Business secretary Vince Cable is due to express further criticism of the UK immigration cuts in a BBC documentary this week.
Cable has made no secret of his disapproval of prime minister David Cameron's plans to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands before the next election. In the past he went so far as to compare the Tory's approach to cutting UK visas to Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech.
The Liberal Democrat is now due to suggest that, regardless of the mismatch of ideals, the Tory party are highly unlikely to achieve the cuts in numbers. He has spoken to the BBC as part of the to documentary, 'The Truth About Immigration' and said: “Setting an arbitrary cap is not helpful. It almost certainly won't achieve the below 100,000 level the Conservatives have set, so let's be practical about it.
“The idea it should come down to 100,000 is something the Liberal Democrats have never signed up to because we simply regard it as impractical.”
In an interview with the news source's political editor, Nick Robinson, he added: “[The figure] involves British people emigrating – you can't control that. It involves free movement within the European Union – in and out. It involves British people coming back from overseas, who are not immigrants but who are counted in the numbers.”
Cameron has already admitted that changes with EU migration and difficulties with data have already hampered the party's pledge to reduce migration. Official statistics recently confirmed
that numbers have actually increased, with a net migration figure of 182,000 recorded for the year to June 2013, compared to 167,000 in the previous year.