Can We Be Great Again? Jeremy Hunt on how to solve mass migration

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0:39Camilla: Well, welcome to this very special edition of The Daily Tea. We are doing a series with Jeremy Hunt, former Chancellor, Foreign Secretary. Many ministries I could name, Jeremy, but it's about your book, Can We Be Great Again? And to mark this momentous moment, we do have a union flag teapot instead of our traditional yellow one on The Daily Tea. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about migration. And we're going to be joined by Madeleine Sumption, who is the director of the Migration Observatory, and Alex Chalk, the former Tory MP for Cheltenham, but a useful man in this debate because of your legal knowledge.

1:13Camilla: You have now returned to the law and you are continuing to work as a barrister.

1:27first of all though jeremy why write the book well the book is really an argument that we should get out of being down in the dumps as a country because we have a lot more influence in the world than we think we have. We've been through a miserable period with the global financial crisis, the Brexit wars that set one side of the country against the other, the pandemic, the energy shock. And there's a sort of view that we are in terminal decline. And I was kind of interested to analyze whether that's true. And what I did was I took the biggest problems the world faces from the future of democracy to European security to the migration crisis, which we're going to discuss today, climate change, all these issues.

2:14And I said, what do the experts say about how much influence the UK has? And what I found is that without any doubt at all, out of 193 countries in the United Nations, we are always in the top 10 most influential. We've got lots of problems. This is not trying to minimize the challenges we face. But in a very dangerous moment for the world, I think countries with influence need to roll their sleeves up and try and sort out some of these problems. And frankly, migration is one of the very biggest ones because, you know, the big misconception is that this is a British crisis. It is a global crisis because the world has got so much richer that people can afford to move in a way that has never been true before in human history.

3:04And of course, when people can move, they do move. And we need to work out a solution. And as we'll discuss, I think the UK is in a very good position to help solve that issue.

3:15Camilla: OK, Madeleine, let's talk about some of the statistics, because I do think that immigration is a major topic of conversation in Britain in 2025. Jeremy's book, as a former Foreign Secretary Wood, talks about the issue of border control, but also talks about our relationship with other countries, not least in the developing world, the relationship between us and aid and immigration, and of course, and Alex, this is where we'll bring you in, lawfare and whether the ECHR should be reformed. So we'll get into all of those issues. But first of all, can you talk us through some stats? Where are we at with immigration in the UK and how has the picture changed under the Conservatives in comparison to the Blair government?

3:56Well, the picture has changed a lot over the last few years. We've been on a real rollercoaster ride. The measure that gets used most in this country is net migration. So that's the number of people coming to the UK minus the number of people leaving for at least a year in each case. And if you look at that broad brush figure, basically we were sort of bumbling along at around two to three hundred thousand per year of net migration for most of the 2010s. Back in the 1990s, it was very low. That was true in a lot of countries. Actually, a lot of countries saw a big increase in migration around the late 1990s.

4:31And then we had EU enlargements. We had a lot more people coming here from the EU, more people coming from non-EU countries on visas, including in the health service. And so it was around that time that there was a lot of debate about migration, a lot of discussion about how to get migration down. Conservative government, of course, comes in in around 2010 with a pledge to significantly reduce net migration to the UK and then brought in some more restrictive policies. Initially, that had some impact and we did start to see a decrease. But then what happened was you had EU migration taking off during the Eurozone crisis.

5:01So after the financial crisis, a lot more people started coming here, particularly from Southern Europe. You then had people from Romania and Bulgaria getting unrestricted access to the labour market in 2014. So we had actually a little bit of a spike, although looking back from where we are now, it doesn't look like a spike anymore in the data. But we had a little bit of spike going up to over 300 ,000 net migration just before the referendum. Obviously, immigration was a massive point of debate in the referendum. The numbers then started to decline. We had the pandemic. So we got our lowest figure for a while during the pandemic because everything was shut down, including a lot of global movement.

