Fewer immigrants could cost Treasury billions

The Lodger’s Rent

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when the majority is permitted to hold two wishes at once and no one is charged with introducing them to each other. In 2024 the Office for Budget Responsibility informed the UK Treasury that a reduction in immigration could cost it billions of pounds. The warning was received as a technical inconvenience. It was in fact a portrait of the electorate.

Consider the social type that produced it. The democratic citizen wants the comforts a generous state provides and wants also a country whose composition alters slowly. Neither desire is contemptible. But for a generation British governments reconciled them by a quiet expedient: they admitted working-age newcomers whose taxes supported promises made to the settled population, and who, for their first years, could not vote on those promises. The majority thus acquired a class of contributors without a voice. Nobody designed this. It accumulated, as administrative habits do, because it spared every minister the task of telling voters that their pensions and their preferences were in dispute.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. A people is not a ledger. The right to decide who joins the community is older and graver than any forecast, and a nation that admits strangers merely to balance its accounts has mistaken itself for a firm. I concede all of it. But a right exercised without sight of its price is not sovereignty; it is appetite. The household that resolves to dismiss its lodger is entirely within its rights. What it cannot do is go on spending the lodger’s rent.

Here lies the institutional consequence, and it is the one I find most instructive. The arithmetic has been delegated to the Office for Budget Responsibility, a body of forecasters no one elected, precisely so that no elected person need pronounce it. Ministers cite the forecast when it suits them and deplore it when it does not; the citizen hears of a “fiscal hole” as of bad weather, something that befalls the Treasury rather than something they chose. A people that receives the consequences of its own decisions as news from an office has ceased, in that matter, to govern.

The remedy is not more forecasts. It is the old, tedious practice of deliberating the trade in public: in the parish hall, in the constituency meeting, wherever a person must say aloud which they would rather surrender.

Picture instead what happens now. A voter marks the ballot for fewer arrivals, walks home past the surgery, and wonders why the waiting list has grown.