If there is one thing that the four remaining Conservative leadership candidates do agree on, it is that their party failed on immigration in government.
A harder question may be why.
One simple answer would be that Conservative ministers just did not take the party’s manifesto commitments seriously at all. A second would be that they did try but failed – lacking the competence to deliver. A third alternative would be that the promises made were probably impossible to keep in the first place.
Immigration is certainly an issue which matters to the party and their voters: indeed, new immigration attitudes data from Ipsos for British Future today finds that immigration was a top three issue for 50% of 2024 Conservatives, and even more strongly for those who left the party for Reform.
For now, the first instinct of the party leadership contenders is to repeat the pledges that were not kept in government. The politics of immigration may make this easier in opposition, without the need for the slogans and soundbites to become workable policy. Challenging Labour over asylum and Channel crossings could be easier than trying to deliver a workable plan. Indeed, the failure to begin the Rwanda scheme may allow the party to claim that the main problem was that it was not yet tried. Calls for lower immigration will face less immediate pressure over the choices needed to achieve them in practice.
Nevertheless, the Conservatives in opposition face at least three significant challenges in the current leadership contest and beyond it.
Firstly, the struggle to get a hearing again. Two-thirds of the public (67%) do not trust the Conservative Party’s approach to immigration. And each of the leadership candidates is distrusted by six in 10 people when they talk about immigration.
Whichever wing of the party the candidates are from makes little difference to their reputation on the topic. Each candidate is distrusted by between 57-60% of the general public and trusted by 17-18%, giving them a negative net trust rating of between -40 and -42. While all politicians struggle for trust on immigration, these are considerably weaker ratings than those of Keir Starmer (-16), Yvette Cooper (-22) or Ed Davey (-23), as well as Nigel Farage (-22).
The Conservative Party’s troubled brand means the leadership candidates and the next party leader will face a challenge to get a hearing beyond the party faithful when they talk about immigration. Each has lukewarm approval from loyal Conservative 2024 voters, ranging from +11 net trust (Cleverly) to +4 (Tugendhat). But all four have a negative trust rating among those who voted for the party in 2019, from net -22 (Badenoch) to -27 (Tugendhat).
Secondly, the Conservatives need to reconstruct, within a single term, a broad enough electoral coalition to be trusted to govern again. That means trying to win back many of the voters lost to its Right over immigration – but without exacerbating other core challenges to its future electability, including votes lost in the centre and the increasing generational chasm in the Conservative vote.
The Conservatives are distrusted by 69% of those with the most sceptical views of immigration, 66% of those with the most liberal views, and by 67% of those who fall in between. They lost confidence on control with migration-sceptic voters, were in the wrong place on compassion among those with more liberal views, and crucially failed on competence too with the swing voters who see both the challenges and gains of migration, and who want control and compassion on asylum.
The Conservatives also need to win back voters lost to the Liberal Democrats and Labour too, who will be turned off by a Tory Party that leans too close to Nigel Farage’s agenda. So they face a difficult balancing act on their approach to immigration. While the most liberal and most migration-sceptic quarters of the public skew strongly Left and Right in party terms, it is striking how far the broad ‘Balancer middle’ of the public thought Labour and the Lib Dems were closer to striking the right balance during the 2024 election campaign than the Conservatives or Reform. That helps to explain why the Lib Dems could quietly propose a more liberal manifesto on immigration without it being a barrier to winning sixty Tory seats.
The final challenge is the future policy agenda. The Conservatives spent almost a decade pledging, in the 2010, 2015 and 2017 general elections, to more than halve annual net migration from around a quarter of a million to the ‘tens of thousands’. But the number of people born abroad rose by 2.5m between the 2001 and 2011 census, with New Labour mostly in government, and again by 2.5m under the Conservative-led governments between 2011 and 2021.
Every candidate is an immigration-sceptic in this contest. Robert Jenrick has staked the strongest claim by proposing a legal cap on the level of immigration, set at the ‘tens of thousands’. Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly are reluctant to disagree on immigration during a leadership battle.
As a slogan, this may well chime with most Conservatives. More than seven out of ten Conservative 2024 voters (72%) want lower immigration, with 58% now favouring large reductions in the overall numbers. Only a quarter are content with immigration levels either staying where they are (14%) or increasing (11%). And some 81% of Reform voters want immigration reduced, 75% by a significant amount.
But most Conservative voters see the dilemmas of control if asked to identify where those cuts might fall. Less than one in five Conservatives would reduce visas for nurses, doctors or care home workers, who accounted for nearly half the work visas issued last year. More would favour an increase in the numbers coming to do those jobs. Indeed, in none of the 13 examples of migrant roles surveyed – from engineers and lorry drivers to fruit pickers and catering staff – did more than a third of Conservative voters choose to reduce numbers.
A ‘tens of thousands’ target is far out of reach without significant reductions in NHS and social care visas, and other cuts in areas where the public think migrants make a positive contribution. Promising large reductions may appeal to the party faithful and voters lost to Reform. But repeating the ‘tens of thousands’ pledge made, and not delivered, in 2010, 2015 and 2017 may just serve as a reminder of the broken promises of the past.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
