A new consensus is emerging. Low or even negative net migration is good and what voters want. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood remarked last November, when UK net migration stood at 170,000, that “when I first came into parliament, back in the days of 2010 and onwards, we were talking about migration in the tens of thousands, so I would say it is still pretty high”. The few politicians who do acknowledge the negative implications for national income and tax revenue – a potential £7bn hit to headroom in this month’s Budget – argue that Whitehall can offset them. Foreign workers are now an “addiction,” as Keir Starmer put it, that must be replaced with homegrown employment.
But this consensus has now been complicated by Andy Burnham’s Labour conference speech. In Liverpool, the Prime Minister declared that he would reopen the debate on the UK-EU relationship. Burnham says he will consider all options, from a customs union to the single market to Rejoin. Free movement of people will be the EU’s price for any deal that substantially reduces the cost of Brexit.
This is because the EU remains committed to the policy that all four freedoms of the single market must go together: goods, services, capital and people. Without the latter, British businesses will not gain substantially greater access to the other freedoms. The helpful but minimal UK-EU ‘reset’, which would trade small reductions in trade barriers for a youth mobility scheme, represents the limits of either side’s ambition to date. As a result, the UK is saying ‘no thanks’ to a large amount of potential national income gained through higher trade, migration and investment with the EU.
