IS there anything more “on brand” than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, child and husband to migrants, using his first tweet of 2024 to celebrate his government’s decision to bar most international students from bringing their partners or children with them to the UK?

Between this and the announcement that income thresholds for UK citizens to bring a partner from another country to live with them will more than double, it’s clear Sunak is not content to merely pull the ladder up behind him but feels compelled to take a sledgehammer to it as well – just in case. Happy New Year, indeed.

The cruelty in these policies is unmistakable but what makes them even more egregious is that they are also utterly pointless, ill thought out, and little more than headline fodder as a General Election looms.

“We’re already delivering for the British people,” Sunak posted in relation to the student visa change, as if the life of one solitary soul in the UK is going to be positively impacted by altering a rule they didn’t even know existed until five minutes ago.

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A report published earlier this year by Universities UK International found that students from abroad brought in £37.4 billion more to the UK economy than they cost it, with the vast majority of that coming from non-EU students.

For every 1000 non-EU students currently studying here, there are 216 dependents brought with them, but this number would have to rise to 10,400 for the cost to the UK to equal the economic gains that come from these students. In other words, we can more than afford to provide international students with the dignity and respect of family life while they study but our universities certainly can’t afford to lose the income that comes with them.

Fees from international students constitute the majority of the income of universities across the UK. So when UK Government ministers boast that the policy will result in a drop of around 140,000 people coming to the UK each year, the next words out of their mouths should be an explanation of how exactly they’re going to fund that shortfall.

If the answer is – as it surely must be – that it will come from a rise in fees for students born in the UK, this would make a mockery of any notion of “delivering for the British people”.

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It would also be prudent for Sunak to outline the consideration that has been given to the impacts of this change for different parts of the UK and any mitigations that will be made accordingly, given that we know that Scotland has an ageing population and therefore a greater need to attract working-age migrants.

At a more local level, Glasgow is among five UK cities where international students bring in the greatest financial contribution.

Considering the city is among those with the highest proportion of people living on a low income, as well as having one of the highest migrant populations in Scotland, this means it is also likely to be disproportionately affected by the promised increase in income levels required for multinational families to stay together.

Leaving decency and compassion to one side (because using those words to most Tories is like trying to miaow at the dog), these plans are simply not pragmatic or economically sound. Of course, expecting this government to engage in any meaningful analysis or discussion of the costs, benefits and risks of any policy change would be out of the question.

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Like so many of the Tories’ Big Announcements of late, this looks like yet another attempt to sound like they’re “cracking down” on something or other by inventing non-existent problems. It’s as clear a sign as any that this UK Government doesn’t have a single substantive idea to speak of and the closest thing to a strategy it can come up with is to deflect and distract at every opportunity.

You see it in their plans to spy on the bank accounts of social security claimants despite the fact the Information Commissioner has said the plans are disproportionate to the actual numbers of benefit fraud cases.

You see it in their obsession with talking about trans people – a miniscule population group – as if this was the greatest threat facing our world today. You even see it in the ban on XL Bullies, another soundbite-driven policy which will do nothing to address the problem it purports to respond to.

Sadly, large parts of the media – and, indeed, the opposition – are more than willing to lap all of this up, ceding precious airtime and white space to concocted hysteria in place of asking the Tories about topics they’d rather avoid – such as their record in government, their catalogue of proven lies, or the black hole which resides where a vision for the next five years of leadership should be.

And yet, I find myself oddly optimistic – or perhaps the more apt word would be schadenfreude – as I watch this unravel.

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Firstly, it reeks of desperation. At this point, shock value and scapegoating are the only tricks the Tories have left, their last-ditch attempt to cling on for dear life as they’re circling the drain. I’ll be happy to open the popcorn and watch them disappear back down the hole they crawled out of.

I also truly believe that, while they scramble to remain relevant and cash in on every hot-button culture war topic being debated in the gutters of the internet or in the pages of tabloid newspapers, they will lose more voters than they’ll win.

Every day as they take their hateful, incoherent agenda that bit further – such as targeting academics, universities and British people who happen to have fallen in love with someone who wasn’t born here – more people are waking up to the threat posed by a government which seeks to appeal to our worst impulses.

It seems to me Sunak’s Conservatives have overshot the mark by quite a bit and they’re fast running out of fall guys to force to resign. So, yes, I am somewhat hopeful that we will soon see the back of the architects of an endless slew of dire policies.

However, considering Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has said her party supports the restrictions on dependents for overseas students and instead focused her comments on criticising the Tories for rising migration figures, there is no room for complacency on making clear just how misguided these plans are.

In the absence of a turnaround in Labour policy, the only real hope for Scotland will be the devolution of immigration policy – or, of course, independence.