In an interview with The Times to promote his new book, Boris Johnson told chief political commentator Tim Shipman that where the Tories went wrong  was “thinking they didn’t need me”.

It might be argued that the highest tax burden since World War Two, the highest level of public spending since the 1970s, scant increases in wages for a decade and a half, a cost of living crisis, impoverishment of state capacity and 14 years of near-consecutive all-time high immigration figures also played their role, but recollections may vary.

Boris is, as Ben Sixsmith writes, up to his old tricks; “changing one’s mind can be a very fine thing, but it does feel like Johnson changes his mind when it happens to suit him.”

 Nowhere is this more obvious than on immigration. In the interview, Johnson claims that the massive spike in immigration during his time in N0. 10 “was because his government had to ‘deal with inflation’ after the pandemic and that meant getting in “hands to do the work” to prevent wage costs spiralling.”

This is a familiar arc. During her tilt for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Priti Patel came under sustained criticism for her record on immigration as Johnson’s Home Secretary. Patel took a similar line; that it was necessary to engineer a huge increase in immigration in order to provide Britain with a post-pandemic oversupply of labour — although she centred her argument on the idea that further immigration was required in particular to tackle NHS waiting lists by providing more doctors.

The problem with these statements is that they aren’t true. To deal with Priti’s claim, under her system (in place from 2021), health and care visas for doctors and nurses barely rose. Rather, the majority increase was into the care sector, a low-barrier entry route that has served, not so much as a merely back door but an open one into the UK workforce. As for Johnon’s claims, it rests on the idea that these reforms were implemented in response to the COVID pandemic; whereas the process of liberalising the immigration system — and much of the work — was done before the pandemic broke out. 

Sadly, Boris’s admission is also vindication for the idea of Human Quantitative Easing. This is the idea that, as I have already outlined in the most august pages, immigration has been used as a form of industrial strategy to allow governments to avoid costly and difficult decisions on growth:

Human Quantitative Easing is the method by which government allows geographically rooted industries, which cannot offshore their workforce to lower wage economies, to satisfy their need for cheap labour by importing the same workforce to the UK — with government providing a subsidy, if required, in the form of services and welfare payments.

The fundamental idea of HQE is that migration has substituted for a more sustainable industrial strategy or more competitive economic decisions, allowing successive governments to avoid hard decisions on delivering growth. The cycle is brutal, but simple; low-wage en-masse immigration acts as a break on productivity because, whilst migrants themselves may be as productive as UK-born workers, the constant influx of cheap human capital disincentives investment by substituting for capital and energy inputs. This then allows both businesses and governments to ignore underlying capital and energy problems deriving elsewhere — such as the planning system, tax regime and monetary policy. What begins as failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency. 

But, to paraphrase Lenin, we may go another way. On Wednesday, Robert Jenrick gave a speech at The Centre for Policy Studies that outlined a policy end of enabling domestic workers to meet domestic need and ending the reliance on foreign labour to plug “gaps in the economy”. And there are already examples of how to do this — which, ironically, come from Boris Johnson’s time in office.

The example is the 2021 HGV crisis, in which the short-term issues of increased demand from Covid-19 and reduced supply as European truck drivers left following Brexit combined with the long-term issues of low pay and an ageing workforce caused a driver shortage some estimated at 100,000. 

To combat this shortage, employers were forced to increase pay, in some cases up to 40 per cent. Government, meanwhile, rolled out a suite of policy reforms, including relaxing late-night delivery restrictions and reviewing HGV parking and facilities. An industry expert also called the government’s offer of fully funded flexible training for a limited number of candidates that held a Category B (car) licence aged 19 or over, “one of the best initiatives” of recent years, as it gave younger people or those who didn’t have the capital to pay thousands for their lorry licence as a stepping-stone into the industry.

The benefits of this will not just lie with the employers, however. In such a competitive marketplace, those firms which are unwilling — or, through bad management, unable — to adapt to the new parameters of the market will cease to exist. Since demand will remain so high, the market will naturally re-allocate the workforce and capital of those failed companies to the successful, creating an overall more efficient unproductive market through something resembling Schumpeter’s creative destruction.

As outlined in the recent Adam Smith Institute paper I co-authored with David Cowan, “Selecting the Best: Building a Future-Focused Immigration System”, there are a range of practical reforms that could shift policy from prioritising the importation of labour to focusing on training local workers. Ending our reliance on Human Quantitative Easing, rather than exacerbating it, is an essential foundation to building the economy of the future. 

Not only are there potentially huge economic advantages to be gained, but political ones too. Despite Boris’ revisionism, ramping up immigration — in the face of electoral promises — was one of the primary reasons we shuffled off our political coil. We disappeared, unwept, from the story of the next five years. Without honesty on immigration and a credible plan to put it right we shall disappear, unwept, from the story entirely.