Robert Jenrick, the frontrunner in the Conservative party leadership contest, has accused the Treasury and the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog of “gaslighting” the British public over the benefits of migration.
The former immigration minister declared in an interview with the Financial Times that the “economic consensus” of the past quarter century about mass migration was “fundamentally broken”.
Jenrick — who quit Rishi Sunak’s government in protest at what he said was an insufficiently robust plan to tackle asylum seekers — has placed crackdowns on both legal and illegal migration at the heart of his campaign for the Tory leadership.
He will go up against the three other remaining candidates — former business secretary Kemi Badenoch, former home secretary James Cleverly, and ex-security minister Tom Tugendhat — at the Conservative conference this month.
Jenrick topped the first two ballots of Tory MPs in the leadership race after starting out as — by his own admission — the “rank outsider”, and now hopes to succeed Sunak as party leader on November 2.
While he is heading into the Conservative conference in Birmingham in pole position, he is unhappy about the format that the beauty parade will take.
“I think it’s disrespectful to the membership not to test the candidates to the full,” he said, deriding the “cursory” 20-minute slot on the main stage afforded to the four contenders for their keynote speeches.
Heaping scorn on Conservative Campaign Headquarters, he said: “I think there’s a risk that it’s being dumbed down by CCHQ.” Tory MPs will whittle down the candidates to a shortlist of two, with members making the final choice.
Jenrick is the only one of the four remaining candidates who is pledging outright to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights; he also wants a concrete cap of 100,000 net inward migrants per year.
In an outspoken intervention on Thursday, he criticised past administrations — including the Tory government in which he served — of having “juiced up our GDP figures artificially” through ever-higher levels of inward migration, which had “masked our relative economic decline”.
Jenrick reserved particular ire for the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog that was set up by then-chancellor George Osborne, and the Treasury, where he once served as a minister.
“The OBR and the Treasury have essentially been gaslighting the British public, making an argument that mass migration was economically beneficial against all the commonsensical experiences of working people,” he said.
Jenrick added: “Ordinary people in our country could see that mass migration was impacting house prices, their ability to access a GP or a doctor, [and] was undercutting their wages in many sectors across our economy and yet the prevailing economic orthodoxy was the opposite.” Migration also discouraged businesses from investing in skills, technology and innovation, he claimed.
He said it was “heartening” the OBR had concluded in a report published this month that low-paid migrant workers were an immediate drain on the public finances and became “less fiscally beneficial than the average UK resident in their early 40s”.
However, the same analysis also found migrant workers on an average wage were nets contributor to the state, even if they remained in Britain and lived to 90.
It also assessed that overall migrants were more likely to contribute more in taxes than they cost in services over their lifetime, since the UK did not cover the expense of their education or healthcare as children. Jenrick did not highlight these parts of the OBR analysis.
The OBR declined to comment. A Treasury spokesperson said: “The OBR is the official independent forecaster for government and their forecasts are based on their assessment of a number of factors which influence the economic outlook.”
If he becomes the next Tory leader, Jenrick said his focus would be on housing, well-paid jobs, skills and responding to “legitimate concerns on immigration and the denigration of British culture that we see today”.
He added: “I want the Conservative party to be the trade union for working people.” He is also calling for a different approach to energy, migration and welfare to generate economic growth.
Married with three daughters, the 42-year-old grew up in Wolverhampton and worked as a commercial lawyer and at Christie’s auction house before becoming the MP for Newark in a 2014 by-election. He has previously described himself as “unashamedly provincial”.
While he voted Remain in the EU referendum in 2016, he said: “I would certainly vote Brexit if I had my time again.”
Nonetheless, he believes successive Tory administrations “have not made use of the freedoms and opportunities that came with Brexit”, including curbing migration.
His ambition now is for Britain to become the “grammar school of the western world”, setting out “to attract the best and the brightest” from overseas rather than ushering in low-skilled workers.
Jenrick’s critics accuse him of being a centrist who has tactically lurched rightward to win over rightwing party members.
He insists his politics were forged in his childhood, describing himself as the “product of working-class parents from small town Britain” who watched traditional industries “destroyed by out-of-control trade unions in the 1970s”, but conceded that “over time, my views have hardened”.
The Tory leadership race was not about “left or right” but “trying to find the common ground in British politics”, he said, arguing that voters who deserted the Conservatives for Reform, Labour or the Liberal Democrats had the same complaint: “People felt that we as a government did not deliver on the economy, on the NHS and on immigration.”
Jenrick said the Tories must now be “painfully honest” about their mistakes, listen to the public and “repent for errors” before trying to rebuild trust.
While he insisted he could lead the Conservatives to victory at the next election, he was reluctant to put a timeframe on when the party would make progress in the polls if he took over at the helm. It will be a “slow process”, Jenrick warned: “We’ve got a mountain to climb.”