5:34And then the post-Brexit immigration system came in. And what's interesting about this was that system was brought in. The whole idea was that immigration was going to fall. And actually, if you looked at all the projections that suggested immigration would fall based on the policies that the Conservative Party introduced at the time, the flagship part of which was ending free movement for EU citizens. And we did, in fact, see a huge decline in EU migration and net migration. What then happened that was unexpected was that there had been some liberalizations toward non-EU migrants. And part of the debate, actually, there was a debate during the referendum about, you know, well, maybe if we restrict free movement, that creates a bit more space to be more liberal to the rest of the world.

6:11And that's exactly what happened. But I think then the response, the prospective migrants response to those new policies was much more enthusiastic than anyone expected. So we had a lot more people coming as international students taking up this offer to be able to work after their studies. The government opened a route for people to come and work in the care sector, expecting maybe a few thousand people to come in. And in the end, in a single year, we had more than 100 ,000 care workers joined by more than 100 ,000 family members. Of course, you then, 2022 in particular, had the war in Ukraine.

6:42And there was a new visa open for Hong Kongers leaving the situation in Hong Kong. And so all of those things added together and led to dramatically higher net migration than anyone expected. The peak was just over 900 ,000 around 2022 to 2023.

6:57Camilla: Okay. So, yeah, much higher. We're now on a downward trajectory. The numbers are coming down. Although there's arguably no other direction they keep going after that peak high of nearly a million. The reason that you've been able to have such a big reduction is because the numbers were quite so high. It's much easier to have a 400 ,000 decline in that migration over a single year if the numbers were, you know, 800 ,000 or 900 ,000. So we're going to talk about legal migration and illegal migration. Alex Chalk, do you think you lost your seat because your friend and Conservative colleague, Rishi Sunak, could not stop the boats?

7:28Not for that reason alone. No, I think on the streets in Cheltenham, the elastic of public trust snapped candidly when Dominic Cummings sat in the Rose Garden and said, I went to Bonnard Castle to test my eyesight. There was an audible twang at that moment and I knew that it was going to be impossible to pull that back. And I don't want to get into the weeds of party and all that kind of stuff. Some people say it was overblown. It doesn't really matter. In Cheltenham, it was a massive deal. Then when there was the follow on impact of the Liz Trust period, there was no doubt at that point it was terminal.

8:00So I knew it was coming. So notwithstanding the points that we're going to discuss today, which are properly made and which I feel very keenly. And my constituents also felt the truth is the die was cast and the way was set. Public Trust had, I'm afraid, snapped.

8:14Camilla: Jeremy, on immigration and Tory failure to control immigration, that famous tens of thousands pledge, that was made by David Cameron. It was repeated by Theresa May. Boris Johnson comes in. He seems to be intensely relaxed about mass migration. How problematic has it been? Well, I think it was problematic in a lot of other seats. Lots of Conservative seats, about half the Conservative seats in Surrey were lost. not because of an increase in voters switching to the Lib Dems as much as Conservatives losing their votes to reform. And in Surrey, the reform vote was about 12 % on average. They're not particularly likely to win a seat in Surrey, but that was enough to deprive half my colleagues of their seats because we used to have all the seats in Surrey.

9:04And I think that is the fundamental reason why we have to sort this out. By the way, why I would want a Labour government to sort it out, any government to sort it out, because, you know, cards on the table. I'm married to an immigrant. I think one of the best things about our country is that for centuries, actually, we have welcomed the brightest and best from all over the world. It's, you know, if you look at the fact that we've got the second largest number of Nobel Prize winners of any country after America, around half of them are foreign born. And this is a great thing about our country, but the social consensus around that is fraying to the point of snapping because people worry that governments cannot control borders.

9:50And I don't want to lose that British generosity, which I think has been the heart of what has made us a great country. So we need to get on and solve this problem. And we failed, bluntly, as a conservative government. I think that Labour will bitterly regret cancelling the Rwanda scheme.

10:09Camilla: Well, let's bring in Madeleine on that because would Rwanda have worked? That's the question, isn't it? Well, it depends on things that we don't know about how it would have been implemented. I think the biggest single question about Rwanda was how many people were actually going to be sent there. Now, the previous government was a little bit cagey about the precise numbers. and you say, well, this is uncapped, but then there was sometimes suggestions that maybe we're talking a couple of thousand people. I think, broadly speaking, these kinds of schemes, and actually the same sort of logic would apply to any deal that Labour might do with the EU, which has also been discussed, is that if you want to have a sort of deterrence programme, if you send a small percentage of people as a largely symbolic measure, it's not necessarily going to have a big difference.

