The prime minister is trying to win Thursday’s election by replaying the shabby and dishonest 2016 Vote Leave strategy of scaring people about EU migration. He is demonstrating once again that he cannot be trusted.
Sounding a loud blast on his dog whistle at the weekend, Boris Johnson tried to call home Leave voters by raking up the 2016 scare stories about EU migration. In an interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky he said that his government wanted to “bear down on migration particularly of unskilled workers who have no job to come to”. He also claimed that such people had been coming into the UK from the EU over the last 20 years. “You’ve seen quite a large number of people coming in from the whole of the EU — 580 million population — able to treat the UK as though it’s basically part of their own country. The problem with that is there has been no control at all and I don’t think that is democratically accountable.”
It goes without saying that the prime minister has got his facts wrong. The EU does not have a population of 580 million, but 513 million (of which 66 million is the UK population). It is not unskilled EU migrants who have come here but mostly highly skilled people, many of whom have been willing to take work for which they are overqualified. And then there is the insinuation behind his words that EU migration has been bad for British workers. But that is not what the Migration Advisory Committee, the official monitoring body that will play a pivotal role in Johnson’s new points-based immigration system, concluded. It found that EU “migrants have no or little impact on the overall employment and unemployment outcomes of the UK born workforce”.
But never mind the facts, Johnson knows these sort of scare-mongering tactics work. They were at the heart of his and Gove’s Vote Leave campaign in 2016. Back then they falsely claimed that Turkey would be joining the EU and that millions of low-paid Turks would be flocking to the UK, threatening a higher crime rate and extra costs for the NHS. They promoted these lies in dozens of online ads and in a poster campaign. Did this work? Well, Dominic Cummings, then campaign director of Vote Leave and now Johnson’s effective chief of staff in No. 10, certainly thought so: “If Boris, Gove and Gisela (Stewart) had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked ‘Turkey/NHS/£350 million’ with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost.” Since then Johnson has falsely denied ever mentioning Turkey in the 2016 campaign.
Johnson’s dog whistle on immigration is not just a squalid tactic based on misleading data and designed to appeal to our basest feelings, it is yet another example of his dishonesty. Immigration from outside the EU – the part, remember, over which the UK has direct control – has been greater over the last 20 years than that from inside the EU. Non-EU migration is now running at a rate nearly five times greater than EU migration.
Ultimately, this election is about trust. By failing to tell the truth on something as sensitive as immigration, Boris Johnson has shown once more that he cannot be trusted to run the country.
