[sefrost]

There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration.

I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration?

Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!

[jltsiren]

People pay too much attention on what politicians say, and too little on what kind of people those politicians and their allies are.

My impression is that Reform and the Greens are the only mainstream parties with an actual opinion on immigration. The other parties approach immigration from a more technocratic perspective. They form policies based on expected outcomes, regardless of what the people with opinions think about that kind of immigration. (Except to the extent those opinions influence the outcomes.)

As long as people keep voting Tories, Labour, or Lib Dems, they are effectively saying that immigration is not that important issue after all.

[roryirvine]

In 2019, the Conservatives stood on a manifesto that promised, amongst other things, to ditch immigration targets (in favour of a more generous points-based system), to increase foreign recruitment of healthcare workers, and to introduce a new student visa which would attract "more students from all over the world" and encourage them to stay on and apply for work in the UK after graduation.

They won a big majority as a result.

[sefrost]

They campaigned on reducing the net figure to below 100,000 in the 2019 election.

Instead they took it from 185,000 to 950,000.

After that, they are now polling at all time lows (17%).

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50524262

[roryirvine]

Read point 8 in your link - the 100,000 net target was from the previous (2015 and 2017) manifestos, but was never taken seriously and was ditched in favour of the looser points-based system in 2019.

Both the Tories and Labour shifted their position several times in the 2010s, but few people based their votes on it. The only real change in policy came with the Brexit referendum, which was widely interpreted as being a desire for a shift from European to Commonwealth immigration.

The recent wave of concern is a new thing, and it remains to be seen whether it will continue now that the Brexit migration surge has tailed off or whether the online shit-stirring will be enough to sustain it for longer.