of trust in politics.

There’s a broader argument here, too, because the EU debate isn’t just about immigration, which is why it is so offensive for the Remain campaign to argue, as George Osborne put it, that those like me who want to leave the EU ‘want a meaner, narrower Britain’.

The fact is that with areas such as the economy, the environment, our legal system — which affect people’s everyday lives in Britain — membership of the EU makes it impossible for the elected government to govern our country in the true sense of the word.

It seems to me that here in Britain, and especially in this referendum campaign, our insular ruling elite is playing with fire.

By dismissing — or worse, demonising — people’s desire for control over the things that matter to them, and their perfectly reasonable expectation that the government they elect should have the power to deliver its promises, the rulers are the ones stoking the anger they decry.

Undeliverable promises. An ungovernable country. An untrusted political establishment. This is what the EU has helped do to our country. We can’t go on like this. It’s time for change. It’s time to leave.

Our rulers are the ones stoking the anger they decry