Was the Boriswave a Brexit betrayal?

Ten years on from the Brexit referendum, the regular account of Britain’s post-Brexit immigration situation is as follows: the people voted to take back control, the politicians promised to deliver it, and then they didn’t. Cumulative net migration reached 3,718,000 this year, with a year-high of 891,000 in 2022, and the word “betrayal” has been associated with consecutive governments. It is a persuasive narrative.

With one or two partial exceptions, the leading figures of the Leave campaign were not, in fact, arguing for less immigration

That said, the charge of betrayal presupposes that Leave’s leadership made a clear and consistent promise to reduce immigration numbers substantially, and then failed to honour it. A closer reading of what the prominent advocates of Brexit actually said in 2016 suggests that the reality was more ambiguous. With one or two partial exceptions, the leading figures of the Leave campaign were not, in fact, arguing for less immigration. They were arguing for a different type of immigration: a restructured, globally-oriented system under British sovereign authority rather than EU institutional control. The public, by and large, heard something else. This created a gap between what was proposed and what was understood.

When we examine the stated positions of the key figures who drove the Leave campaign this becomes clear. Boris Johnson, at the time, was explicit: “I am in favour of immigration; but I am also in favour of control.” He pledged a points-based system and called for an amnesty for long-term undocumented migrants. This position sat in obvious tension with the more restrictive reading of “Take Back Control” being absorbed by much of his audience. Moreover, Johnson’s record as Mayor of London had been notably pro-immigration in tone, and his stated case for Leave rested on sovereignty and democratic accountability rather than any desire to reduce the overall intake.

Michael Gove framed his position in similar terms. On the Andrew Marr programme ahead of the referendum, he described himself as “pro-migration” and argued that the way to secure public support for immigration’s benefits was for people to feel that numbers could be controlled. Again, the claim was about legitimacy and process rather than a commitment to reduction. His most specific immigration argument concerned NHS capacity, but even there the case was about management rather than scale.

Priti Patel, in retrospect, gave the most instructive description of post-Brexit migration policy. She made the case that EU free movement operated an implicit hierarchy, privileging lower-skilled EU workers over higher-skilled non-EU migrants. A globally competitive points-based system, she argued, would allow Commonwealth and South Asian workers to compete on equal terms with Europeans. She famously claimed that Brexit would “save Britain’s curry houses”. What Patel was arguing for was a shift in the composition of immigration, rather than a reduction in its scale. This would go on to represent the immigration rules she introduced during her time as Home Secretary. It was also not what the majority of Leave voters understood themselves to be voting for.

Even Nigel Farage, who ran an explicitly anti-migration campaign through Leave.EU, fell into this frame. In a June 2016 interview with Andrew Neil, pressed on the mechanics of reducing numbers, he effectively conceded the fundamental point: “The real point about this referendum is who makes the decisions, do we have the ability to control the numbers that come to Britain or not.” Control over principle, in other words, not a pledge on outcomes. In the same interview, he acknowledged that the government already had control over non-EU migration, which accounted for nearly 200,000 net arrivals annually. The logical implication was that even a complete end to EU free movement would leave nearly two-thirds of net migration at the time untouched. It was not a point he lingered on.

This is not to rerun decade-old debates on Brexit and the merits and demerits of leaving the European Union. However, the points-based system was consistently presented in contexts where audiences were encouraged to understand it as a promise of lower numbers. Although, in substance, it was a promise of a different selection mechanism — one that does not, in itself, determine the volume of people admitted.

Leave needed immigration concerns to outweigh economic risk calculations in voters’ minds

What emerges from examining the 2016 record is less a campaign of explicit promises later broken, more a campaign that was profoundly vague about the difference between sovereignty and reduction. Leave needed immigration concerns to outweigh economic risk calculations in voters’ minds. Especially as Leave voters consistently ranked immigration as one of the most important reasons for voting for Brexit. It did not need, and its principal figures did not produce, a specific commitment to a particular net migration figure.

Many voters interpreted the campaign’s immigration messaging in the most concrete terms available: if you vote Leave, fewer people will come. That interpretation was both understandable and, given the decades of policy failure that preceded the vote (such as the broken tens-of-thousands pledges made by the Conservatives, or the gap between official projections and actual EU inflows after 2004) almost inevitable.

The post-Brexit immigration system failed to deliver what voters wanted, and one explanation is that politicians betrayed that mandate. Another explanation, better supported by the evidence, is that several of the Leave campaign’s most prominent advocates were never personally committed to that mandate in the first place. The more uncomfortable truth is that the belief that Brexit created a mandate to reduce immigration was, to a significant degree, constructed in the space between what was said and what was heard.

As Migration Watch UK’s recent retrospective on migration policy since Brexit shows, the Johnson government’s 2021 immigration reforms were softer than the Tier 2 framework they replaced in every respect: a lower skill threshold, a lower salary floor, no resident labour market test, and no cap on Skilled Worker visas. Net migration reached record highs that dwarfed anything recorded under EU free movement. This lead to what would become known as the Boriswave.

The architecture of those reforms was consistent with what Johnson, Patel, et al. had actually argued for — a globally open, employer-led system, selecting migrants on merit without imposing numerical limits. What was betrayed, if anything, was the voters’ understanding of that offer. That understanding was encouraged by the campaign’s rhetoric, rooted in decades of frustration, and given no significant riposte from the Remain side. The result was a referendum in which many voted for something that was never precisely on the ballot. The Boriswave was, therefore, less a betrayal of Brexit than its logical conclusion.