The Immigration Debate: A nation divided?

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. Coming up on The Daily with Menial Patterson, the immigration debate. Sky News hosts a special discussion looking for solutions with questions to politicians direct from the public.

0:42So, did they get any answers? Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast Stuff Matters I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. You've talked about giving people back their hotels. I want to know why that is more important than the rights of the people living in them who, by the way, are having, like, a terrible time.

1:30Why are hard-working taxpayers being forced to contribute more in taxes to facilitate the state of mainly young male illegal immigrants? Why are we not doing that and sending these boats back, redirecting them back to the countries that they are coming from? Who's most responsible for the Labour Party changing their tune on immigration? Donald Trump, Elon Musk or Nigel Farage? Immigration. As a political issue, it's everywhere right now. So many questions, too few answers. So, Wednesday evening, Sky News hosted a special debate in Birmingham where the audience could quiz the politicians directly.

2:14On the panel, we had Labour Migration Minister and MP for Dover, Mike Tapp, the Conservatives' Shadow Justice Minister, Kieran Mullin, for the Liberal Democrats' Home Office Spokesperson, Lisa Smart, and Reform UK's head of policy, Zia Youssef. So, just how did they get on? The issue we have here with deploying the Navy is if we put them in our waters, it's not enough. We'd need to be on the shores of France, and that's French territory. I really do understand that we didn't deliver this policy in government, but the overall policy that's going to stop all of this, stop people being in hotels, stop them being in social housing that local people desperately want, is to have a deterrent so people don't cross in the first place.

2:53OK. We have long called for the closing of asylum hotels by processing the applications far more quickly. These are places where people have their wedding reception, where they have their child's christening party. And I think all communities want their hotels back. Between my father and my mum, who's a nurse, they have given more than half a century of service to the NHS between them. So no one knows more about the invaluable contribution immigrants have made and can make to this country than I. But I will say this, this country is now overwhelmed. Our borders are being overrun. Hmm. Well, we thought we'd check in with one of the questioners to see what he made of the debate.

3:31Before I speak to Ryan Alexander, here's what he asked. Labour's promised to close all asylum hotels. Where will these people be housed? And is this alternative arrangement sustainable and ethical? It's really important that we do move people out of hotels. It's an unacceptable solution to this. and the public have made that really clear. But of course, you know, I talked earlier about British values and that means that we do the right thing. You've got families who've got no catering facilities. Hotels aren't working for the communities, like mine, like I was saying, but they're certainly not working for the people who are in them.

4:05And so we do need to process people's applications much faster so that those who've got a right to be here can get on with their life, can get a job, can contribute. We've got to ask yourself why people are making that journey. It's because we offer, the British people are being forced to pay for a much better deal. What was it about asylum hotels that prompted you to ask that question of the politicians last night? What are your concerns? I think it's extremely important that we look at this issue that has really captivated this country. I think this is an issue which has come about from the former Conservative government.

4:38And these issues are lingering into the Labour government right now. And then the numbers keeps increasing with the migrants which are crossing as well. And I think that if we don't tackle this now, it's just going to keep getting worse and worse. as time goes on. What did you make of the responses you got from the politicians last night? The politicians didn't really answer any of the questions which we put to them. They sort of took and they sort of spun it in their own way and either attacked another political party for their policies or tried to improve public relations with their own party.

5:08Why do you think that the politicians on this particular topic couldn't, as you say, provide a straight answer to any of the points made by the audience? It's completely divided the nation. that everyone has loads of different opinions. And I think that a lot of the politicians wants to get a lot of people in their favour. So they will offer up potential solutions to the problem. But I don't think that they're sustainable solutions. I don't think are ethically possible. Do you think that there is genuinely a solution out there to the situation we find ourselves in? I think there need to be policies set into place that would allow relations between the UK and France to sort of stop these migrants from crossing because they are crossing over from France into the UK.

5:52I believe that these migrants needs to be sort of processed through legally and sort of see where they came from and how we can actually help them because the UK is a country that wants to help. Look what happened with Ukraine, for example. Immigration has been used for people to help out with the NHS and I think that the migrants crossing is a big part of it that has come to light very recently but it's only because that the Labour government has allowed such massive amount of migrants across the Channel and being put in these hotels, I think that people have sort of had enough. Thanks, Ryan.

6:31Well, the man in charge of Wednesday night's debate was Trevor Phillips, host of Sky's Sunday morning politics show. Hi, Trevor. Look, you certainly had your work cut out. So what were you expecting and what did you end up getting? The thing is, with these live studio debates, is it's never wise to go into it with too many expectations, because nobody ever does what they're supposed to do. My hope was more than anything else that what we would get across is the extent and intensity of the frustration felt by so many people across the country. Normally, when we do these debates, we're thinking for, against, or left and right.

