Border Skirmish

Public opinion on immigration in Britain is extraordinary.  We’re always at or near the top of any international comparisons of concern, we’re least convinced of its benefits and most negative about its impact on our public services.  We think we take much more than our fair share of immigrants and we grossly overestimate the numbers of them in the country. In this context, any perceived failure in controlling our borders has the potential to be extremely damaging, as the well resourced and highly choreographed reaction from the PM and Home Secretary to the UKBA row demonstrates. There are other reasons for the government to be concerned.  Rows with officials don’t play well with the public, and we know from tracking trust in individual professions for decades that civil servants have been one of the few professions to see trust increase, while trust in ministers and politicians is significantly lower and falling. But there are also plenty of reasons why this particular row may blow over with little political impact for the government.  Firstly, controlling immigration has been a traditional area of significant strength for the Conservatives, with the previous Labour government never convincing the public that they had it under control.  In fact, since we started measuring it in 1977, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have never been seen as the best party on immigration, and the Conservatives had a massive lead going into the last election.  They do therefore have a significant cushion, at least compared with the other major parties.  As with the economy, the approach of focusing on Labour’s record will play to public opinion. Second, most of the detail in the story is quite technical and boring – biometric chips, risk-based measures, watch index checks and so on.  One of the reasons the MP’s expenses scandal took such hold was the florid detail of duck houses and “limed oak toilet seats”.  A key to whether this row will register with people for much longer is whether more compelling stories and detail comes out, but that seems unlikely. And third, public opinion on how immigration is controlled by the machinery of government, not just politicians, is very negative, driven by a regular drip of stories about administrative failures.  So the focus on officials and the UKBA is likely to go more with the grain of public opinion than it would in some other areas of the civil service.  The truism often trotted out in similar high profile corporate errors - that trust takes years to build up, but can be lost in an instant - doesn’t apply here, simply because that trust didn’t really exist.  That is no doubt largely unfair to the UKBA, as the public’s concerns on border control are at least as much to do with their opinion that there are just too many immigrants – but misperceptions abound in this area of public policy.

So the immediate danger to Theresa May and the damage to the Conservative part of the coalition government may not be that great.  But it is going to be a continuing challenge for the Conservatives in particular to retain their image as the safest option on immigration among the major parties.  The reality is it’s not within their power to give the public what they say they want: for example, half of the population would like all immigration stopped or a one-in-one-out policy of zero net migration.   This row should run out of steam quite quickly – but it will be only the first of many.

Bobby Duffy is Managing Director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute and wrote this article for the Sunday Times.