No one should hold his breath that anything will be done about this most vexing of questions in the near future. It takes balls to tackle the problem of immigration; and balls are what most politicians these days sorely lack. – © Mark
THE TELEGRAPH: With Labour at last accepting that immigration is an issue, the Coalition needs to move fast, says Benedict Brogan
It is still just about possible to go through life without spotting how Britain is being changed by immigration – if you are a hermit, or live on one of the more remote of the Hebridean islands, or are insulated from the realities of everyday life by money or power.
If you are a politician, of course, you can choose not to see. Gordon Brown presided, both as chancellor and prime minister, over a record influx of migrants, but was indifferent to the consequences. Isolated in a world bounded by Downing Street, his official Jaguar and his ethnically homogenous Scottish village above the Forth, his was never the experience of most citizens, in particular those in the capital.
When Gillian Duffy tried to raise the issue with him during the campaign, his instinctive response was to dismiss her as a bigot. No matter that six months before, he had found it politically expedient to identify himself with such concerns. "I have never agreed with the lazy elitism that dismisses immigration as an issue, or portrays anyone who has concerns about immigration as a racist," he assured us, before doing just that to Mrs Duffy. "Immigration is … a question about what it means to be British."
In fact, immigration ranks as one of Labour's greatest, most durable failures. Worse than that, it was a wilful failure – as secret documents revealed earlier this year, Labour opened the floodgate for social as well as economic reasons, in an attempt to change the culture of the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity".
The consequences, in terms of social tensions and pressures on local services, can be seen almost everywhere. During the election campaign, immigration was consistently the most important issue for voters, after the economy. Yet Mr Brown was oblivious to it. He was the dealer who got us hooked on cheap foreign labour, and its artificial highs of unsustainable growth and low inflation. Ministers learned not to ask awkward questions. With no reliable statistics on who was coming in, who was here, and who was going out, "I don't know" become [sic] a legitimate excuse.
Tony Blair set the orthodoxy by proclaiming that we were not a "high-immigration country", and his followers duly repeated it. David Blunkett, who could normally be relied on to speak plainly on behalf of those who knew things were changing but could not say why, pronounced that there was "no obvious upper limit" on immigration.
And until the economic crisis hit, he was right. The numbers say it all. Net immigration jumped in a decade from about 41,000 a year to 233,000 in 2007. It fell to 163,000 in 2008, but only because more people left the country. The number of people entering Britain that year actually rose, from 574,000 to 590,000. Even now, they keep on coming, drawn to a country that offers more opportunities (and even greater welfare support) than just about anywhere else. >>> Benedict Brogan | Wednesday, June 02, 2010
