- Theresa May has rejected a points-based migration system from the EU. But she needs to explain her alternative and her plan
The Guardian
Editorial
There are plenty of reasons why Theresa May’s press conference in Hangzhou, while perfectly competent in most ways, was not the most assured performance of her two-month premiership. She was, after all, attending her first top-level international summit with a group of more practised peers. She had arrived to find many of the G20 leaders in hostile and sceptical mood over Britain’s Brexit vote. She was about to have a sticky encounter over nuclear power with China’s president, Xi Jinping. She had not faced the British press since becoming prime minister. It would have taken someone with the rhinoceros hide of a Keith Vaz not to display a few nerves in such circumstances.
Yet the main reason why Mrs May found herself on the back foot on Monday was wholly political not personal. On her way to China she had told the travelling press that the points-based immigration system promoted by the Vote Leave campaign during the EU referendum might not work. On Monday in Hangzhou, speaking from bitter experience from her time as home secretary, she amplified her sceptical view, saying that the trouble with points-based systems is that they take away migration control from governments by allowing people who meet the criteria to have automatic rights of entry.
This stance was important for two reasons. First, it marked a clear break from the position adopted by the Vote Leave campaign, which had put a points-based system at the core of its immigration argument. This therefore puts Mrs May potentially at odds with Leavers in her own cabinet and party, including the trade secretary, Liam Fox, and Brexit secretary, David Davis, who campaigned for such a system. It also drew Nigel Farage back in front of the radio microphones and TV cameras – hasn’t he retired to get his life back? – to accuse her of betraying Brexit voters.
Second, it marked the conclusive arrival in the Brexit argument of a phrase that will soon start to haunt Mrs May unless and until she can deliver on it. The electorate voted to leave the EU, she said, because they wanted “some control” over migration from within the EU into the UK. Later, she varied it a little: “an element of control” which could be delivered in “various ways”. Faraway in the House of Commons on Monday, Mr Davis, in a generally anodyne statement on Brexit, confirmed it yet again.
If politics was a respectful process in which voters allowed a government the luxury of honing its positions on big issues over time, a phrase like this might not matter too much. Since politics does not work like that, however, and since immigration is a toxic issue, the phrase matters. By rejecting the points system Mrs May puts pressure on herself to define the alternative. This will matter to Brexit voters, many of whom cast their votes because of immigration, real and imaginary. Their wish was for a lot of control, not some. And it will matter to pro-Brexit press campaigners, full of self-confidence now, who know weasel words when they hear them. They will press the issue until Mrs May reveals how much control is some.
Mrs May has made her own luck this year, with spectacular rewards. She had another piece of luck on Monday, when junior doctors called off the first of their new waves of industrial action, in a dispute on which Mrs May has been unbending. But she will need to tell a lot of people very soon what she means by “some control” if she is not to become a hostage to the ambiguity of the phrase. Mrs May said she would look at all forms of immigration, presumably including non-EU, before reaching a decision, while Mr Davis hinted that existing EU nationals in the UK would be able to stay. Nevertheless, a government that has staked its credibility on delivering Brexit, and that has put migration control at the top of its Brexit goals, is running a serious political risk if it does not come up pretty quickly with a solution that will satisfy its voters and activists.
Important though it is, immigration is not the only issue here. Brexit is not a tactical issue. It is as large a strategic issue for the country as can be imagined in peacetime. As Mr Davis told MPs on Monday, even remain supporters have an interest in the government doing as good a job as circumstances permit. The increasing worry now, from both sides of the Brexit argument, is that Mrs May doesn’t actually have a plan at all, and that she is pressing forward into the fog without a clear enough idea of her detailed goals. “You don’t know what you’re doing” is a chant from the political terraces that would spell bad news for Mrs May.
