No room at the inn

This week: the Tories unveil their loveliest immigration policy yet! Plus, some last episode titles, and a global map of how tall places are.

Theresa May’s father was a vicar. Her faith, Very Serious People often told us during her premiership, was an important source of her values.

So it was a source of some irritation to me that no one ever thought to ask which part of the Gospels, exactly, had guided the hostile environment policy, or inspired her other attempts to make this country as unwelcoming to foreigners as possible. In the same way, I cannot recall anyone ever asking Ann Widdecombe which part of Christian teaching she was thinking of when she suggested that the poor should deal with their inability to afford the luxury of a cheese sandwich by not eating the things. At risk of coming over like the “God I don’t believe in” passage in Catch 22, despite having no religion myself to speak, I’ve never quite understood why we simply accept that, when a politician says their values are guided by their faith, we generally assume this means “bit iffy on LGBT rights”: it’s never “big on refugees” or “thinks they should give all their money away”, is it?

Anyway: I was going to try to avoid British politics this week, in deference to my growing number of readers who are a long way from this island and thus, presumably, know little about it and care even less. But then this week Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the record net migration rate – 745,000 in 2022 – as “far too high”, and hurled up some new policy in a panic. From the spring, to qualify for a work visa in most sectors, migrants will need an offer of a job paying £38,700 or more, above the median salary and up nearly 50% on the current threshold of £26,200. Some sectors, notably health and social care, will be exempt from these rules; but those who don’t earn that £38,700 will no longer be able to bring over family members, regardless of which sector they work in, and regardless of whether they’re British citizens, too.

There are so many issues with this policy that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’ll reduce Britain’s competitive advantage in sectors, like science and higher education, where non-British people choose to work here for reasons other than money. It’ll wreck the NHS and social care system, which depend on immigrant labour to function and will struggle to recruit if workers can no longer bring their children. (Sure, you can argue that those systems should wean themselves off cheap migrant labour by hiring more staff domestically; but doing so would likely require substantial budget increases which ministers have made abundantly clear they have no intention of providing.) It means smugly telling the public that we are reserving not the best, but worst, paying jobs for the domestic workforce – and doing so just as we approach an election year. 

And it means telling British voters that they no longer have the right to bring someone they love to their own country, simply because they don’t earn enough money. The estimate doing the rounds for the proportion of the public affected is 73%; given that people are more likely to fall in love when they are young and not earning very much, that may well be an under-estimate. And on Tuesday night, the government declined to promise that this would not affect visa renewals for those who are already here. They’re literally telling the voters that, to get the numbers down, they’re going to deport their partners.

One reading of all this, given that the likely collapse in public services won’t hit for some time, is that it’s an attempt to salt the earth before the arrival of a probable Labour government. But the lack of clarity surrounding the announcements, combined with the outrage from Tory columnists who just realised this could affect people they like, too, suggests “open panic” is a more plausible explanation. My guess is that ministers, having read one too many tweets from right-wing pollsters about the surging vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform party, asked for ways to bring the headline number down, without stopping to think about what they will actually do. They may be about to discover that there are things the public care about more than raw numbers: their loved ones, for example, or their own personal rights.

There is at least one thing to be said in favour of the government’s latest immigration policy: at least nobody is claiming it’s their Christian faith that’s making them do it. 

An advert of sorts

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Some last episode titles 

All Good Things... Last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The phrase is used by Captain Picard’s nemesis/boyfriend Q in dialogue, but that feels like a sort of back formation. It’s there so that we autocomplete it with “come to an end”, to tell us that the voyage is over.¹ Which might be why it’s one of the earliest finales I can recall watching as a finale. 

Captain Picard and his biggest fan. Awww. Image: screenshot from ST:TNG.

Oddly enough the voyage wasn’t over at all. Even ignoring the fact one spin-off was already running, another would shortly start, and there have been approximately 247 other Star Trek shows since – the result, let’s be honest, as much of TNG’s success as that of the original series – this exact cast would be back in a movie before 1994 was out. They’d already started filming it.