Robert Jenrick’s decision to resign as immigration minister over the alleged shortcomings of the government’s new safety of Rwanda bill is the latest evidence that Rishi Sunak is in a no-win situation on the issue he has chosen to put front and centre of his bid to remain in office.
Had he gone as far as allowing his ministers to ignore the European convention on human rights, the refugee convention and other international treaties – as Suella Braverman and others had called for – there were reportedly up to 10 ministers on the left of the party prepared to resign.
Yet failing to do so has cost him his immigration minister – and while one is definitely a much smaller number than 10, Jenrick’s departure is still a serious blow.
Sunak’s decision to dismiss Braverman from the cabinet agitated some on the Tory right. But any fair-minded observer, even if they support her stance on immigration, has to concede that he had more than adequate grounds to do so. No government can tolerate indefinitely a senior member of cabinet appearing to freelance on serious issues, and nobody was under any illusion that there was much goodwill or common ground between the prime minister and then-home secretary.
Jenrick is different. He is, or was, an ally of Sunak. When he was first sent to the Home Office in October last year, it was widely seen as Downing Street making sure it had a friendly set of eyes and ears in the department.
He’s also a minister who tries harder than many to get to grips with difficult problems. When Boris Johnson handed him the poisoned chalice of planning reform, Jenrick to his credit actually made a real go of trying to pass it – even though his eventual reward was getting sacked when Johnson got cold feet.
That a year at the Home Office has apparently pushed him towards Braverman’s position on the asylum system is an interesting development for people who might be inclined to dismiss her interventions as politics-as-punditry and leadership positioning.
Yet Jenrick’s resignation also highlights an even bigger problem for the prime minister than the fate of the Rwanda scheme: overall immigration figures. When the Conservatives first took office in 2010, net immigration was 257,000. This was the highest number then recorded, and led to David Cameron’s now infamous promise to bring it down to the “tens of thousands”.
Last year, net immigration hit an extraordinary 745,000. Even accounting for one-off shocks such as refugees from Ukraine and the decision to extend the right to live in Britain to tens of thousands of Hongkongers, it is still set to remain comfortably north of 300,000 per annum.
That means that when James Cleverly, the home secretary, claims that the government’s latest proposals will cut immigration by 300,000, that huge number won’t even take the annual inflow back to where it was when the Conservatives first entered government.
This is why Sunak keeps focusing on Rwanda, and the broader question of asylum, despite the enormous difficulty the government is having getting the scheme off the ground: to try to use it as a shorthand for being “tough on immigration”, without having to admit that since 2019 the Conservatives have been running perhaps one of the most laissez-faire immigration policies in modern British history.
This problem predates Sunak. But the fact is that that neither he nor his predecessors wanted to confront the hard choices that reducing the UK’s reliance on imported labour would entail. They have instead repeatedly talked tough, and installed a rightwinger at the Home Office with the impossible task of sorting the issue out, while allowing other departments such as education, business, and the Treasury to keep pushing policies that drive the numbers ever higher.
It’s not as if there isn’t a coherent case to be made for a serious effort to reduce numbers. The problem is that any radical action would be about reversing a status quo over which the Conservatives have presided for more than a decade.
One example illustrates the point. The shortage occupation list allows businesses to recruit overseas (at a discount on the UK going rate, until this week) if they have a post they can’t fill with a British worker. This created an obvious disincentive to invest in training British workers. In fact, the number of firms pleading a skills shortage tripled between 2011 and 2022, despite a decade of rising immigration supposedly justified by a skills crisis.
Yet how does any Conservative minister, whose party has presided over almost the entire lifetime of the shortage occupation scheme and increased the number of jobs on it earlier this year, even start to make that point?
Focusing on the troubled Rwanda scheme is the closest Sunak has got to answering an impossible question: how do you campaign on being tough on immigration when your record says the opposite? I suspect that next year he will learn the hard truth: you can’t.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
