Parties matter but institutions live on: Labour’s legacy on Conservative immigration policy and the neoliberal consensus
| Author | Erica Consterdine |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119890253 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
research-article2020
Original Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Parties matter but
2020, Vol. 22(2) 182 –201
© The Author(s) 2020
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institutions live on: Labour’s
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119890253
DOI: 10.1177/1369148119890253
legacy on Conservative
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
immigration policy and the
neoliberal consensus
Erica Consterdine
Abstract
The drivers of immigration policy have long been contested. While partisan theory contends
that policy is a product of parties’ interests, historical institutionalism places explanatory value
on the norms of policymaking and path dependency. Examining Conservative-led immigration
policy, I argue that while parties matter for defining policy objectives, institutions explain policy
outputs. Despite a shift from Labour’s expansive managed migration regime to the Coalition’s
restrictive policy, there was remarkable confluence in policy and policymaking. Challenging the
parties matter school of thought, I argue that institutional legacies inherited from New Labour
explain policy stability and that these are reflective of an emerging political consensus on neoliberal
migration management, including outsourcing and commodifying migration controls, maintaining
an indirect corporatist agreement with employers, underpinned by a policy paradigm predicated
on economic worthiness. This article demonstrates how inherited institutions persist and how
ideational legacies evolved to a political consensus of neoliberal migration management.
Keywords
Conservative Party, historical institutionalism, immigration, neoliberal migration management,
New Labour, outsourcing, partisan theory organised interests
Introduction
Few would deny the heightened politicisation of immigration in the last 10 years across
Western Europe. In Britain, many scholars claim that public anti-migrant sentiment led to
the vote to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 (Dennison and Geddes, 2018; Portes,
2016; Thompson, 2017: 248), and ending free movement has been a keystone of the
Brexit debate. Others maintain that the so-called resurgence of the populist far right has
Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Corresponding author:
Erica Consterdine, Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW,
UK.
Email: e.consterdine@lancaster.ac.uk
Consterdine
183
been a response to rising levels of immigration facilitated by multicultural immigration
policies (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017). Past policies can create divisive politics then. Yet
there remains contestation about what the determinants of immigration policy are, and
ultimately what drives policy.
A key policy decision which some claim contributed to making Brexit ‘an eventual
inevitability’ (Thompson, 2017) was the New Labour government’s 2004 decision to
grant unfettered access to the newly acceded EU states, otherwise known as the A8 deci-
sion. The A8 policy was part of New Labour’s (1997–2010) wider managed migration
regime (Home Office, 2002b; 2005), a term used to signify a new approach to immigra-
tion regulation based on economic utilitarian arguments (Balch, 2010). The managed
migration regime was a Janus-faced policy (Zanfrini, 2019), designed to filter between
‘good’ (labour) and ‘bad’ (humanitarian) migrants based on economic worthiness
(Anderson, 2013; Flynn, 2005). Underpinned by a neoliberal logic which placed primacy
on labour market flexibility above all else, and a governing Party ideologically committed
to globalisation, the managed migration regime sought to facilitate the movement of those
deemed economically worthy while restricting so-called unwanted immigration. This
rhetorical distinction allowed the Labour government to be tough on asylum while tacitly
pursuing an expansive economic immigration policy (Mulvey, 2011: 1478). The managed
migration regime involved then both a succession of repressive asylum measures, includ-
ing extending criminal sanctions and restricting appeal rights and welfare entitlements,
while enacting a series of expansive policy reforms designed to embrace labour market
flexibility, including expanding work permits, doubling international students, establish-
ing new low- and high-skilled work schemes, the above-mentioned A8 decision, along-
side the establishment of a points-based system (PBS). Historically for Britain, and
comparatively across Europe, Labour’s expansive economic immigration reforms were
unprecedented (Hansen, 2014).
The Conservative Party in partnership with the Liberal Democrats officially aban-
doned the managed migration policy when they entered Office in 2010 as a Coalition
government (2010–2015), retaining an emphasis on ‘attracting the brightest and best’ but
nonetheless adopting a highly restrictive policy. Rooted in the Conservative manifesto
pledge to ‘reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’
(Conservative Party, 2010, 2017: 54), the policy harked back to the Party’s 1970 mani-
festo pledge of ‘no further large scale permanent immigration’, and their 1974 pledge to
bring down ‘new immigration . . . to a small and inescapable minimum’. In an attempt to
achieve this ambitious – and unachievable – target, the government adopted a number of
draconian measures (Home Office, 2015), including tightening eligibility criterion on all
labour migration routes, setting a cap on the main work visas (Tier 2), as well as a mission
to create a hostile environment for irregular migrants.
Under the Conservative-led Coalition administration, immigration policy objectives
shifted due to a change in partisan administration. Yet does this mean that policy changed?
Too often, scholars assume at face value that a shift in policy objectives translates to a
paradigmatic policy change. Yet unpacking the black box of policymaking in this case
suggests, contrarily, policy stability. Based on document analysis and over 50 elite inter-
views with civil servants, politicians and interest groups carried out between 2012 and
2016,1 I argue from a historical institutionalist perspective that while policy objectives
changed, policy and policymaking did not, and that there was conversely remarkable
confluence between the New Labour and the Conservative-led administrations’ (2010–
2015) immigration policies. Challenging the party politics school of thought that
184
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(2)
contends that policy is a product of partisan interests (Budge, 1994; Imbeau et al., 2001;
Schmidt, 1996), and my research demonstrates that while parties may matter, institutions
matter more for explaining policy outputs. In turn, an ideational legacy has evolved into
an emerging political consensus on the neoliberalisation of migration management a pol-
icy paradigm carved under New Labour that frames and regulates immigration in terms
of economic worth.
Determinants of immigration policy
What drives immigration policy? This is essentially the question scholars of migration
politics have been pondering for 20 years (Massey, 1999; Meyers, 2000). While the ‘poli-
tics matters’ school of thought (Budge, 1994; Imbeau et al., 2001; Schmidt, 1996) places
primacy on the party composition of government and the preferences and interests of
party actors, conversely historical institutionalists place explanatory value on the norms
and habits of policymaking as well as path-dependent effects (Hansen, 2000; Sanders,
2006). In short, partisan theory holds that actors have agency to change policy, whereas
historical institutionalists contend that policy is a product of inheritance, previous policy
decisions and formal and informal institutions. A third approach inspired by political
economy contends that policy is determined by the relative power weighing of organised
interests (Freeman, 1995). Therefore, some argue that the fault line in the debate remains
between the neo-intuitionalist under theorisation of agency against political economy’s
insufficient account of structure (Boswell, 2007). Yet given that such power weighting of
interest groups is determined by institutional factors including interest group incorpora-
tion, party political systems and how the institutions of the state mediate the relative
influence of different interests, policy ultimately remains a product conditioned by
institutions.
Parties matter
Stemming from a broadly elitist perspective, proponents of the ‘parties matter’ school of
thought (Imbeau et al., 2001) argue that the major determinant of variation in policy
choices and policy outputs is the party composition of government (Schmidt, 1996: 155).
Essentially parties matter in explaining policy outputs because parties control the govern-
ment. A left versus right theory of party competition implies that the respective parties
will promote programmes favourable to their interests ‘while repealing programs of their
adversaries’ (Rose and Davies, 1994: 123). The hypothesis of partisan politics models is
simple then:
As parties from different ideological backgrounds that represent different constituencies should
strive for different policy goals in order to gain re-election, different policy choices across space
and time in modern democracies should be...
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