Is Truss About To Betray Brexit Voters?

Political Commentator Patrick O'Flynn writes for Heaver News.

Liz Truss won the Conservative leadership contest partly on the basis of saying the party had been re-elected on an excellent manifesto in 2019 and needed to get on with implementing it.

While her Chancellor’s financial measures on Friday, which sacrificed the public finances in the short-term on the altar of radical tax cuts – especially for the rich – are hardly in the spirit of Boris Johnson’s centrist approach to economics, they did at least include restoring the manifesto promise not to raise the rate of National Insurance and also delivered on her own pledges during her leadership campaign.

But in the policy area ranked second in importance to the economy by 2016 Leave voters and 2019 Conservative voters – immigration - Truss is marching swiftly away from the most important manifesto promise.

The key Tory pledge in its 2019 document was that: “There will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.” It also stressed the importance of “establishing immigration controls and ending freedom of movement”.

While Johnson failed to make any progress on the promise of overall numbers coming down and barely seemed to try – during 2021 his administration agreed to a staggering and record-breaking one million foreign nationals coming to make Britain their home – the carte blanch to import workers that Truss is now proposing for employers in many sectors is breath-taking in its recklessness.

Well-sourced reports coming out of Whitehall say she is even leaning on Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch to shake hands with India on a free trade deal that will involve a freedom of movement clause and that she is demanding the agreement is sorted by Divali on October 24.

At 1.4 billion, the population of India is more than three times that of the entire European Union. As recent events in Leicester have shown, communities heralding from South Asia also have a far from perfect record when it comes to integrating into British society.

To end free movement for 500 million Europeans mainly from countries with similar living standards and cultures to ours only to introduce it for more than a billion Indian nationals – or even a significant chunk of them – would be nuts.

The Conservatives could forget holding the seats they won off Labour last time in the Midlands and the North and would also risk losing seats in traditional white-van-man heartlands in counties such as Kent and Essex.

While voters may be dubious about tax cuts for the very wealthiest, they will be pragmatic about that policy. If it works and helps boost economic growth overall then they are unlikely to gripe. But importing huge numbers more migrants from the developing world is simply a red flag to the red wall and plenty of other places too.

Two of the other stars of the Conservative leadership contest this summer – Ms Badenoch and Home Secretary Suella Braverman – both spoke out about the need for tougher immigration measures in their campaigns and are being put into an incredibly awkward position by Truss. So far the new PM has said or done nothing to support Braverman on tackling the shambles regarding the illegal immigration across the English Channel either.

The Conservatives have been making false promises to the British public on bringing down immigration for 12 years – ever since David Cameron pledged to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands.

Under every Tory Prime Minister this century, annual net migration has In fact hovered around the quarter of a million mark. This has added hugely to the pressure on public services, stoked an acute housing shortage in many regions and contributed to a loss of social cohesion that has damaged living standards in profound ways that those focused merely on the economy seldom even bother to measure.

When Margaret Thatcher said there was “no such thing as society” she was making the point that society did not exist in the abstract but depended on the responsible actions of families and ordinary people in order to function well.

The worry is that Ms Truss may believe the comment is literally true. The happiness and well-being of a people depends on far, far more than the output figures compiled by Treasury bean-counters. A country is also more than a mere zone for economic production. Does Liz Truss understand any of this?