It's hard to know where to start with Theresa May's awful, ugly, misleading, cynical and irresponsible speech to the Conservative Party conference today.
If you haven't seen reports of it, allow me to summarise: "Immigrants are stealing your job, making you poorer and ruining your country. Never mind the facts, just feel angry at foreigners. And make me Conservative leader."
This line deserves close attention:
And we know that for people in low-paid jobs, wages are forced down even further while some people are forced out of work altogether.
Really? We know that, do we?
Because last year, Mrs May's own officials carried out a pretty serious review of the evidence.
This is what they found:
There is relatively little evidence that migration has caused statistically significant displacement of UK natives from the labour market in periods when the economy is strong.
And as ministers rightly tell us, the economy is indeed strong right now. In other words, the government's own assessment is that immigrants are not forcing people out of jobs as Mrs May says.
The government's own assessments in other documents say other things too. The Treasury, for instance, says immigration means annual GDP growth is .25 percentage points higher. The OBR, meanwhile, says immigration means the deficit is smaller because of the taxes immigrants pay. And then there are studies from the OECD and the rest showing immigration makes Britain richer and British public services more sustainable.
Then there's Mrs May's other contention, that immigration makes it "impossible to build a cohesive society."
That's a more subjective issue, less about statistics than judgements. I'd suggest that Mrs May is wrong and that Britain is actually, after a period of high immigration, a remarkably cohesive and tolerant society, largely and happily free of the nasty and even violent nativism seen in many European countries of late. See Fraser Nelson's gloriously positive assessment for more.
I'd also wish that politicians like Mrs May would celebrate that success (and sound like they actually like modern Britain) instead of talking up tensions.
But I'm not naive. I know a lot of people won't agree with me. Many British people are indeed worried about immigration and the effects it has on their communities and lives. Doubtless many people base their thinking on personal experience. But perhaps, just perhaps, perception matters too – the perception that immigration is a problem even if you don't directly experience any negative consequences yourself. There's evidence, for instance, that the less personal acquaintance with migrants a person has, the more worried they are about immigration.
If, as Mrs May argues, immigration makes British society less cohesive, leaves groups of people less unable to get along, isn't that at least partly the result of politicians pandering to ignorance and prejudice and wilfully distorting the evidence to persuade people to be angry and afraid?
The Home Secretary says she's worried about immigration social cohesion. If she really wants to help, she could start by abandoning this cheap and nasty speech and the politics behind it.
But then, there's a Tory leadership election coming and Mrs May's hopes have been fading as George Osborne (who takes a rather different view of immigration and its consequences) has become the party's favourite for the job. And political ambition is more important than talking responsibly and honestly about immigration, isn't it? What a curious form of leadership.