10:50The thing that makes a difference, because people aren't very well informed about migration policy, right, and asylum policies, So what they see is what actually happens to people that they know who cross the channel. Do those people settle successfully? Are those people removed? If you'd had a scenario where 80 % of people who cross the channel in small boats were sent to Wuranda, then yes, I think it probably would have had a very large impact. If you'd had a situation where it was just a symbolic programme sending a few hundred people, I think it would have probably had very little difference.

11:16Camilla: There's a killer line in this book, Jeremy, where you summarise the problem. The Refugee Convention makes it too easy for people to come to the UK and the ECHR makes it too difficult to deport them if they shouldn't be here. How do we sort this out? Because, of course, as we all know, there's a debate going on, not just in the Tory party, but in the country about the ECHR. And it's slightly triggering, I think, because we're now talking about, you're talking about reforming our relationship with the ECHR and how it applies to our own domestic laws, particularly when it comes to immigration. you've then got other figures like Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage saying we just need to leave this treaty.

11:57Camilla: Alex? The first thing to say is that the situation at present is completely intolerable. You cannot have a situation, and I say this as somebody who might in the past have talked a lot about upholding the rule of law which is incredibly important, but the rule of law, yes, means that no one is above the law, get all that. But what it also means is there should be no benefit to people who break the law. And at the moment, the law is being brought into disrepute because people are acting illegally. And for the avoidance of doubt, Immigration Act has made clear for 50 years that you can't simply get on a small boat and tip up having crossed the channel.

12:31And yet there doesn't appear to be what lawyers might pompously call condign punishment. So that is undermining the rule of law. So the status quo is completely unacceptable. That's point one. Point two, is it certainly true that the European Convention on Human Rights, which contains things like Article 3, prohibition against torture in human and degrading treatment, which I'm sure we'd all agree with, which was forged in the ashes of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau and those sorts of horrors. I think there are a lot of people who say, well, hang on, how is that being applied to circumstances where people have willingly got on a boat from a safe country and have headed to the UK?

13:05And so I think there is a disconnect. Now, we have to reform it and we have to reform it aggressively. And the point is, when I was in office, I remember going to the G7 and I dug it out for this podcast, saying that international law of which the ECHR is but a part, don't forget being in NATO is also part of international law, but international human rights law is being brought into disrepute because it is appearing like, I use the expression, an ossified relic that's gathering dust on some shelf. And if it doesn't adapt, it will face irrelevance at best or contempt at worst. And that is where I think we are headed.

13:41But the interesting thing was, is when I was sitting there in Venice, saying to my French counterparts, saying to my German counterparts, we are really in, if not the last chance saloon, we're getting quite close on this. We have got to adapt and adapt fast. That message was not resonating. and yet since with this letter that's gone into the Strasbourg court from these I think 14 nations or whatever it is of which Britain isn't one surprisingly saying we need to change this and change radically there is definitely a mood chip but what was fascinating as I say when I was in Venice at the G7 is I was saying these things and I really felt quite strongly about it and yet there was a palpable sound of dumbledweed

14:20Camilla: We seem to be applying the ECHR more to our own domestic law and our management of our borders than other European nations that seem to be able to disapply it at will. That's just my impression. I could be wrong. Telegraph readers will be familiar with a number of different cases where Charles Hymas, the Home Affairs editor, has reported extensively on cases where I think there would be a public belief that the person should be deported because they are an actual criminal who have committed crimes against British citizens while they've been here, often illegally or indeed seeking asylum. and British judges have said, no, we can't deport you for various reasons, including because your child might not like eating foreign chicken nuggets, because actually you've stayed here quite a long time, so you might find it difficult to readjust to life back home.

15:10Camilla: Or in a recent case, which most people, I think their heads may have exploded, you know, you're a criminal and you've committed crimes, so if we send you back to your home country, you may be treated badly there or persecuted because you're a criminal. so we'll just keep you in the UK instead. Alex? I mean, that of course is completely unacceptable. I just want to, if I may, the very brief point to the question you asked about do other countries obey this stuff? So one of the cases that resonated when we were in office is the ECHR said to the Swiss government, hold on a minute, in respect of a case that had been brought by some Swiss women about climate change, your government sovereign policy is in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights because it's not aggressive enough in terms of bringing down emissions.

