Just like the Labour conference that came the week before it, the Tories are using their time in Manchester to set out some of the offers they’ll make to the public in the likely general election we have ahead of us this winter. But while Labour conference swung behind progressive plans on immigration, the Tories show no sign of changing the debate. Over a year since Windrush and all the promises that were made about changing the immigration rhetoric, the hostile environment remains firmly in place and the Conservatives are using the same old anti-immigration narratives.
Home Secretary, Priti Patel, today insisted that free movement needs to end (something Labour committed to in 2017, though conference delegates just demanded a change in direction that might materialise). This is rooted in the untrue but tirelessly repeated idea that certain immigrants and groups of people are responsible for the UK’s problems – whether low wages or the supposed erosion of national “culture” (exactly what’s meant by “British culture” isn’t ever clearly defined).
“Representation matters, but it isn’t a cast iron assurance that positive change will follow.”
In many ways, “end free movement” has become a signal that doesn’t only relate to people from Europe but immigrants from all over the world. If free movement ends, the logic seems to go, the UK will have less immigration. For some people that means fewer people of colour or people deemed to be “not-quite-white”. Why else would some of the post-referendum abuse have been directed towards visible minorities, including people born in the UK?
The details of what the Tories will replace free movement with are nothing other than a soundbite. We’ll introduce an “Australian-style points-based system”, Patel told the country. This tune might sound a little familiar – and not just because Patel and Boris Johnson have been saying it for months – politicians have been saying this almost on loop for the past 20 years. From Charles Clarke through to Nigel Farage, there have been promises of a “points-based system” for decades.
“We shouldn’t automatically expect Tory politicians like Patel to introduce a less violent immigration system by virtue of their personal history.”
There are a lot of problems with this plan, not least because the Australian scheme attributes points to people based on a number of different criteria, reducing them down to numbers, often in a discriminatory way. The very notion of a “points-based system”, a form of which the UK has had, is dehumanising and hardly what you would call “fair”. When politicians have absolutely nothing of any real meaning to say, but instead want to signal they have swift and easy solutions that will mean they’re “tough” on the “wrong kinds” of immigrants and welcoming to the “right kind”, this is what they reach for.
It’s vacuous. But still they use it. The same goes for the “best and the brightest”. Happily picked up whenever they can, people who advocate for a “tougher” system claim that what is fair is attracting people who are “highly skilled”. As if people’s skills can and should be placed in a hierarchy, as if they can be reduced down to what politicians deem to be worthy, and as if they’re nothing more than disposable pawns to be moved around and used for whatever and however long the country wants. These lazy phrases can be thrown in with the other Patel used: “North London metropolitan, liberal elite”. Soundbites might be handy in an election but they reproduce racialised stereotypes and flatten complexity.
These essentialist representations don’t help us understand the world around us, that’s why we shouldn’t automatically expect Tory politicians like Patel to introduce a less violent immigration system by virtue of their personal history. She might reference her own immigrant background but her voting record is far more instructive and reliable than the narratives about the importance of “cabinet diversity”. Patel’s Gujarati parents might have migrated to the UK from Uganda, just like many members of my family, but she has voted for a stricter asylum system, for the policies that make up the hostile environment and against banning imprisoning pregnant women in detention centres. Representation matters, but it isn’t a cast iron assurance that positive change will follow.
Immigration might not be dominating public debate in the way that it once was, but it is still being used as a political football – while the people at the centre of the debate continue to be subjected to punitive, costly and callous policy. Patel’s speech is a reminder that some of the most pernicious thinking and policy on immigration are still at work and could still very well get worse.
Maya Goodfellow is an author and academic