Alexander Smith: A missed opportunity to add tolerance and honesty to the immigration debate

Now, the issue threatens to open up real ideological cleavages between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – the latter of which are looking increasingly uncomfortable in coalition with the Tories – without achieving meaningful reform.

In a speech last Thursday to his activists, David Cameron restated his party’s 2010 manifesto commitment to cut immigration “back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. His comments immediately drew criticism from leading Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, who said the Prime Minister “risked inflaming extremism” in the run-up to next month’s local government elections.

As I noted in these pages in January, Europe and immigration are the two issues on which the Conservative and Liberal Democrat election manifestos differed the most. Indeed, the approach the Conservatives advocate is much closer to the tough talk of former Labour Prime Ministers and their current leader Ed Milliband, who is calling on the Government to “get a grip” on immigration.

But the verbal bunfight that erupted over this issue last week demonstrates just how polarising immigration remains for Britain’s political elite, most of whom take great care to address this issue sensitively, although without making a major difference. Indeed, it is to Mr Cameron’s credit that he prefaced his more strident comments with an acknowledgement of the valuable contribution migrants have made to the UK in the past.

His concern is not with migrants but, rather, the unprecendented scale of immigration to the UK in recent years. At a time when deep funding cuts to our over-stretched public services mean people must expect less from them, and growing unemployment queues ratchet up the competition for the few jobs existing, many people in the UK share the Prime Minister’s concerns.

On this issue, however, the Government is between a rock and a hard place, for one very simple reason: for all its tough talk, it almost certainly cannot deliver on its promise to reduce net migration to Britain on the scale it claims.

To do so would involve slashing immigration to the UK by at least 50 per cent. At the same time, the Government is cutting 5,000 jobs from the UK Border Agency. This will only further undermine its ability to achieve such ambitious reductions.

As the Labour Party has pointed out, the coalition’s proposed cap on the number of skilled migrants it will allow to enter the country will only affect about 20 per cent of all those coming from outside the EU. This policy has already attracted strong criticism from the lobbies for British business, which argue that Britain’s economy desperately needs skilled migrants to drive forward the innovation and growth needed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Also, taking account of those who enter the UK from other EU member states, the Government’s proposals on cutting immigration levels increasingly look irrelevant.

In addition, many more thousands of migrants enter the UK on family, spouse and – especially – student visas. The Government has suggested it intends to review the number of overseas students it is prepared to allow into the UK.

However, this is likely to provoke a backlash from university vice-chancellors, who are now even more dependent on the tens of thousands of pounds each international student pays to study in the UK now that the Government has announced it will cut public funding for university teaching budgets by more than 80 per cent.

David Cameron is right when he argues that there needs to be an honest and open debate about immigration in the UK. But that debate needs to proceed sensibly, based on a pragmatic and sober analysis of the evidence. It would also have to start with the Government acknowledging how limited its options are for tackling this issue.

If recent political history is any indication, neither the Conservative or Labour will be willing to engage in such a debate. As a result, our two most important political parties miss an opportunity to lead and reshape public debate about immigration to reflect the sorts of positive values that make Britain stand out in the world.

One such value is tolerance, especially for religious differences. This principle was embraced earlier last week when both David Cameron and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, declared that the UK would not follow France’s decision to ban the burqa.

Such a judgment represents the best of Britain, a country renowned around the globe for its strong civil society and liberal democratic institutions, and built on traditions of political moderation and religious toleration.