15:55And this was an extraordinary overreach from the ECHR. And the Swiss parliament just said, no, we're not going to comply with it. Now, we do have some history in this country as well, when there was the prisoner voting stuff that you may remember, David Cameron said it made him physically sick. Now, we found a way of sort of complying with it in name only, but actually not really. But it is the case that the UK has one of the strongest records of compliance. And by the way, that is part of what makes us a great nation, that when we sign up to SAF, we are a reliable partner. The issue has been that there has been material overreach in certain cases.

16:33The Swiss climate case, I mean, it has no business, I'm afraid, intruding upon domestic policy so far as climate emissions. It's simply not their remit any more than it does intruding on British decisions about whether we give prisoners the vote.

16:46Camilla: Jeremy Hunt, summon your bulldog spirit here. What are the solutions? because you think unbelievably Keir Starmer, a man who once famously declared in his earlier political days that any immigration control is inherently racist, you think he's got the answer to this problem? Well, I think he could because he is a human rights lawyer who knows this law backwards. You know, he's practised as a barrister. And if there was one person who was going to lead an international movement to rip up and rewrite international law around migration. He would actually have enormous credibility. Whether he's prepared to do it or not, I have no idea and haven't seen any sign, sadly, so far.

17:28But he would certainly be able to do it. I want to just ask Alex a question, if I may, following up what you just said, which is absolutely fascinating. If it is against the law and has been for 50 years just to come to this country illegally on a small boat, the question I get asked on the doorstep, I'm sure you did, is why can't we just send the Royal Navy in and stop it? Well, there are several issues about that, but Madeleine will know as well. Basically, part of the issue is intercepting small vessels at sea. You've got the international law of the sea, and in effect, if you act in a way which imperils people, so they end up willingly or otherwise jumping into the ocean and dying, then there are international laws which we would be in breach of.

18:06That's point one. But the second point is the one that Madeleine makes. You can't just scoop them up and just say, right, we're going to put them on play and land somewhere. if that country doesn't give you landing permission. So that is the awkward situation. The other point that is worth making as well, which I think sometimes is lost in this debate, is the one which really bears emphasis. We talk about the ECHR because it's kind of the fashionable thing. People know what the initials mean and so on. But when we were in government, we got whacked by the Supreme Court in this devastating judgment, November 2023, about the Rwanda policy.

18:35And the Supreme Court was at pains to say, this ain't just about the ECHR, by the way. even if you were to remove that. And do you remember the issue was non-refoulement, whether in fact we were able to say as a British government that we weren't sending people back to places where unspeakable things would happen to them. And what the Supreme Court said, listen, even if you were to been off the ECHR, you've got the ICCPR, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. You've got the UN Refugee Convention. You've also got domestic legal obligations. And so when we're having this debate, which is immensely important for the rule of law, for who we are as a people, for safeguarding our borders, for all these things that are massively important, We also have to have our eyes open and to proceed clearly and not gull the British people into saying, well, rip off the plaster of the ECHR and all your problems go away.

19:20That is not the case. Alex shows a really important point here, which I think people often don't fully understand, which is that we are incredibly reliant on other countries in this area of policy. It's really hard to do anything unilaterally. As Alex said, you can't just scoop people up and dump them in France if France says no. You can't go into French waters and intercept people there if France says no. So the key example that's used a lot in the media is Australia, which did successfully prevent unauthorized maritime arrivals. And the reason that they were able to do it was that they had cooperation of other countries.

19:49They ran offshore processing in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. And the thing that probably was most effective actually was just physically intercepting boats and turning them back. And they were able to do that partly because there were international waters between them and Indonesia, but partly just because Indonesia allowed them to do it and turned a blind eye to the turnbacks. And so I think in this area in particular, it's incredibly difficult to think of any solutions. You know, the Rwanda deal was also a form of cooperation. Labour's interested in cooperating with the EU. It's very difficult to think about how to address that without having some really strong partnerships with other countries that are willing to work with us.

