Sometimes, politicians don’t announce new policies with great fanfare, they just quietly implement them – either because they don’t want to spend political capital justifying them to the public, or because they don’t want those measures to be part of their “brand”. A key example from recent months has been Rishi Sunak’s response to the record net migration figures published last month. He decreed them “too high”, as if they were not the product of his own government’s policies but entirely out of his control as prime minister.
The truth is that, following Brexit, Boris Johnson and then Sunak significantly liberalised migration rules for people outside the EU who want to live and work in the UK; this was a result of the skills shortages affecting public services and the wider economy. So while it’s become harder in some ways for EU citizens to come to the UK (51,000 more EU citizens left than arrived in the UK last year), the government has reduced the salary requirement for obtaining a skilled worker visa by £4,000 a year, and reduced the minimum qualification level. It has also retained the flexibility to open up visas for low-paid jobs where there are shortages; so far, it has done this in the care sector.
Public attitudes to immigration have become much more positive in the wake of Brexit
Add to this the large numbers of refugees who have resettled in the UK through humanitarian schemes aimed at Ukrainian citizens and Hong Kong residents, plus a significant increase in the number of international students – a direct consequence of government making it easier for them to work in the UK after study. This makes us a more attractive destination for higher education, which is why net migration levels stand at 606,000, the highest they’ve ever been. It is a feature, not a bug, of the government’s post-migration Brexit policy.
There is no substantive issue with these levels of migration; these are people who are filling important gaps in the UK’s economy and health system – more than half the total of skilled-worker visas last year were given to people working in health and care – adding to the rich multicultural fabric of the UK. Public attitudes to immigration have become much more positive in the wake of Brexit. Polling undertaken earlier this year found that in all seventeen countries where public attitudes were surveyed, Brits were the most positive about immigration. This reinforces previous findings that the British public are overwhelmingly pragmatic in their approach to immigration, feeling it is justified if is meeting an economic need, and are more concerned with whether the government is able to control numbers, rather than the absolute levels.
Why, then, has Sunak decided to distance himself from these figures, given he has overseen the policies of which they are a product? The answer lies in Sunak’s weaknesses in relation to his party. The Conservatives are a party who, now Brexit has been achieved, no longer seem to know what they are for, characterised by warring ideological factions. Many of Sunak’s MPs do not believe he can win the next election, and leadership hopefuls are already effectively conducting their campaigns to succeed him should he lose. That includes home secretary Suella Braverman, whose hard-line position on immigration is designed to appeal not so much to the country, but to the unrepresentative group of Tory members who will be selecting their next leader. So, even though the hard Brexit they campaigned for has hardly been a success, the right flank of the Conservative party continues to exert a strong pull over the way it governs, in a way that simply is not reflective of broader public attitudes.
Too vapid on vaping
A policy Sunak has subjected to the fanfare treatment, however, is the government’s plans to crack down on loopholes that allow vaping manufacturers to target children. Retailers and marketing companies will no longer be able to hand out free vapes to children. Ministers are also looking at banning the sale of nicotine-free vapes to under-eighteens, making it easier to fine shops who sell them to children.
This goes nowhere near far enough. Public health experts are divided on the benefits of vaping as a way of giving up smoking; Public Health England argues that vaping “could play a crucial role” in reducing the harms of smoking; the World Health Organisation says it is unclear whether vaping works to help people giving up smoking and that both vaping and conventional cigarettes pose health risks. Nicotine is a highly addictive and dangerous drug with significant risks for children; the long-term health impacts of vaping are currently unknown, but levels of vaping are on the increase among young people. Vaping manufacturers deploy marketing techniques – advertising flavours like “bubblegum” and “candyfloss” – that are implicitly, if not explicitly, aimed at children.
This is why Australia has taken the step of banning recreational vaping altogether; vapes will only be sold in muted packaging in pharmacies as “smoking cessation devices”. The question is why ministers aren’t considering stronger measures in the UK, starting with a similar ploy of selling vapes behind the counter in unbranded packaging, as with cigarettes. They’d still be available as “stop-smoking” aids, but it would reduce manufacturers’ power to push these addictive and harmful products onto non-smokers, including children.
Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist
