The government’s indecision over spousal visas proves it is not fit to run the country

Editorial: The Conservatives’ latest embarrassing climbdown over migration policy – this time, the unreasonable earnings requirements – was sneaked out on the quiet, with the home secretary nowhere to be seen. The entire ‘flagship’ strategy looks as sunk as the government

(Dave Brown)

According to the late Richard Crossman, an intellectual turned Labour politician, the most damaging thing you can do to a political party is to question its central myth in the run-up to a general election. In recent times, the Conservatives themselves, rather than the opposition, have been doing an outstanding job of demolishing their own central myth – that they are the uniquely competent natural party of government.

The latest self-inflicted injury is the messy U-turn on the earnings requirements that must be met in order that a spouse may settle with their partner in the UK. Born in confusion, and still in its early infancy, the plan seems doomed never to reach maturity.

The original Home Office proposal was to require that those who migrate to the UK must earn £38,700 a year before they are allowed to bring members of their family to live here – more than double the old, relatively undemanding threshold of £18,600. After an initial muddle, in which it was feared that the policy would be applied retrospectively and thus force settled families to break up, a further adjustment of the plan has been announced.

Sneaking the announcement out at the end of the parliamentary term in a written answer – the traditional method used to bury bad news – the Home Office has now postponed the introduction of the £38,700 rule until 2025, which is, handily, well after the next general election. In the meantime, the threshold will rise to £29,000, and will continue to rise thereafter in stages.

The clumsy attempt at subterfuge rebounded badly on the Home Office, merely drawing the media’s attention to the embarrassing move. Tellingly, the home secretary is nowhere to be seen. James Cleverly has left it to the prime minister to make his excuses for him. It hasn’t been a showcase in political communications.

With a spurious sense of precision, the planned thresholds are linked to the 25th percentile, 40th percentile and 50th percentile of earnings for jobs eligible for skilled worker visas. In reality, the figures are arbitrary and political, part of a panicky reaction to the collapse of the Rwanda plan after the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful. A cohort of Conservative backbenchers, obsessed with migration to an unhealthy degree, were baying for ministers to do something – anything – to show they were in control. They did, and then, a couple of days later, they changed their minds.

Aside from the inhumanity of the policy – it remains, in essence, a tax on love – this disarray can only confirm the image of a government not competent to govern, headed by a prime minister who was put in place in order to restore order after the ramshackle Johnson and Truss eras, and who has proved to be a disappointment.

Let it be recalled that Rishi Sunak made it his mission to ensure that his government would display “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”, and would conduct itself according to the maxim that “Trust is earned.” He was welcomed for his apparent competence and work ethic. It was fondly believed that he might drag his party back to the centre-ground.

Instead, Mr Sunak has lurched in various directions, including a phase during party conference when he preposterously tried to present himself as the “candidate of change”, denouncing administrations of all colours that had ruled the nation for three decades – including the Tory and coalition governments led by David Cameron. Not long after that, Mr Cameron was recalled, ennobled, and made foreign secretary.

It was a change, all right, but not the kind envisaged by Mr Sunak in his Manchester conference speech. It gave a mildly centrist flavour to the latest reshuffle – in which the increasingly strident Suella Braverman was released into the wild – but within weeks, Mr Sunak was doubling down on the Rwanda plan.

As for the policy itself, it makes little economic sense. The whole point of the post-Brexit, Australian-style points system promised, and delivered, by the Conservatives was to allow the economy to attract the skilled and semi-skilled workers it needed in order to thrive, after free movement of labour within the EU was abolished.

Compared with the EU system, the points-based approach is clunky and bureaucratic, and ill suited to allow the labour market to respond rapidly to ebbs and flows in supply and demand in a dynamic economy. Adding what are, basically, politically driven obstacles to workers coming to the UK will only have the effect of driving up labour costs, adding to inflation, and creating fresh shortages of workers of all kinds.

The myth that there is some vast pool of underemployed British workers ready to fill the near million vacancies in the economy is just that – a pernicious myth. Besides, the uncomfortable truth about the UK economy is that it needs unskilled labour as well as the most highly rewarded professionals, and there aren’t enough people of working age able and willing to do the jobs that the immigrants are eager to take on.

It is also worth repeating that the rows about the workings of the points-based system, and the bewildering regulations for spousal visas, have nothing to do with irregular, so-called illegal migration via the small boats. Britain, now nominally in control of its immigration policy, can place whatever limits it wishes to on its legal migration, which accounts for around nine-tenths of the total. What it cannot do is pretend that erecting ever higher obstacles in the way of people who wish to come and staff British warehouses, care homes, farms, hotels, bars and transport services will have no economic, or indeed social, effect.

Competence in government means carefully framing a policy in the national interest, implementing it, and sticking to it. The Sunak administration currently seems incapable of discharging such basic duties.