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The lack of immigration plans in Theresa May’s Brexit deal show it up for the con it is. This isn’t taking back control

The prime minister knows her plans would please no one, so she wants to get Tory MPs to back her deal without knowing what they are. She must publish them now

Ed Davey
Friday 16 November 2018 13:25 GMT
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Brexit deal: Theresa May's draft withdrawal agreement explained

Remember when all Brexiteers wanted to talk about was immigration? “Take back control” they said over and over, while unveiling scaremongering posters showing dark-skinned crowds or just the word “TURKEY” in menacing capital letters.

But now that Theresa May wants MPs to sign off her long-awaited Brexit deal, immigration is the last thing she wants to talk about.

By their own admission, Leave campaigners stoked fears about immigration to sway voters to their cause. They exploited footage of desperate refugees making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and ludicrously implied that 76 million Turks were about to arrive on the shores of Kent. And it worked.

But once the referendum was over, it quickly became clear that the Brexiteers didn’t have any answers to the concerns they’d stirred up. An “Australian-style, points-based immigration system” – which had been spoken of as a panacea by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign – was dismissed by Theresa May soon after she became prime minister.

For her part, May has offered no specifics beyond her mantra that “freedom of movement will end”. She promised to set out her immigration proposals in a white paper last summer, but more than a year later there’s still no sign of it.

At first, I thought this was just the usual dithering and delay that accompanies most policy announcements – especially those involving the Home Office. But now it looks more like a deliberate strategy on the part of Theresa May.

The prime minister knows that her post-Brexit immigration plans will please no one, so she wants to get Tory MPs to back her deal without knowing what they are. May will promise her Brexiteer backbenchers that this deal will allow them to “take back control”, but she knows that’s a promise she can’t keep.

It’s a con, and we mustn’t let May get away with it. She must publish her immigration white paper before asking MPs to vote on the Brexit deal, so we all know exactly what we’re voting for.

At the moment, the best we’ve got to go on are the vague messages sent out by the Tories at their conference last month, suggesting that they plan to impose the visa system that applies to the rest of the world on EU citizens as well.

That would be a disaster for British businesses. Just 2 per cent of employers are able to sponsor visas for non-EU nationals. Extending that system to cover EU nationals would place a huge additional burden on the hundreds of thousands of businesses who employ them but don’t currently have to worry about visas.

Far from “taking back control” and cutting red tape as the Brexiteers like to pretend, Theresa May’s Brexit would leave British businesses with an invidious choice: a big increase in bureaucracy and costs or a major shortage of skilled workers.

And who would be left to administer this massively expanded, complex visa system? The Home Office, which is already unable to handle its current job of managing non-EU immigration. Scandal after scandal has left the Home Office thoroughly discredited. The idea of putting an even bigger portion of the economy in its hands should fill us all with dread.

So I’m confident that if Theresa May’s immigration proposals were part of the Brexit deal they’d be rejected by MPs on all sides of the House of Commons. The plans she floated at the Tory conference would be bad for the economy, bad for public services, and wouldn’t deliver on the promises made by the Leave campaign during the referendum.

And that’s precisely why they’re not part of the Brexit deal. Because Theresa May wants to push it through while avoiding a debate on one of the biggest issues that drove the vote to leave the EU.

That’s just not acceptable, and the Liberal Democrats demand better. Publish the immigration paper now, Theresa, so that MPs can scrutinise it before we decide whether to give you permission to press ahead with your version of Brexit.

Ed Davey is the Liberal Democrat MP for Kingston and Surbiton

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