Tories want lower migration while skipping the unsayable on taxes

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Good morning. Sun rise, sun set. Another row within the Tory party over immigration. Some thoughts below on the latest one and what it tells us not just about immigration but about British politics more broadly.

Whatever it takes

There’s a lot going on in Anna Gross’s scoop that the government is considering paying lawyers working on UK immigration cases 15 per cent more in order to attract more legal professionals.

One part is that it is a reminder of a neglected truth in UK politics, which is that restricting immigration is a spending commitment just as much as putting more teachers in schools, building more hospitals and putting more police on the streets.

Political parties have a tendency, both internally and externally, to treat immigration as some kind of magical policy area where the usual trade-offs don’t apply. But if, as the latest Conservative internal pressure group does, you want to cut the number of social worker visas and international student visas, you have to be willing to put more money into the UK’s social care sector and more money into supporting universities in the UK. If you want to clear the UK’s immigration backlog quicker, you need to spend more on lawyers.

As long as the Conservatives remain in office, this part of the party’s immigration debate goes largely unspoken but it does act as a brake of sorts on the party’s desire to promise yet more restrictions. Freed from constraints of holding office — as I continue to believe is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the next election — and you better believe the Tory party is going to commit to all sorts of expensive positions on migration.

But the other part is bigger than just the politics of immigration. There are important areas where the UK’s problems are about more than money: such areas include the effectiveness of the country’s police, the subject of a series of damning reports and a fascinating new set of proposals by the Tony Blair Institute, as well as the NHS’s longstanding struggles to invest in adequate capital expenditure, the subject of a great report by Rachel Wolf and Sam Freedman. But while some of the UK’s problems are about “reform not money”, quite a lot are about “money and reform” and some of them are just about money.

A recurrent theme I return to in this newsletter are the political risks to the Labour party over tax rises, and the risks to the Conservative party over tax cuts. How can these both possibly be the case, some readers ask.

Well, my general sense when I travel round the country and when I think about the expert assumptions that will shape part of the next general election campaign, is that most people think, rightly in my view, that spending is going to keep going up and so too will taxes.

The risk for Labour is that the party will always be seen as the party that will want to put taxes up that little bit more. If the Conservatives also look like they are heading that way, Labour risks looking like a party of excessive tax rises. But the risk for the Tory party is that any pre-election tax cut looks either like a cynical and meaningless bribe, or like a party that is no longer reality-based.

So there are risks to both parties on tax and those anxieties will continue to shape what both parties do, this side of an election at least.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Beethoven’s fifth symphony while writing my column, in part because it’s a brilliant piece of music and in part because I am trying to listen to as many different conductors’ take on it ahead of seeing it as part of this year’s Proms. Let me know if there are any recordings you particularly enjoy.

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• Bridget Phillipson on Labour’s early-years education push | More graduate teachers would be parachuted into nurseries under plans being considered by Labour to improve education for under-fours, the Guardian has learned.

• Doubts raised about Yousaf claims | Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has been reported by the Scottish Tories to Britain’s statistics watchdog for allegedly making “grossly misleading” claims about the health benefits of minimum alcohol pricing, the Telegraph reports.