The campaign to leave the EU promised many things, but hard agricultural labour was not among them. Seasonal fruit picking is physically demanding, poorly paid work that was, before Brexit, done mostly by migrants exercising their freedom to live in any EU member state. Ending that freedom is one of the few Brexit pledges that has been delivered. But enthusiasts for the project are dissatisfied. Net migration has not fallen. Last year it was estimated at around 500,000.
That number is inflated by exceptional cases – Ukrainian refugees and Hong Kong passport holders – but no downward trend is forecast. There is a steady inflow of workers filling vacancies in the health service, social care and other sectors. Some employers are lobbying for more generous visa allocations. Farmers still need fruit pickers. The government has acquiesced, recognising that labour shortages put pressure on supply chains, drive up inflation, risk food security and stifle economic growth. That is the Treasury view. Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is frustrated by the outbreak of pragmatic liberalism in cabinet. Earlier this week, she told a conference of radical rightwing conservatives that Britain’s home-grown workforce should be mobilised in the fields.
Brexit, in that view, was supposed to help the nation wean itself off reliance on foreign workers. That proposition has resonance with people who are uncomfortable with the social changes that accompany mass migration. But the core of the argument is an economic fallacy – the “lump of labour” belief that work is a fixed commodity, and that every immigrant who finds a job in Britain is taking it away from a local worker. In reality, migrants go where there is demand for their work. They spend their wages, stimulating local economies. Immigration is generally good for growth, especially immigration of young people into a country with an ageing population. Ms Braverman’s model of labour autarky is a recipe for stagnation and decline. But the home secretary is not interested in economics. Her focus is the prospect of one day replacing Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader.
Ms Braverman is positioning herself as the candidate of her party’s nationalist right – a faction that was once confined to the fringe but now defines the Tory mainstream. There are few constraints on the anti-immigration rhetoric deployed to win applause from that audience. The home secretary needs no encouragement. She has already borrowed the far-right dehumanising idiom, describing refugees crossing the Channel as an “invasion”. How eagerly the prime minister supports that view is unclear. He appointed Ms Braverman, and champions her policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda in defiance of Britain’s international human rights obligations. This week Mr Sunak defended that breach at the Council of Europe.
Asylum claims and work visas come under different rubrics of immigration policy. Mr Sunak is quietly permissive on the latter, while licensing cruelty for the former. The distinction is lost on Tory hardliners, who are stepping up the hunt for scapegoats now that Brexit has conspicuously failed to deliver. That presents the prime minister with a choice. He can resist the anti-immigration fanatics, taking the road where human decency and practical economics align. Or Mr Sunak can indulge the capture of his party by xenophobic nationalism, which would make the Tories both toxic and out of touch. Britain doesn’t need more snarling populists. They have damaged the country enough.
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