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Managed Migration

The hon. Gentleman is being deliberately obtuse. He has offered the view that the scheme lacks rationality without a quota. He has said, in terms, that it cannot constitute a way forward unless we say what the limit on immigration should be, and he condemned himself with that fatuous claim. It is as fatuous as his even more obtuse claim at the last election that an asylum limit or quota should somehow be established. How, in the context of the 1951 convention, that can possibly be done defies belief; so, subconsciously or otherwise, he is obtusely conflating all the issues that the Conservative party deliberately conflated at the last election. That is a matter of regret, because the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth did not do so and neither did the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden. I profoundly disagree with the right hon. Gentleman’s economic analysis and, therefore, his conclusions, but he did not conflate such issues in the scurrilous way that the hon. Member for Ashford did.