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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and Spectators Daily Politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls, and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyfe.

UK Net migration hit 504,000 in the year to June, the highest figure ever recorded,

according to the ONS. Isabel, this isn't exactly a good news story for the government?

No, because it's taking the figures in ink exactly the opposite direction to the long-held ambition

that ministers have had. Now, that ambition has been subject to lots of upgrading and downgrading

over the years, so did when the Conservatives came into government have a net migration target

of bringing it down into the tens of thousands. That in itself was a real sort of back-of-the-envelope

lunch table napkin sort of target that had no basis on the impact on the economy or even sort

of political considerations. And was a real albatross around the Tories neck all the way up to 2015

when the party started to downgrade the force of that target from, I think, to remember Tories

of May saying on the State program, we made that comment rather than target. I've never heard

something being described as a comment before or since, but so it was sort of killed off for a few

years. And then I'd expect a fringe at Conservative Party conference at Suéla Bravenman,

home secretary known for developing policies probably quicker than on the back of an envelope,

announced that it was back and that that was her ambition again. And so you've got the rhetoric

and the numbers going in opposite directions. You then have ministers, including the home secretary

and the Prime Minister, whenever they're asked about a pragmatic immigration policy as

organisations such as the CBI would put it, you know, sort of sector-by-sector arrangements

...