Theresa May’s baseless blast against immigration

THIRTEEN years ago the Conservatives’ first female chairman stood at the lectern at the annual party conference and declared that the Tories needed to shake off their “nasty party” image. “I want us to be the party that represents the whole of Britain and not merely some mythical place called ‘Middle England’,” she said, “but the truth is that as our country has become more diverse, our party has remained the same.”

How Theresa May has changed. While the chancellor, George Osborne, attempts to shift his party to the centre, openly courting Labour voters in his conference speech this week, the home secretary’s address was aimed at the party’s right, and those mythical middle-Englanders. She used the speech to announce a new drive to curb immigration to Britain, and with it was a much harsher tone. “[W]hen immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast,” she said, “it’s impossible to build a cohesive society.” The nasty party, said Tory detractors (for the phrase has stuck), is back.

The home secretary’s new policies concentrate on limiting the right to claim asylum. The government will invoke new rules which mean it can treat any asylum claim by a citizen of another European Union country as automatically inadmissible. It will also change the welfare system to stop migrants on very low salaries being able to claim the same levels of benefits as they do now. Furthermore, there will be efforts to reduce overstayers on student visas.

All of which suggests that in the race to succeed David Cameron, who has indicated that he will step down as prime minister before the next election in 2020, the home secretary is positioning herself as the right-wing alternative to Mr Osborne and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. These two, the current front-runners, are more relaxed about immigration and generally socially liberal.

Ms May’s speech will cause her problems. First, the home secretary cannot stir up concerns about immigration without attacking her own record. “There is no case, in the national interest, for immigration of the scale we have experienced,” she said. Yet it is during her five years as home secretary that immigration from within the EU has more than doubled. Net migration to Britain is at its highest-ever level.

Second, many of her assertions are based on shaky evidence. She states, for example, that immigration forces people out of work—a claim that is directly contradicted by a report published by her own department last year, which concluded that there was little evidence “that migration has caused statistically significant displacement of UK natives from the labour market in periods when the economy is strong”.

Ms May also claimed that migrants bring no economic benefit to Britain. This claim tallies with a report by the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, which does indeed find that the net fiscal impact of migration on Britain in 2007-09 was negligible. But reports vary. A study in 2014 by Christian Dustmann of University College London and Tommaso Frattini of the University of Milan found that the net contribution of European migrants to the public finances between 1995 and 2011 was more than £4 billion ($6.4 billion), compared with an overall negative contribution of £591 billion by native Britons. The Office of Budget Responsibility, a government watchdog, predicts that immigration will reduce pressure on government debt over time. Cherry-picking facts to bash migrants might once have been the sort of behaviour Ms May lamented. Not any more.