20:22Camilla: The same must be said of smashing the gangs. Yes. I mean, I think, you know, having been someone who in government has tried to solve a million different problems, you know, thinking about my time in the health service. I think when you have a crisis like this, you have to say, we're just going to attack it from every single front. So I would support, for example, digital ID cards. If that was part of the solution, I would support reforming international law. But if necessary, and we have to leave these conventions, if that was the only solution, I would support that. But I would prefer to reform the international law around it.

20:56because I think in the end, if you want to stop small boats coming across the channel, you need to stop them coming across the Med first. And so I think as a long-term solution, it would be better to have international law that worked. Then I think, you know, the Rwanda scheme or versions of it with large numbers of people, you need to send a signal to people thinking of coming here that if you come here illegally, in a matter of days or weeks, you'll be on a plane somewhere else. And you have to do all of these things. But just to be a little bit more positive, I do think this is a solvable problem.

21:30I mean, if you look at the big crises the British state has faced in the last 50 years, we've faced many of an equivalent magnitude. And when there has been the political will, we have found a way to solve it. And I think this is one of those examples. But my worry is that although the numbers are a relatively small proportion of overall migration, it is the failure to control illegal migration that is causing people to lose confidence that elected politicians are actually in control. I completely agree with that. And, you know, I think this is as much in Labour's interests as in the Conservatives' interests, because underlying this movement away from the two main parties that we're seeing in the polls at the moment and strengthening this Nigel Farage uni party argument is this sense that, you know, on a basic issue, like stopping people coming here illegally and, you know, us ending up with a huge bill for hotels and asylum processing and so on, the elected politicians just can't solve it.

22:32And I have to say, I think people are right to be angry about this. The situation is intolerable. What is the point, so the argument goes, in a democratic system, if democratically elected parties, each of them say, we're going to sort this out, pick your slogan, smash the gangs, whatever. If they can't do it, then the sense of alienation is absolutely palpable. And Camilla, my worry about Keir Starmer and this administration is that they start, as I do, from a balanced, quite liberal view of the benefits of migration. But, you know, after 14 years in government, I ended up being very hard-line because I could see not tackling this problem with incredible energy was going to destroy confidence in the two-party system we've had for a very long time and corrode politics.

23:21Now, I think that Keir Starmer has reacted to the drubbing that Labour had in the polls at the hands of reform by doing the wrong thing. U-turns on the winter fuel payment, which frankly make him and Rachel Reeves look weak. More backtracking on benefit reform, when actually the root of reform's popularity is people's anger about migration. Totally agree. This is where we need to see the energy from this government. If Kirsten Barber just gets to this point in three years' time, it'll be too late.

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24:41Camilla: Can I just make a point on if we are going to move into legal migration or even illegal migration turning into legal migration and people gaining asylum here and settling here and all the rest of it? Isn't there a perception among the electorate who for far too long have been told that if they express any concern about immigration at all, they're a bigot and a racist? As far as they're concerned, the genie is now out of the bottle. You know, you cited at the beginning, Madeleine, that statistic about where we were with net migration before 1997 and where we are now. And we are talking about a thousand percent plus rise in legal migration from before Tony Blair to after.

25:23Camilla: And people fear being accused of being xenophobic for expressing concerns about that. Some of these statistics, they may seem scaremongering, Madeleine, but is this the picture moving forward? I think the reality is this is actually a very tolerant country. If you look at things like the World Values Survey, which asks people the same questions in a number of different countries, and you ask them things like, you know, would you have a problem living next door to an immigrant family? Almost no one would say yes in that country. Even if it's that they know what they're supposed to say, you know, that matters too.

25:54And all of those measures of racism, they've declined a lot over time. And generally the UK comes out pretty well in all of those metrics compared to other places, you know, even places like France. I think the key problem on the politics, and I'm just sitting in a room with two politicians here on your views on this. One's former, I don't speak. Sorry, a politician. One's a politician, Alex. Is that the political marketplace, as far as I can see, creates an incentive for people to say, I have a solution. It's oven ready. If you vote me in, I will implement this thing and the problem will go away.

