The Sunday Long Read
What we think we know
For some time there has been a consistent pattern in the opinion polling on immigration. It can be summarised as:
- A long-term trend towards more liberal attitudes in Britain, including on immigration;
- Views on immigration depend a lot on the precise question: they’ll say levels overall are too high but then also be against cuts in nearly every category they’re asked about;
- Immigration, even when linked to asylum seekers, is relatively low down the public’s list of priorities;
- The public views the Conservatives as performing poorly on immigration and asylum.
All this makes it very implausible that a ‘tough’ line on immigration will rescue their political fortunes. As the graph above shows, in the six years since the Brexit referendum, the proportion of people who want immigration reduced fell very substantially.
But is this still true?
So, has the sustained push by the government to put immigration in the headlines and make it a dividing line with Labour, combined with the big increase in immigration numbers, changed the picture?
There certainly is a long-term decline in the number of people seeing immigration as too high. Professor Rob Ford has shown that public support for reducing migration has been falling steadily since 2019, and that a majority now see migration as economically and culturally beneficial.
However, Figure 1, (from YouGov’s tracker) shows what proportion of people say that immigration is the most important issue. It shows that after peaking in late 2016, concern fell to a low point in late 2019. But since then it has risen again, although, at 41%, it is still well below pre-referendum levels.
The rise is, however, very polarised. Figure 2 shows that among those who voted Labour in 2019, the issue has hardly moved up the agenda, remaining below 20% for the last four years.
But Figure 3, which shows the views of 2019 Conservatives, the picture is very different. After briefly falling to 25%, it has now risen again to 68%.
An alternative perspective
To put those figures into a different context and to show their robustness let’s switch to another pollster with a different question wording (this time Conservative/ Labour means current rather than 2019 support).
So the picture is that immigration now matters a lot to current Conservatives, but not to (the larger number of) Labour supporters.
But the Conservatives are not polling well. Ipsos’s separate voting intention polling in November had the Conservatives on 25% and Labour on 46%, fairly typical compared with other pollsters. When you’re 21 points behind, going big on an issue that rates highly only with your own supporters is not an obvious route to success. This is specially true when Labour voters have moved strongly in the pro-immigration direction. Work by Rob Ford shows that a large majority (60-80%) of Labour supporters are ‘positive’ about the impact of immigration, compared to only 30% of Conservatives. This means that this isn’t an issue which will divide Labour in the way that Brexit was.
Can the Conservatives’ win back their lost voters?
However, there is a relevant chunk of the voters who the Conservatives wish to win over and for whom this issue matters. They especially need to recover those who voted Conservative in 2019 but no longer support them. And for those voters immigration tops the list of reasons they give for switching away.
But although immigration is the most frequently mentioned, it’s only a little ahead of a wide range of other reasons, So it’s doesn’t follow that this is the magic bullet issue which would win such people back over. They have a lot of other reasons to abandon the Conservatives, and pursuing the issue more may – if it highlights further divisions and further policy delivery failures – even heighten the impact of some of those other factors.
Signs of change?
But could the terms of the debate be changing, making this more promising for the Conservatives than it may look?
Well, the latest data does suggest a dip in support for immigration. The Ipsos Migration Tracker shows that, since the Brexit referendum, the proportion of people who saw migration as having a positive impact on Britain has been steady at a little over 40%. The proportion seeing it as negative fell from 45% to a low point of 25% in 2019. But in the last two years that figure has risen again to 37%, closing the gap to only 6 points. The latest poll was done in mid summer, so it’s reasonable to speculate that the negative trend may have gone further since, given how dramatically the actual immigration numbers have changed in the last couple of years, as this graph from Jonathan Portes at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, shows:
Can the Conservatives find a political advantage in this?
If anything, the recent divergences in the longer-term trends which YouGov found, have played out badly for the Conservatives. Asked which party would best manage immigration, the Conservatives led until the middle of 2022. But then Labour overtook them, and they have held a consistent, if small (6 point) lead on the issue ever since.