7:11But in this case, I think the dividing line in the studio was something a bit different. It wasn't to do with whether you think immigration is a good thing or you think it's been a bad thing. You want more or less. It was more to do with, if you like, a line drawn across the floor between the audience and the politicians. The audience on the one hand, whatever their political standpoint, feeling that they were not being heard. and the politicians, on the other hand, wanting to redefine every question that the audience asked in a way that felt more comfortable to the Westminster politics. Watching the debate last night, it was difficult to find any straight response to any of the questions that were put out there.

8:00Politics finds these identity issues very, very hard to deal with. If what you are being asked, Will you raise taxes or will you put a price on some public service or not? Then you can put numbers to it. It's much more difficult if you're in politics to respond to sentiment. For many people, these hotels aren't just places down the road. They are the hotels which have the reception rooms or the restaurants where their daughter had her 21st birthday or you took your parents for their 50th wedding anniversary. But it is the sense that memories of communities, the things that they hold precious, that they hold in their minds and in their hearts, are somehow being rubbished or put in a place that nobody wants.

8:53So I think that that's all very hard for politics to get hold of, but it is the stuff that really powers the passions and makes people feel, why isn't politics paying attention to what I really feel, what really moves me? So let's turn to reform. What did you make of Zia Yusuf's performance last night? I mean, yeah, leading the debate on immigration, but when it comes to the detail over how they would use the Royal Navy, the number of illegals, in his terms, that are here in the country, they do tend to fall down sometimes. First of all, we should remember, Wazir Youssef is not an experienced politician, and I think he tends to come to these debates as a business person and, to put it gently, not entirely used to being battled with verbally.

9:44Having said that, I think that probably most viewers would say of the four, he was the clearest, most specific. But the real problem for reform is that though they've got very clear positions on issues, when you ask them, have you actually thought through how this would work? I think we find that it's not quite adequate. So I think that reform still has a bit of work to do. They are riding the wave of this emotional response. But sooner or later, if they want to compete to be the government and to be taken seriously as contenders for government, they do have to have some answers on these issues.

10:26It's also difficult to articulate an opposition to a government policy when, you know, five minutes ago, you were in government and were in government for 14 years. And I'm just wondering whether you were struck by me, by the Conservative representative last night, accepting on multiple occasions we got it wrong when we were in government. And this poor chap hasn't actually been there that long. And he actually has to bear the burden of the fact that, if I can put it bluntly, the country has not forgiven the conservatives. So I think the conservatives got a really, they've got a really tricky line to tread.

11:03They can't really go head to head to the government on many things because they're so vulnerable to the charge. You were there for 14 years. You're saying do this, do that. You had every chance and you didn't. And on the other hand, they can't just disappear into the dusk. But kind of a parallel example to that, those are the problems that the Labour Party has when it comes to defending what's been going on there. So they keep arguing, we've only been in power for five minutes. We inherited a broken system. The data shows us that arrivals are up and those in hotels, numbers in hotels are up. And it's difficult to defend that, even if you have only been in for, as you correctly pointed out, not five minutes, not a year, 14 months.

11:46The real problem, I think, that Mike Tapp had in the discussion last night, because the first question I asked him is, what are you going to do that is different from the Yvette Cooper team, which has now been cleared out of the Home Office, did before you? And I have to say, I don't think I heard an answer from Mike Tapp. In fact, what he tended to do was to say, well, Yvette Cooper has made these arrangements, these agreements with the French and we're discussing things with other countries and we're trying to speed things up and on. But there wasn't any sense that there was some very new initiative that would break through the impasse that is frustrating so many people.

12:27Answer me this, Trevor. You know, I know that the biggest problem when it comes to immigration is not the numbers that are arriving here in small boats. It's the numbers that are arriving here legally. So much of the politicians' input into last night's debate was focused on the former and not the latter. I felt that they all, all of them, felt more comfortable talking about, in inverted commas, illegal immigration versus the legal rules. One level is kind of obvious why. If you talk about borders and who can come across the borders and what documents and so on, at least notionally, these are things that are, to some extent, in the control of government.

13:05Actually, in practice, we've seen it's not as easy as that. But in theory, governments have the power to change things at the border. The problem, I think most illegal immigration, by the way, is not people coming in small boats, it's people coming on visitors or study visas and overstaying it, and then disappearing into the population. There are issues like the reason that people are coming in small boats is because they can find work on the black or in the grey economy. And tackling that is much more difficult because what you say to employers and how do you control employers. Now, the real difficult issue for this government is how do you start to ramp up internal control?