26:26The problem will be fixed. And so you've got this incentive to overpromise. And so it's not just the underdelivery that's the problem. It's those two things come together, that the promises being made are sometimes just not promises that can even feasibly be kept, like smash the gangs, for example, or arguably the 100 ,000 net migration target. There were ways to reach the 100 ,000 net migration target, but the Tory party at the time was not even thinking about implementing them. So I think that is part of the challenge as well. It's not just that governments haven't done what they said they were going to do, but the things that they said they were going to do in the first place were not realistic.

26:58Alex? Well, this is something that, you know, the amazing thing about being out of politics is it gives you a chance to breathe, to view Britain and often viewing Britain from abroad. So I've spent a lot of time in the States and I've had this really strong sense going there. And there's a country which is even more diverse than Britain. And yet they put so much time and effort and energy into developing what it means to be an American. And they take overt pride in that everywhere you go. It is infused into the body politic. Just recently, I was going around a factory in Pennsylvania. And there in the burn room where they were testing these materials, there's a huge US flag up on the wall.

27:38This is just a standard business. Driving past the homes, they've got flags outside people's homes. There is this pride and we have neglected that in Britain. And the thing that is so interesting is that those who purport to be doing something good and decent and kind and enlightened by very often beating up Britain, saying we should be in this groveling crouch about our history, etc. are actually doing an unkindness very often to young people, but also to those coming to our country because there is a cultural anomie. You know, there's a cultural lack of understanding. And the point that Jeremy makes, which is a really powerful one, is yes, we are an open, tolerant country for the brightest and the best who want to come here.

28:14We want to welcome people like that, but we should do so under the cloak of what it means to be British. But because we've neglected all that, there is a rootlessness that I think is much the most damaging thing about Britain. And so we have to get on the front foot and do things like, I think, which might sound radical, you know, schools should have a union flag. Now, that is in America as well. That's absolutely standard. If you were to do that in Britain and say that every school has to have a union flag flying in the playground, there would be a rebellion. It's so interesting because the Conservatives have pioneered the absolutely superb benefits of immigration with its own leaders.

28:47Camilla: We had American born, I think it is, Boris Johnson, Turkish blood, quite a mixed race person in many respects. Then, of course, we have a British Asian prime minister in Rishi Sunak, a kind of prime example. He gave such a compelling case for the power of immigration in his maiden speech and continued that throughout his premiership. And now Kemi Badenok, a British Nigerian at the head of the Conservatives. And yet this real angst among your electorate, particularly those people who have gone to reform about this very issue. Absolutely. I mean, when the Hunt family and the Sunak family were living in Downing Street, you had two couples, one born in India, one born in China, one an Indian Brit.

29:35And I was the only white Brit. And what was the most amazing thing about it was there was not a single story in the newspapers. Nobody cared. And I thought actually that was Britain at its best. We're just supremely relaxed about that kind of thing. But I think Madeleine is absolutely right. When she talks about how people feel, I think the people who are worried the most, actually, about not controlling our borders are the immigrants themselves, first and second generation, who are so proud to be British. They're thrilled to have come here. They think it's one of the most important things that they did.

30:13And they are worried that that sort of British hospitality is being abused. and they are worried in the end it could blow back on them. So this is actually a pro-tolerance argument here. We have to address this problem and protect what is so great about this country. And I think Alex is absolutely right. I mean, there is lots of things that I don't agree with President Trump about, you know, when it comes particularly to his views on Ukraine, for example, but wokery has gone far too far. And this thing that we're told about being embarrassed about our history, I think is completely stupid. I mean, we should have proper debate.

30:53You know, we have a very free press. We have academics who can say what they want, rightly. But we shouldn't get into this apology mode. Analyse, yes, but apologising for what? I mean, you know, you can't be responsible for what previous generations have done. And I think it's just very dangerous because what it does is it erodes people's pride. And just to reflect on some of the other things we'll discuss in the book in other podcasts, Camilla, you know, right now we have a global battle between democracy and autocracy. And China is getting more powerful by the day. We as the democracies of the world are not going to win this struggle if we're ashamed of our own history.

