Immigration
Migration is Britain’s abortion. Nothing divides right from left in the UK in the way that immigration policy does; it engenders anger in more or less anyone who has an opinion on it. Polling data on the subject is surprisingly sketchy. One thing that we know for sure was that the Tory party ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket in 2005 and got thumped. Beyond that, the best I can do is a poll commissioned by the BBC in 2007. (You can use the hand to drag about, and the magnifying glass to zoom into and out of, the results table of the poll below.)

While Labour’s policies on immigration were heavily negative (72% against to 24% for), a slender majority thought that immigration helps the UK rather than harming it. A clearer plurality (37% to 27%) believed that immigration was specifically good for their community, although most respondents thought that it actually had no effect at all.

The idea that immigrants might pose a threat to public order and safety met with very low agreement (36%). On the ideas of immigration posing a threat to employment 52% agreed, 48% agreed that a lack of immigration might damage the economy. The most widespread agreement (62%) was with the idea that immigration might lead to Britain losing its identity. The young are far more pro-migration than the old; possibly reflecting any one, or a mixture of, the arguments that the young will need increased migration to pay for their pensions, the young have a markedly higher admiration for cultural diversity and a lack of investment in existing community structures, and the experience of the young shows that the idea of migration threatening employment is increasingly hollow.

So broadly speaking, the gap between left and right seems slight. Howard lost not necessarily because he argued for restricting immigration, but because he ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket; the position he occupied was fringe by the standards of Britain’s benignly migration-sceptic population. The positions of the three main parties are now broadly aligned with the will of the electorate: some migration, enough to keep the economy at a light simmer, just not too much.

This frothy summary masks deep divides.

The first big problem is the question of how much is too much. Britain once had one of the most liberal migration policies in the rich world, and migrants responded in kind – 5.6 million have entered Britain for a year or more over the last 13 years, and 1.6 million of them have been granted permanent residence. The population of the UK is set to rise to 70 million in the next two decades, and that worries many of those who already live in crowded, congested cities and have to cope with stuttery underfunded public services.

There is some irony to the effects that this has had. Recent curbs on migration have made truth of a lie. One of the earliest complaints against migrants was that the influx was causing British people to lose out on jobs, driving wages down and inflating unemployment. At the time this was a gross distortion, masking more deep-seated prejudices; most migrants were unskilled labourers, and Britain had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. There seems to have been some downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the job market, but on one estimate they have fallen by less than 1%: the national minimum wage means that pay for people over 22 cannot legally go below £5.93 per hour, and many of these jobs were on that baseline already. The low-paid, outdoor, tiring jobs that Poles and Lithuanians have often taken are not ones that the long-term unemployed in Britain seemed wild about turning out for. Had Britain not imported the workers, it might have had to export the jobs. It became an issue regardless, however, and Labour reacted reflexively. The immigration controls that they implemented had the unintended consequence of making the criticisms that inspired them true, at least to a limited extent. By implementing curbs on unskilled migrants, Labour encouraged skilled migrants to arrive in the UK in greater numbers – most of whom settled down in congested London and rather than the parts of Britain that actually lacked labour.

That’s the preamble; what about the policy? Well, the Tories have proposed a tighter cap on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK annually, while Labour want another crack at implementing a points-based system (which would effectively also function as a cap, but with a more rigorous process of selection). The Lib Dems agree, but go further still, saying that they will have regional points-based schemes in which each part of the country will be able to calibrate its own priorities, ensuring that migrants are sent to the areas where they are most needed. While EU law reduces the flexibility that the parties have when dealing European migration, the Tories have stated that they would place an absolute limit on annual non-EU inflows, although this is a task made near-impossible by the time-lag in the publication of reliable statistics on migration. The Tories would also force foreign students to pay a “bond” upon entering the country, to be repaid when they leave. This is a deeply stupid idea that borders on the criminally negligent; Britain’s universities are almost entirely propped up by these students’ lucrative tuition fees, and disincentivising these students from coming to the UK can only have a negative impact on our education system and thus all aspects of our social and economic future.

A large part of the UK’s problems with migration is that much of the legislation has been knee-jerk, riddled with unintended consequences; and this is partly because the information that the UK generates and gathers about migration have historically been lacking. The Lib Dems have pledged to improve border recording. Labour’s ID cards, regardless of their other demerits, would have the effect of enhancing the information available on migratory trends. Labour also want to insist upon harder English tests for entrants and promise to ensure that all customer-facing public service workers have an “appropriate” level of English, acknowledging that the problem is as much one of perception as fact. The Lib Dems will use some of their Trident / Mansion Tax money to bolster the border guard.

