Nigel Farage has dropped Ukip’s plan to cap immigration at 50,000 arrivals a year, saying his policy is now just a return to “normality”.
His u-turn throws the party’s stance on immigration into confusion on the day its leader is giving a flagship speech on the issue.
Just last Friday, Ukip’s immigration spokesman, Steven Woolfe, repeated the party’s policy that net migration would be capped at 50,000. But since then, David Cameron has come in for intense criticism for missing his 100,000 net migration target – with the actual figure almost three times that number.
Clarifying his policy, Farage said: “I’m not putting on caps or targets. You need to have more flexibility than that … You cannot have anything in politics without people obsessing over caps and targets and I think people are bored of it.”
However, he said the party’s plan for a five-year ban on unskilled immigrants meant the number would naturally be about 27,000.
He told the BBC: “I want to bring immigration to Britain back to normality – and normality from 1950 until nearly the year 2000, from Windrush onwards, normality was net migration into Britain which varied between about 20,000 and 50,000 a year. The effect of Ukip policies would be to bring us back to those kinds of numbers. Each year will be slightly different for obvious reasons, but what we’re pushing here represents a drastic cut.”
He added: “You can call it a target if you want to and I’m afraid the media’s obsession with targets is almost as bad as the political class’s obsession with targets and these don’t work … Let’s have a degree of flexibility. What we need to stop is the open door to unlimited numbers of unskilled migrants to coming to Britain because that’s where the problem is.”
He said Ukip would also set up a new migration control watchdog to bring down overall numbers.
George Osborne, the chancellor, accused Farage of “making it up as he goes along” after the Ukip leader ditched the 50,000 cap live on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
However, the Conservatives are themselves still struggling on immigration, having acknowledged their own target of less than 100,000 has been missed by so much. Osborne confirmed that reducing immigration to tens of thousands was still the party’s ambition going into the election.
Farage will be hoping to keep the issue of immigration in the headlines, given that a new ComRes/ITV poll showed that Ukip is more trusted on the subject than other parties. However, the party’s confusion over its policy will do little to improve its score for competence, with the same poll suggesting that 47% of people say it is not a credible party – up 11 points since last year.
The party’s immigration policy has chopped and changed substantially since the last election. Ukip previously said it wanted a five-year moratorium on all immigration, but then instead started talking about having an Australian point-style system that allows people in on the basis of their skills.
The final proposals due to be put forward by Farage on Wednesday morning appear to be a mixture of the two. He advocates a moratorium on unskilled worker visas for five years and a points-based system allowing in highly skilled workers with visas valid for up to five years. New arrivals would have to have private health insurance and not be allowed to claim any benefits for that period.
After that, those who qualify for highly skilled worker visas would be permitted to apply for permanent leave to remain “provided they have obeyed the law”.
On Tuesday night, Farage said the current system was “unsustainable, unfair and unethical”, given that it gave preference to EU migrants over those from outside Europe. “The British public has acknowledged that they can’t trust the other parties to be serious on immigration,” he said. “Despite Mr Cameron’s pledge, net migration is now up to 300,000 people per year.
“That’s why Ukip has developed a policy focused around an Australian-style points-based system, led by a newly formed Migration Control Commission, tasked with bringing numbers down, and focusing on highly skilled migrants and our Commonwealth friends – as opposed to the low-skilled, eastern European migration that the Tories and Labour have expanded.”
Despite Ukip’s dislike of new quangos, the party would set up a commission with a remit to bring down net immigration; the moratorium on unskilled workers would be reviewed annually.
The party would also increase border staff by 2,500 and rule out any amnesty on illegal immigration.
Although Ukip has ruled out joining any coalition and is likely to get only a handful of seats, the other parties will be carefully watching its immigration policy because of the potential impact of Farage’s party in key marginals.
The Conservatives argue that a vote for Farage could help let in Ed Miliband, while Labour is trying to cast the party as “more Tory than the Tories”.
Farage himself has declined to predict how many seats Ukip would win, apart from saying it will be more than people think. However, he has forecast that his party will take second place across much of England, where the Conservatives are weak in the north and Labour absent in the south.
Ukip will be hoping to regain some momentum with its immigration policy announcement after polls suggested the party might have lost ground to the mainstream parties in recent weeks.
Source: The Guardian