31:35Camilla: No. Good point. Just on legal migration and caps, Madeleine, reform saying net zero migration. I don't even really know what that means because it will have to have carve outs for certain professions, including, I would imagine, hospitality and health care. I can't imagine how either industry can survive actually without a degree of immigration to this country. We've then got Kemi Badenock rueing, kind of considering there's going to be a cap. We're not going to say what it is yet. What should it be? We're afraid of saying tens of thousands. Should there be a cap, not just by the way on legal migration, but also maybe on how many people can be granted asylum in this country?

32:15Camilla: Could it be that simplistic? It's probably not how the Home Office works. Well, on the asylum point, I think under the Refugee Convention, you can't have a cap on the number of people granted asylum because the principle is that if someone is a refugee, they cannot be sent back to a country where they could be harmed. They can be sent somewhere else. The question is, you know, are there other countries with good human rights standards willing to take them? On the broader issue, I think the challenge, I think absolutely it's perfectly legitimate to set a target and say, you know, we would like migration around this level or that level.

32:43The challenge is that in the past, a lot of those discussions about what the overall level of migration should be have been totally untethered from any of the policies that would get you there. And so you had the situation where people were saying, OK, well, we're going to have much lower levels of migration, but we're also going to have a liberal policy on this type of migration that you like. You know, Ukrainians or people coming into the care sector or people coming in into the NHS. And yes, people will be able if they marry a foreigner, they will be able to live here together. All of those things then add up.

33:11And so I think the challenge is that if you want to have much lower migration, you have to say, OK, these are the people who are currently able to come who will not be able to come anymore. Some of those types of migration are much more difficult to restrict than others. So effectively, you know, we've talked about asylum and the challenges there. Labour and Conservatives over time have both wanted to reduce those numbers and have not been able to. You've then got family migration. So a British citizen like Jeremy, for example, marries someone from overseas, brings them here. That's, you know, a substantial share.

33:38It's a minority, but it's a substantial share of the total. And that's very difficult to reduce if you believe that people should be able to live with their family members. Then the two groups that are left that are actually quite easy to reduce, where you can just say, OK, we'll stop issuing visas here and fewer people come to the UK. Those are the ones that tend to be more economically beneficial, i.e. international students and workers. And so you've got this trade off that actually the groups that are most beneficial for the economy are the ones that are easiest to cut operationally if you want to have lower numbers.

34:05Camilla: So we should be judging each and every migrant on their merits. Alex Chalk, it sounds to me like a points based system, as was modelled in Australia. What happened to that? Well, I mean, Madeleine set out, I thought, with searing clarity what happened after the pandemic, which was precisely this. It was a points-based system. The trouble is you've got to work out how you're allocating your points and what your thresholds are. And I think, you know, those who were responsible for it at the time now accept that they got the thresholds wrong. And that I think it was the earnings threshold that was, what was it?

34:35For workers, it was initially 26 ,000. 26 ,000, yeah. And as a result, many more people came than was anticipated. So the principle of points per system is absolutely right. You've just got to work out how much, how many points you're allocating to each criteria. And let me make a point, if I may, about the economic impact, just following on what Madeleine says, because the other side to the coin of this is welfare reform. Because in the end, the reason that all these businesses are saying, you talked about the hospitality sector, Camilla, the social care sector are saying they have to have migrants is because they can't find people at home.

35:11And at the same time as we are having this huge demand for overseas workers from businesses, every year we are signing off 80 ,000 people. And we're saying, by the way, this is at the extreme end, not just that you don't have to work, but you don't even have to look for work. No, it's crazy. And this is including, by the way, a growing number of university graduates who have never entered the workplace at all. And so serious welfare reform would address those supply issues. And that's where the big ticket is. So I had a budget in the MOJ, which deals with all the prisons, all the courts, all the probation, all that legal, £14 billion a year.

35:48That's spent by the DWP, that annual budget, is spent by the DWP in two weeks.

35:52Camilla: I know, it's frightening. So if you really want to save money, you've got an extraordinary situation where the government, the massive majority, is now bottling it in respect to what is quite a modest... Don't worry, we're going to do a separate podcast. All right, do another one. We've got lots of ideas. But the other thing, just to finish, let's just go global, if we can. You went global once, Jeremy, so why not? And this is another stunning statistic in this book. Between 1970 and 2020, the number of people not living in their country of birth rose from 84 million to 281 million. So you're also writing this particular chapter with your foreign secretary hat on and talking about the impact of aid.