Advantage? Still not the Tories, who stubbornly refuse to accept that a problem this complex needs a solution that is more nuance than “squeeze harder”. Not Labour, who really have no new ideas beyond the ID cards, which are troublesome for other reasons. The Lib Dems have an interesting suite of proposals; the regional points-based system, the enhanced border guards and the greater focus on data-gathering seem like a sensible half-step in the right direction, if implemented correctly. But in truth, all three parties deserve a lot of the blame for the fact that it’s impossible to have a sensible debate about migration policy in the UK. Some level of migration is clearly needed, but wanting to manage the way in which our economy handles that migration makes good tactical sense. All three parties need to abandon the more extremist elements of their rhetoric and devote some serious attention to the actual effects of immigration policy, and come up with a suite that meets the needs of the country. At present, none of them do.

Crime and policing
There are three issues at stake when talking about crime. The first is how to deter them, the second is how to catch those who won’t be deterred, and the third is what to do with them after that. Britain is average at the first, very good at the second, and lousy at the third.

First, I’ll look at the second part, because some errors in the electoral propaganda of both the Tories and Labour need to be straightened out. Crime has been falling in the UK uninterrupted for the last 15 years. It’s currently at its lowest rate since before World War 2, and is some 45% lower than it was when Labour took power. Violent crime, the crime that tends to excise, is at its lowest rate since 1991. Labour deserve a lot of credit for that, as do the police forces of the UK – particularly the Metropolitan Police in London – who have modernised their methods, drastically reduced the corruption in their own ranks, and increased the level to which their communities support them. People are generally much happier about the level of criminality in the UK than they were twenty years ago. However: crime is an election issue, because crime is always an election issue. ‘Twas ever thus.

The parties are thus fixing their sights downwards, at what is termed “anti-social behaviour”. The Tories plans are pretty anaemic; they want to crack down on bars that sell alcohol to children, increasing fines and making it easier to shut down repeat offenders. Labour have more teeth, but their policies remain avowedly statist; more benchmarks for chief constables to meet, including the power to sack police heads if they don’t “improve standards”. On the other hand, they have a stated policy to allow “restorative justice” – ‘where they are able to tell offenders directly how their actions affected them and accept an apology’ – which is a bit bewildering. The Lib Dems will put more police on the streets (that pot of Trident and Mansion Money is going to run out soon, guys), and will put prisoners to work in a policy that may just contravene several key facets of existing human rights legislation. Punishments for anti-social behaviour may also be devolved to local Justice Panels under Lib Dem proposals.

All parties agree that the paperwork and centrally-imposed targets designed by Labour to drive up standards must be reduced, to eliminate the perverse incentives that they created. The Tories would like to abolish the form that officers must fill in when they stop someone to search or question him; details would be speedily radioed back to the station instead. The police themselves are making some efforts to get a bit leaner: the head of Scotland Yard recently announced that officers in London would walk the beat alone, rather than in pairs, in order to increase the number of patrols.

Incarceration remains the big problem, however.

Britain’s prisons are underfunded and wildly overcrowded. Labour are taking an amusing shot at corporate fraudsters, insisting that high-earning offenders will need to foot the bill for their own incarceration. But the party that has done the most to come up with creative solutions to the problem is the Tories, who would sell off old prisons (which often occupy prime real estate) to finance the building of new, modern, larger prisons in more remote areas. The credit crunch may affect that policy but it still seems reasonable to expect that selling off Wandsworth Prison would easily finance a larger, more effective construction somewhere outside of the Home Counties. This should create a virtuous cycle; more space means better resourcing for rehabilitation, which means reduced recidivism.

The Tories are also planning, however, to initiate some upheaval in the current sentencing regime. They propose to scrap the automatic release on parole that many prisoners enjoy after service half of their sentence, forcing them to “earn” their early escape instead. What form this “earning” will take remains opaque, but it seems clear that this will drastically increase the prison population. Given the financial pressure the next government will experience, this policy seems unlikely ever to see the light of day.

When it comes to preventing crime and recidivism, all three parties are clearly constrained by budgetary priorities. All parties agree that more needs to be done to treat drug addicts rather than imprisoning them; Labour will support “family interventions” rather than implementing new policies. The Lib Dems and the Tories have both made vague promises about enhancing rehabilitation policies but there are no new ideas here.

The Lib Dems are generally not to be found on the issue of crime. Their claim of 3,000 more police is eye-catching but given the fall in crime, and the fact that the number of police officers has risen by nearly 30% in the last decade, suggest that it may even be overkill. Labour have some smart policies but their lack of ideas on prison reform is distressing. For that reason it seem to me that the Tories have the strongest suite of crime-related proposals.