On immigration reform, populists have usually been part of the problem

It is real big problem and needs to be tackled. The Conservative Party can and should show it is serious about it. Badenoch is right that we have to be painfully honest about what has gone wrong and how it could be put right. So here are three suggestions about issues we need to confront.

First a significant factor in the surge of migration is the extraordinary inflow of social care workers often bringing dependents with them. David Goodhart estimates that is 270,000 workers with 380,000 dependents.

It is shocking that we are incapable of training and employing many more local people to do this essential work. But training them and paying enough to attract more British workers costs money, and that is where the barriers are.

One obvious place to start is to reform the funding of social care and expect more affluent families to pay for their care, domiciliary or residential, over some new threshold for assets, and with flexible arrangements for it to be a charge on their estates rather than paid up front. That is what Theresa May proposed, without properly preparing the ground, back in 2017 – and look where the ‘Dementia Tax’ got her.

If people won’t pay for it individually then there needs to a contribution from taxpayers. That is what Boris did with a 1.25 per cent extra national insurance charge, the Health and Social Care Levy. He went through the tough politics, partly under pressure from Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, and legislated to bring it in.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng cancelled it and brought in legislation to reverse it. After she fell the Bill to repeal the Levy was still going through Lords; some peers wondered if we could possibly vote to send it back to the Commons, now that its author was not prime minister just to check if the new Tory Government really wanted to abandon that key funding having brought it in. But the Lords did not dare go beyond our constitutional constraints.

So both May and Johnson tried serious difficult measures to fund social care and both have seen their attempts rejected. If social care is not to be properly financed, then we are going to continue to suck in low paid workers from abroad.

Secondly there was the fantasy of the Australian points-based system which was a popular buzzword as it appeared to solve all our problems. It was part of the case for Brexit that we had no special relationship with our European neighbours and should just recruit from around the world regardless of where people came from.

This post-Brexit openness to migrants coming to work from across the world has not been taken up evenly: the main countries enjoying these post Brexit freedoms have been India, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

The global points-based model was always high risk. There are deep differences between the short-distance migration of a worker coming from Poland or Spain, often travelling on their own and returning home easily, and a long-distance migrant worker coming from Asia or Africa. They are much more likely to bring their dependents with them and to expect to stay.

Going for a flow from the other side of the world instead of sharing in the single European market designed by Margaret Thatcher was a consequence of Brexit. It wasn’t the Boris Wave – it was the Brexit Wave.

Then there is our open labour market combined with the absence of ID cards. Conservatives are proud of our flexible labour market – but without strict controls of who is working, it is a magnet for migrants from abroad.

The 2019 manifesto had a sensible commitment to bring together the Gangmasters Authority, the minimum wage team in HMRC, and the inspection of Employment Agency Standards in a single enforcement authority. The Home Office rightly wanted this as a key tool to check compliance – but that manifesto commitment was not implemented. That was another failure to implement a useful policy that could have helped tackle illegal migration in particular.

We should go much further with a more contributory welfare state together with an ID card to establish your entitlement to access benefits or health care as a British citizen. But the Coalition abandoned Labour plans for ID cards.

Other EU ministers could not understand why we didn’t make our welfare benefits more contributory. There is free movement to work in the EU but there is not absolute freedom of movement. An EU citizen in one state living in another may be required to register after three months and can be expected to show they have the means to support themselves and required to leave if they don’t.

Britain could have gone for a really tough policy consistent with EU membership… but we never tried it.

Properly-funded social care, ID cards, a contributory welfare state, tough labour market enforcement, and full use of our powers to require people to leave within the EU would have added up to a coherent package to control migration. Instead we went for Brexit which has made the problem worse.

So there were and still are a practical set of policies that a competent, confident governing party of either centre-right or the centre-left could implement to control migration. Calling the extraordinary recent surge the ‘Boris Wave’, as if it is all the fault of one man, or claiming that the real culprit is the ECHR, does not match the scale of the challenge.

Getting good effective policies to control migration is difficult but not impossible. Populism and the political pressure it exerts are actually part of the problem. It is anxieties about populist opposition to doing difficult things which stopped us funding social care or introducing ID cards and led to the dangerous Brexit myth of going for long distance migration.

Populism is not the answer: it is one reason we have got into this mess.