36:29Camilla: And you do cite the example of Somalia and Somaliland. And actually some countries can become so dependent on aid that they don't increase their growth rate and they don't do what they need to do because they become overly reliant. So there's an argument about aid and things that probably we need to leave for another day. But maybe it is just the case with some parts of the developing world, less developing, now more upwardly mobile, more people in continents like Africa being able to fly. and combined with huge pockets still of poverty, particularly in war-torn countries, that just there are no borders anymore, that people can get around the place and actually that is the changing nature of everyone's demographic, not just in the UK but across Europe and other countries.

37:16Camilla: That's just the way of the world now. People will go on the move. They will seek a better life. They will eventually end up in the UK if there's nothing really in the law or the law can be changed in order to allow them to settle here. And that's just what we've got to get used to. No, no. We have warm hearts, but it's perfectly legitimate to have a secure front door, to want a secure front door. And the answer to the point that you rightly make, you know, there are 100 million people on the move, is to say that we have to reinforce that front door. We do so with humanity and we do so with common sense.

37:51We have to do so in a way that works, which means not trying to sell snake oil to the electorate and say, sort this out and all your problems go away because it isn't as simple as that and people don't like being duped. So that's why I think Kemi's right, actually, to get David Wolfson, who's very eminent, to look at this in a really careful and considered way so that when we present something to the British people, and they're not stupid, they will work out if something looks like a quick fix because quick fixes don't work. But the central premise of your question, which is, should we just effectively throw our hands up and say, well, it's just the way it's going to be?

38:19The answer to that must be no. In a sovereign nation, you've got to be able to control your borders and you have to do so to preserve the very values of humanity, decency, kindness and tolerance for which we're famed. Because if you don't, those will soon fall into disrepute. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a view among some academics that people are going to move regardless of what you do. And then almost there's no point in having any policies. I think policies do work. I think they have an impact. And so if you want more restrictive policies, you will get lower migration. The element of truth in that argument is that the policies often have less impact than governments expect.

38:56And we see this actually sometimes you have a policy that's introduced as an impact assessment that says, OK, well, we see that this share of people wouldn't be eligible anymore. So migration in this group will fall by 40 percent. And in practice, it falls by 10 percent or 20 percent or in whatever case you're talking about. because people who really want to move will find other ways to become eligible. Even, you know, if you're not talking about unauthorised migration, you know, people will reorganise their lives in order to make it possible for them to move because they really want to. But that doesn't mean that you should just throw your hands up and say, well, there's no point in immigration policy because I think there is a lot of evidence that immigration policy does have an impact.

39:28Camilla: Final word to you, Jeremy, because, I mean, we spoke earlier about being revisionist and trying to apologise for our colonial past. But the point is the Britain of yesteryear did have more of a say and a stake. it seems, in the world and more influence over countries which may try and solve the immigration problem in those countries than we can today? Or am I being too declinist and not half full enough? I think you are being a little declinist there, actually, because I think we do have a lot of influence globally, and particularly in a period where America seems to be willingly relinquishing its global influence.

40:05I think a country like the UK is very respected. Put bluntly, though, to go back to your statistic that comes from the book, no borders means no democracy, because what a democracy is as a group of 60 million people coming together and making choices about how we live. And if you say there are no borders, then that becomes meaningless. And I just want to finish on a slightly more positive note, very strongly agreeing with Madeline, actually. Look, we as a human race, we were able to tackle the Soviet Union in the Cold War. We were able to get vaccines out in record time in the pandemic. We've been able to stop the global economy collapsing in the global financial crisis.

40:49With political will, we can absolutely find a way to deal with the fact that the majority of the human population can afford to move. That's never happened before. We can absolutely address that problem. It needs political will to do it. And I just really hope that Keir Starmer is up for it.

41:09Camilla: Jeremy Hunt, Madeleine Sumption, Alex Chalk, thank you very much indeed for joining us on this special edition of The Daily Tea. And we will be discussing other chapters from the book very soon.

41:29Thank you.