13:49How do you find people who are cheating the system? How do you deport them? Now, Donald Trump, somebody referred to last night, has done this in two ways. He sent the marines to the borders and literally pushed people back across the borders, physically, literally. And secondly, he's sending in snatch squads to big employers in American cities. Are we prepared to do that? There's absolutely no sign at the moment that our government is going to be as tough as that. There was a point last night which I thought was fascinating. Zia Youssef, in fact, challenging your assertion, your framing of the United Kingdom as a country divided, instead positing the idea that perhaps immigration or opposition to the current system of immigration is something which the country might actually be uniting behind.

14:37I wonder if he might have a point there. There are two things that everybody basically agreed about. One is that immigration can be a positive to the country. And even Zia talked about his parents and their 50-year contribution to the health service and so on. And the other thing that everybody agreed about, systems broken. Well, these two things everybody can agree about, but they don't tell you anything at all about what people want to do about it. And in truth, that is the real question at stake here. Immigration isn't just, you know, a million identical people. It is about different kinds of people, bringing different skills, coming here for different reasons and coming from different places.

15:21Before Brexit, the preponderance of immigration were people from European countries. That's fallen away dramatically. And the bulk of our immigration is now coming from places like India, Nigeria and other African nation countries. And that presents a rather different, particularly cultural set of issues for the country. I would lay a bet, to be honest, that if you sat down with most people in most parts of the country, it's not the border control that they're paying attention to. It's the changes in their schools, in their GP surgeries, in the names and the shops and so on in their high streets that they are really noticing when they think about immigration.

16:03And that's the thing that makes them anxious. That's the thing they want to get solved. But Trevor, are we at the very least not in a better place to have those discussions in the public domain than we ever have been. The language that is acceptable to be used around the immigration debate has certainly shifted. I think something else, though, is happening which is probably not quite as healthy. People are ready to talk more openly, but what they sometimes do is not engage with the other person's argument. What they say is, you're only making that argument because you're a bad person, because you don't like foreigners.

16:43And I think that's one of the things we've got to guard against, that the argument stops being about what should we do about the facts, how we manage migration, which we are going to need because we're an aging society and so on. And having that debate, which is a grown up one and having a debate, which is about why are you saying that if you're saying that you're a bad person? Well, that I think is it leads us into arguably the most worrying thing about what is going on in this country at the moment. There isn't a debate, in inverted commas, around immigration anymore, that none of the people who were in that audience last night or who were sitting at home watching it had not already got a settled view on small boats, legal migration, asylum hotels.

17:28The interesting thing is that we all seem a bit surprised that immigration has risen to the top of what the polls has called a salience chart. That has always been true. actually immigration is if you like the touchstone for many of the trade-offs in all of areas of public life for example one of the things that we we still haven't been talking about very much is housing which is the fact that virtually all population growth for the last four years and for the next six or seven years will be through immigration is critical to what we do about housing. Government says it wants to build up 1.5 million houses.

18:08Well, if you do the arithmetic, what you'll find is that something like half or possibly more of those new houses will go to new arrivals to this country. Now, is that what we want to do? You know, I think there's a perfectly respectable argument for doing that. But it's a it's a debate that we have to have openly. Trevor, if someone watching the debate came away thinking there is no solution to the immigration problem, would that be an unfair conclusion for them to draw? I think it would be an unfair conclusion to draw. I think there are solutions, but they involve really profound choices about what kind of country we want to be.

18:52The big transformations going on in the world, particularly in the Western world, is about globalisation. And the big choice for everybody is, do you embrace globalization? That is to say, you know, more open trade with others, more movement of people, more exchange between different countries and so on. Or do you resist that in order to preserve the character and the behaviors and the things that you think have been historically important? And I think there are legitimate arguments both ways. But in the end, all politics, in my view, is about choice. And we have to make a choice. Which way are we going here?

19:35And then all sorts of other things follow, including what we do about immigration. So there are solutions, but they involve a choice. And there is no solution that is going to essentially bridge that divide between those who want to embrace globalization and those who want to resist it. And that's the debate, I think, in the end, that big politicians are going to have to have. Thanks, Trevor. And if you missed it or want to watch it again, the full debate is available on the Sky News YouTube channel. Details are in the show notes. And you can catch Trevor every Sunday morning from half past eight.

20:12As for the dairy, well, we're back again tomorrow. Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.