1/5 Nearing the 2nd anniversary of the referendum, a piece of advice to the PM. Following the June Council meeting: (1) remove the red-line on the EEA, (2) announce a project to design an EEA-compliant immigration policy that maximises govt control over aggregate migration flows.
2 Political sectarians try to cast FoM as a binary issue: either you have it or you don't. But it's not. Freedom is a relative concept: it's a question of more or less, not all or nothing. E.g. we can see and read international rankings of 'freedom of the press'.
3 My bet as to what project (2) would show is: (a) the scope for increased govt control over aggregate flows in EEA-compliant ways is considerable, (b) it is increasing over time as EU politics changes, (c) re-design of domestic systems is key to increasing control in practice.
4 Some old know how might be useful (see Peacock Report for HO in the 1980s). By all means set a HO team on project (2), but also open it up to competition, i.e de-monopolise the problem solving. Competing teams can be commissioned, or use a prize system. Cheap at 100x the price.
5 PS to practictioners of the dark arts. Spin you must, but you may find it remarkable how effective it is to spin truth. Project (2) would be radical, innovative, a break with standard practice. Maybe even a signal of an emergent, new way of thinking about regulatory policy.
For a summary of what Peacock was about, see api.parliament.uk/historic-hansa… Douglas Hurd's passing comment on what was a project (2) approach is at the end of the second paragraph.