Moreover, polling on individual government measures does not look promising for them. By 49%-20% people think its Rwanda policy is poor value for money, and by 42%-28% think the policy would damage the UK’s international reputation. Only 31% in that poll said the policy made them think more favourably of the Conservatives.
However, by 50%-35% people support increasing the salary required to qualify for a visa to £38,700, which suggests there are some measures that the government may pursue which may poll favourably.
But we know from past Budgets, and Autumn Statements in particular, that individual policies polling well does not necessarily add up overall to an improved political standing for the government.
There is also the risk of collateral damage. The continuing focus on immigration may be sustaining, or worsening, the public’s views of the Conservatives as disunited. Asking if the party is united, in the latest YouGov tracker, the Conservatives came out at net -62, compared with Labour at net -13. And with the Rwanda policy being a source of multiple ministerial resignations, it’s unlikely that the focus on immigration is helping on this front. Nor has the increasing focus on immigration and on small boats helped Sunak’s own personal ratings or those of the Conservative Party, at least so far.
So there are some parts of the basic picture that look to be changing, especially the rising concern about immigration among the reduced core of current Conservative voters and some of the voters they’ve lost since 2019. Some of the government’s policies also poll well when asked about in isolation.
Focusing on failure
Overall, though, it’s hard to see a consistent picture that suggests that a focus on immigration is a route to political success for the Conservatives. This is especially true when the public rates the party so poorly on the issue and when Labour is currently on around 44% in the polls (only slightly less than the Conservative winning share in 2019). Reclaiming some voters from Reform might raise the Conservatives from worse-than-Duke-of-Wellington to as-bad-as-William-Hague, but none of the above looks like it’s a route to success.
Especially as concentrating on this policy area may, rather than winning back those people who put it top of their list of reasons for switching from the Conservatives, end up in fact reinforcing and amplifying their defections. Is talking so much about something that’s been a vote loser for you up to now really going to help? Certainly the experience elsewhere in Europe suggests that trying to win back support from populist parties by moving onto their agenda is liable to fail.
Perhaps the only option available?
It’s worth ending though with two takes from other pollsters on why, despite the above, it may still make sense for the Conservatives to major on immigration.
First, James Johnson, former pollster to Theresa May and focus group provider to Times Radio. His argument is that it is rising immigration numbers which are pushing immigration up in levels of public concern, and that politicians have a duty to respond to the public mood:
The more a voice is denied, the louder it gets. If people do not feel like their concerns are being addressed by the mainstream, they will look to the fringes. This is what happened with Trump in America and is now happening again. This is what happened this week in Germany, where the far right AfD gained seats over consternation over immigrants.
The second argument, from pollster Anthony Wells, is that however unpromising immigration may look for the Conservatives, it’s still the best of a bad range of options (similar to a point pollster Luke Tyrl has also made):
People dunking on James Johnson for saying the Tories should go on immigration. They’re correct that it’s an awful issue for the Tories (people think they’ve handled it terribly & don’t trust them on it). But we are at a point where you can say that about almost everything. The question is more, is it ‘less bad’ than, say, the NHS or the economy? The Government are not in a position where there is a good, vote winning issue that everyone thinks they done brilliantly on…
Immigration is probably not a winning strategy for them. But sometimes there is no winning strategy. The choice is more one of which strategy limits the losses the most.
But even so, there is a long-term risk to that, as Matt Goodwin said in 2012:
Talking tough on the identity-axis will help mobilise the party’s older and core base, but over the longer term the strategy risks alienating the younger ranks. For the party to move strongly onto the territory of culture and identity, focusing to an even greater extent on immigration and cultural unity in the hope of gathering a national values coalition would seem to be choosing its present overs its future.
This article was originally published on Mark Pack’s Substack “The Week in Polls”
