• Cameron preferred not to take the economic pain of doing that and then gambled on a Remain win. Immigration has always been the emotive issue that the Sun/Mail used to drum up Leave support... some token ‘tough guy’ actions (rather than breached numerical targets) would have neutered that?

  • Blair was pretty good at playing the Murdoch press, it might have worked if combined with good marketing. Though putting a number on immigration, not too smart...

    You cannot limit FoM more than what EU allows, going to the EU asking "can we stop all the Polish now" even though they got jobs fair and square, yeah, forget about it.

    Now that "immigrants are under control" the whole topic just trailed off, perhaps a smart enough marketing might have sorted it, as in reality non EU immigration was already "controlled" and higher than EU immigration...

    No guarantees of course, as you say, it's an emotive issue and would need smarts and wanting to get a win w/o throwing immigrants under the bus.

    (crickets)

    Ah yeah :)

  • You cannot limit FoM more than what EU allows, going to the EU asking "can we stop all the Polish now" even though they got jobs fair and square, yeah, forget about it.

    Now that "immigrants are under control" the whole topic just trailed off, perhaps a smart enough marketing might have sorted it

    Yeah I suppose that’s my point - maybe we could have got public opinion to this point on immigration (ie fine / not a top 5 issue) without Brexit?

    “four freedoms are indivisible” was/is not helpful dogma

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