Immigration limits are ‘playing with fire’

“In the last decade, net migration in some years has been over 200,000, which I think is too much. We plan to reduce net annual migration to the tens of thousands.”

These are not the words of Theresa May, but of David Cameron. He said them in 2010, when he was still leader of the opposition.

He failed dismally on this promise. After an initial drop in net migration after Cameron came to office, the figure soared to 332,000 in 2015. The promise haunted Cameron, but he just kept sticking to it.

But yesterday Theresa May indicated that, yet again, the pledge would feature in the Conservative manifesto ahead of the upcoming general election. She stated that it was important for the government to aim for “sustainable” levels.

May was attacked from both the left and the right. The Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron called the target “artificial”, while UKIP slammed the Tories for failing to keep past promises on immigration.

Politicians who make bold promises know they are playing with fire.

The Lib Dems’ pledge to oppose any increase to tuition fees, which were then raised when they entered government with the Tories, led to furious protests and to many students abandoning the party.

Another notable broken promise was Theresa May’s statement that she would not hold an early general election. Reacting to this in The Spectator, Isabel Hardman wrote that broken promises are a key reason why people, who have a “childlike sense of justice”, mistrust politicians.

The flip side of this is that politicians are “frightened of their own shadows to the extent that they do not want to make any sort of decision at all”.

But writing in The Atlantic, Brian Goldsmith points out that the majority of political promises are, in fact, kept. Barack Obama “delivered on about 70%t of his 2008 and 2012 campaign promises”. Many of the other 30% were blocked by Republicans. It was just the broken pledges that made all the headlines.

Should the unfulfilled pledges dampen our faith in politics?

Let’s be honest

Yes they should, say many indignant voters. Let’s not tiptoe around this: politicians who make promises they do not and cannot keep are flat-out dishonest. Radical promises are easy enough to announce, but voters want to see action. If politicians scaled back their proposals to achievable goals, people would to trust them.

“Minds change, circumstances alter,” reply others. It is unrealistic to expect politicians to keep every single promise they make, and actually the vast majority are kept. Such scepticism feeds into a dangerous mentality that says politicians are pathological liars. They do their best, so let’s not hold them to such ludicrous standards.