ON MAY 8th a descendant of German immigrants sat in Parliament and announced a series of measures intended to make life harder for future arrivals on Britain’s shores. The queen was reading out the government’s legislative agenda for the coming year. If the proposals become law, landlords and employers will have a new duty to check the residency status of tenants and employees, on pain of fines. Ministers will gain powers to deport criminals. A broad immigration bill will restrict access to health care, civil legal aid, driving licences and unemployment benefit. Britain’s two biggest tabloid newspapers, the Sun and the Daily Mail, led their coverage of the speech with “PM to slash migrants’ rights” and “Immigration crackdown”.

Although the economy comes top of voters’ list of concerns, immigration is prominent, too (see chart). Britons loathe it. A poll last month by Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative Party treasurer, finds that 54% believe it has been bad for the country, and nearly all think there is too much of it. Politicians say constituents raise few other topics as passionately on the doorstep. One tells a story about a man who insisted that his Hungarian immigrant grandfather ought to have been shipped home.

If polls and rants were not enough to concentrate minds, on May 2nd the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won a quarter of the vote in local elections, in part by stoking fear and resentment of immigrants. Not surprisingly, Tory strategists have concluded that robust talk on the issue can win back voters from UKIP and confound the opposition Labour Party.

That conclusion is foolishly simplistic. Immigration is not the vote-winner that it appears to be—at least, not for a mainstream party like the Conservatives, not at general elections, and especially not in the swing seats that it needs to win a majority.

“We shouldn’t try to out-UKIP UKIP” says Gavin Barwell, the Conservative MP for Croydon Central in south London—voicing a disquiet that other Tory MPs express privately. If politicians talk too much about immigration, he says, voters will conclude that they are obsessed with the issue, to the exclusion of more pressing things like jobs and the cost of living. They may also question the politicians’ motives.

That seems an odd view, given the prominence of immigration as a doorstep issue. But other politicians, both Tory and Labour, point to a discrepancy between what people say to pollsters and politicians and how they vote. Britons appear to suffer from reverse political correctness. They espouse fiercely anti-immigrant views on the doorstep, and swear that the issue will sway their vote. But in the privacy of the polling booth other issues crowd it out. It is “a sort of schizophrenia”, says one politician with long experience of northern working-class voters.

This has wrong-footed politicians before. The Conservatives lost the previously safe seat of Romsey, on England’s south coast, in a 2000 by-election in which they campaigned heavily on immigration. William Hague, then the party’s leader, proceeded to lose the 2001 general election after warning of a “flood” of asylum-seekers. Two years later Liam Fox, a stalwart of the Tory right, called for a renewed emphasis on the issue: “William had many of the right issues—it was just the wrong election,” he argued, adding that politics “has now shifted”. By 2005 polls suggested that the Conservatives had a colossal structural lead over Labour on immigration, and that people cared about it much more than any other issue. Michael Howard duly led an election campaign that emphasised it—and fared little better than Mr Hague.

Peter Kellner, a pollster, says views on immigration are often fiercely held but not particularly salient. His latest poll shows that 57% of people think it is one of the three most important issues facing the country; yet only 17% say it is one of the three most important issues facing them personally. Employment and hospitals, by contrast, are immediate. And voters care less about politicians’ specific views than about their character. Though David Cameron has worked to “detoxify” the Conservative Party since becoming its leader in 2005, the public still doubts that it wants the right kind of society or is compassionate. Tough talk on immigration, though popular in itself, plays dangerously into that suspicion.

This was the insight that guided some in the party a decade ago. “If we seem not to like Britain today, the feeling will surely be reciprocated” ran a favourite modernisers’ mantra. And if too much talk of immigration leaves white Britons cool, it positively repels others. In 2010 just 16% of non-whites voted Tory, according to Lord Ashcroft. Blacks and Asians are increasingly moving from the solidly Labour inner cities to more marginal suburbs, where they rub shoulders with the centrist voters, cautious but not xenophobic, who decide British elections. Banging on about immigrants abusing Britons’ good nature will not help the Tories win over either group.

But perhaps the greatest danger is the perception of pandering, say some Tory sages. Britons already doubt the integrity of their elected representatives; the prospect of MPs chasing after opinion polls does little to repel charges of cynicism and disingenuousness. They might be better off not bothering—at least they would get marks for being honest.