Thank you so much for being on the program today. It's great to speak to you. So what's your reaction to today's immigration figures?

Well, for those who don't follow these things in detail and that's, I suspect the bulk of the population, they must be very confused because the Office for National Statistics are revising the way that they undertake the calculations. I think the term used is experimenting, and as a consequence, the figures have been revised up and we're not sure whether they're going to be revised down in the future. But obviously they're very bad news for those. And that is clearly the government who have been parading that they wanted to get immigration figures way down. Remember the tens of thousands, not 672,000 or 745,000. So we're in a different ballpark altogether.

Yeah, that tens of thousands just feel like another sort of lifetime almost. So in your view, is immigration too high?

Well, it depends which part of it you take. I think it's really important to understand that if you strip out those who have come from the Ukraine and Hong Kong, and this was true of last year as well, and you take out, which I think we should, full time education students, both undergraduates and post grads, then you have a very different picture. And I was amazed to find myself agreeing today with Jacob Reese Mogg, who rightly says that the issue not in terms of secure borders or what we should do to deal with traffickers, but as an issue of migration, the small boats issue is a complete distraction, in his words, distraction. And I believe that. So I think we just got to take the different parts of what we're seeing today, get a grip where we need to. So if people are bringing immigrants in on work visas and they're paying them less than the going rate, we should deal with it. If people are bringing in dependents in an inappropriate way, we should deal with it. But we should have a rational, long term approach. And I think from the conservatives point of view, they've got to ask themselves this question do you believe in markets?

If you believe in a labor market, then you have to fill vacancies from somewhere.

Does that mean you're quite relaxed then, with the current level of immigration?

No, I'm not relaxed because I think the system's out of control. I think 165,000 people waiting for their applications to be processed and I think a failure to understand that you actually have to deal with other countries if you're going to get this right, including much better agreements with the French. I think all of that can be done. But I think if you elevate immigration as a major political issue and then you fail to deliver, it's not surprising that people become disillusioned.

What do you make about the current Labor Party's position when it comes to immigration?

Well, I think we've quite rightly seen it as part of a much bigger picture of getting people into work, of the skills agenda. I produced or led on a report for Kirstarmer some time ago now, which laid out a whole range of recommendations for re skilling as well as skilling people so that we can fill the vacancies of the future particularly. With the onset of artificial intelligence and robotics, the world's going to change dramatically. And we need to help people progress in work and to be secure in facing these enormous changes. And I think if we get the perspective right across the board in terms of policies that are joined up, we can reassure people. What I really fear is that if we're not very careful, we'll end up with a situation that the Dutch are in today, where they've had a far right party do so well, that their leader is claiming to be the next Prime Minister. And that mirrors, of course, the far right Prime Minister of Italy. But even she is more moderate, more humane, in terms of what they call offshore processing of asylum claims than we are, because she believes that it should be done by Italian immigration officers, not some other country.

You're talking about Rwanda there, I guess.

I'm talking about Rwanda. I'm talking about the way in which the Italians, under a far right government, would allow people back into the country if they were deemed to be legitimate asylum seekers. The Rwanda policy doesn't even allow that. It's a one way ticket, which is why the Supreme Court was so jumpy about the safety of people who go there.

Do you think there is a risk, as you put it, a far right government or politician taking control in the UK as well?

No, I don't, because I think Labor will win the general election, but there's nothing to say that the Conservative Party won't absorb even further those elements that they already embraced when many members of Ukip joined the Conservative Party. And we saw that with the influx of MPs in 2019, which were very much to the right of the previous cohort. So there are two ways this can go. Either a far right party on the fringe starts to develop, as the BNP did some years ago, or a right wing Conservative Party emerges with all the elements that we've seen over recent weeks with the previous Home Secretary.