It is one of the most basic of political lessons to interpret events so that they support your argument. Theresa May has taken this workaday truth and developed it into an overarching narrative for her Brexit strategy. She is well on her way to pulling off an act of national self-harm, and in the total absence of a counter-strategy she is running away with the ball.
It was there again in her Lancaster House speech yesterday, this misconstruction of the leave vote: “The message from the public before and during the referendum campaign was clear,” she told the ambassadors and hacks gathered in surroundings of gilded imperial glory: “Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe.”
That is not true. As many of the Vote Leave campaigners were anxious to argue (and the British Election Study (BES) confirms), the Brexit vote was not about immigration. Immigration was never top of the list of concerns of leave voters, and it has only very rarely been top of the concerns of voters in national elections. The leave vote was about a complex web of issues to do with a sense of powerlessness, nostalgia, and a mistrust of people in general and experts in particular.
It is not, however, an accident that immigration has come to stand as shorthand for all of the above.
In the years of Labour dominance, the idea that immigration was the source of many of voters’ grievances, and that controlling it would be a magic bullet, was deliberately fostered by a Conservative party that couldn’t think of anything better to say to rival new Labour’s appeal.
From William Hague’s asylum clampdown pledge in 2001 to Michael Howard’s 2005 cap on asylum to David Cameron’s 2010 catastrophic decision to compromise his moderniser message with a promise to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, immigration controls have become the default escape route of the desperate politician fleeing electoral firestorm.
Conservative policy moved from being casual about nurturing positive public attitudes to immigration to deliberately legitimising hostility. From the early decision to cut the migration impact funds that Tony Blair had proposed in 2005 in order to tackle the sense of exclusion that was growing in poorer communities, to the “go home” vans, it is scarcely surprising that the BES analysis of the Brexit vote finds a lethal correlation between hostility to immigration and a sense of disempowerment.
Modernising Tories call their traditional policy strengths on crime and immigration the “old ladies”. When it seemed Gordon Brown might call a snap election in 2007, Cameron dusted them down and sent them out, and they’ve been on active duty ever since.
Yet May’s conspicuous focus on the net migration target as home secretary clearly has more to it than mere loyalty to the party line. Here was a pledge that could not be achieved while Britain was in the EU, a pledge that if it was achieved would severely constrict economic growth, that would unavoidably sour relations with the fastest growing regions of the world, and cripple higher education along the way.
She turned the pledge that Cameron had resorted to into her own. She fought epic and angry battles with economic ministers in cabinet to protect it. She sent out her junior ministers to fight for it. As a result, the stubbornly rising figure for net migration, now three times higher than the original pledge, is a quarterly rebuke to the government, a knife turned in the open wound of failure. Always in the public eye, never far from the front pages of the tabloids, it has acted like a fuel propellant on popular alienation from Westminster and Brussels.
There is something attractively novel in a prime minister with a sense of obligation to the promises made in manifestos, in the strict terms in which they are made. There is a good case to make for the claim that such loyalty to the idea of democracy is a necessary precondition to restoring confidence in Westminster. But there is something dangerously perverse in it too.
May’s determination to interpret the leave vote as a vote about immigration is a misframing that will have catastrophic consequences. Out of the single market, out of the EU: like politicians who refused to rearm in the 1930s because they hesitated to warn the country it would have to fight another war, May is squandering all the things that her speeches suggest she went into politics to achieve. Her promises to share prosperity more equally and to protect against the bad times more fairly are likely to be the first casualties of this false interpretation of her duty to democracy.