A Question of Numbers or of Kind?

Rhoda Klapp

You have no trouble arguing with the 'opponents' arguments which you have just made up. To your own satisfaction you have on. There is a smug 'so there' tone to this whole piece. Stick around this time, and argue with some of the real, articulate coffee housers. Or will we be dismissed as green-ink racists again?

Hawkeye

It is the number of people in the UK that is a problem, not their point of origin or colour.

The problem is wider than that. There are too many people in the world. More people mean more resources are needed (and consumed) than if there are fewer people around. Bit of a no-brainer that...

Those who live in Britain consume, per head, far more resources than those in China or India, but not a much as those in the USA. So our 60 million have about the resource impact as 250 million in India. Pump that up to 70 million and it is like adding another 40 million in the 3rd world. For yankees the ratio is a factor of 7 so 300 million of them have the same effect as China and India combined.

The western economies need to control immigration a lot better than they have done so far. From a "pressure on resources" point of view, getting UK and Yanks to emigrate to lower consumption economies is that best thing that can happen.

ed hall

It isn't numbers, it's culture.
We just don't want any more people. Full stop.

Ray Burston

Alex, if you're relaxed about of Britain of seventy million souls, then at what point do you start to lose sleep? Eighty million? One hundred million?

However, what you have failed to address is at what point the British people actually get a say in how many people they want to cram into their already crowded island. Or do our views not count?

If you want to know the difference between a crowded country and a not-so-crowded country, let me offer you a telling measure that I have discovered.

Holidaying in Britain: parking charges on every beach you stop at and, even then, you have to hunt high and low for a parking space. Holidaying in Spain or France: seldom ever asked to cough up to park the car on the beach and little if any problem parking the car.

The bien pensants of this world might think mass immigration is groovy, what with all these fancy new foreign restaurants to chatter away in whilst the Ukrainian au pair tucks the kids safely up in bed. However, the rest of us plebs have to live with the less endearing side of it.

Rhoda Klapp

Well, Alex, are you content just to shout 'racist!' and run away? Are you more comfortable making up the arguments than facing them?

Tiberius

That's all very cleverly presented, Alex, but let's cut to the chase, shall we.

Would you also consider the brave souls who are apostates of Islam to be racist, bigoted Little Englanders?

Fergus Pickering

It IS the immigrants' point of origin. If they come from muslim countries (and are therefore muslim) then we don't want any more because they threaten our way of live, and indeed our lives. If they are Australians then we don't mind at all. All the fewer for them to pick a Test team from.

Carroll Barry-Walsh

Aronovitch's article was smug and patronising telling people that they're worried about change not immigration and that immigration is enriching and aren't we all fools for not realising it. And you're falling into exactly the same trap.

Of course, it's the type of people we let in because there is a difference between letting in people who share our values, who want to - and take positive steps to - become British and discard those elements of their culture which are inconsistent with or hostile to our culture. And then there are those who simply come from the Third World and continue to live here as if they were still there but with more money. They don't discard those cultural practices which are contrary to our values, to our laws; no - they demand that we accommodate them, that we tolerate the intolerable. That is what we don't like and want to change. There is nothing "enriching" about having polygamy or Female Genital Mutilation or "honour" killings or forced marriages or burqas or death for apostates or book-burning on our streets or demands that free speech be curtailed or virulent anti-Semitism or demands for sharia law etc and it is utterly disingenuous to pretend that there is.

There absolutely has to be some recognition that if people are let into the country they have an obligation to assimilate and become British and that this means that they cannot continue to live as if they were still in their country of origin.

A nation is more than simply a collection of people who happen to be in a particular geographical area at any one time. A nation consists of people with a shared culture, a shared language, a shared history, shared values and beliefs, a shared narrative about what they are about and where they are going. People coming to this country can become British, no matter what their origins and colour/ethnic group etc but they need to do something positive to become British and we need to make it clear what we expect of them. The problem we have now is that we have not had that expectation, still don't have it in any meaningful way and Labour in particular have poo-poohed the very idea of a nation as I have described it. But a nation with many different competing cultures will eventually fall apart and risks doing so bloodily - see Yugoslavia / Northern Ireland, for instance. The failure of the political class and the so-called intelligentsia to understand this is depressing. Even more depressing is that the only politician raising this issue - for entirely disingenuous reasons - is a Nazi

Simon Denis

I think Carroll Barry Walsh is right. Aaronovitch is prattling again. If people fear change then immigration will terrify them for it represents a change more substantial, more intimate than almost any other kind of development. It breaks the easy familiarity we have with our environment; it breaks the easy association of our national life with its past; it introduces new and jarring associations with a number pasts which to many have little or no appeal - and that is just the start. It transforms neighbourhoods - churches and Sundays and pubs are replaced - by mosques and Fridays and halal butchers. The very smells on the street cease to represent anything sensibly like home. Can you not see this, Mr Massie? Do these visible, tangible, palpable upheavals not affect you at all? And if not, are you perfectly sure that it is not because you can retreat from them? Into books? Into your library? Into the "inscape" supplied by the remnants of the old society? Of course in small doses a touch of the foreign, the colourful, the exotic is welcome. Of course, if one or two areas gain an ethnic character distinct from the prevailing type, nobody is harmed. But when a whole country looks as if it is about to go under for ever beneath a sudden tide of indifferent and sometimes hostile newcomers, then something has gone wrong. It is at this point that you will remind us that the figures are misleading - the number of people coming in is going down, you purr. So we have always been informed when the reality of immigration becomes unbearable, but it makes your argument inconsistent. Either you think that continual, large scale immigration is a good, in which case stop reassuring us that it is not happening. Or you think that if it were happening, our anxieties would be understandable - in which case, don't quietly imply that somehow we are "racist", objecting to the type not the number of immigrants. In the first place, we all of us accept that common humanity trumps nationality, when push comes to shove. It is just that the only shove going on has been a Labour one, forcing migrants into Britain for no good economic or humanitarian reason. Secondly, we are not against any particular type; rather, we are for a particular type - the English type and his or her right to predominate in England. Our objections to mass immigration would still stand, therefore, even if we were genuinely getting the most various and mixed new population in the world. It is the long continuity of an island people in its island home which we cherish - yes, a particular people and only "white" as it happens. It is the left's obsession with race and racism which prevents it from realising that the revulsion from multiculturalism is not "racist" but particularist. Indeed, I would go further and hazard that it is the deep, unrecognised racial prejudice of the left itself, which is directed against "whites" which prevents it from allowing such particularist feeling to any culture which happens to have "white" origins and composition. We want the familiar; we want our home; we want something of old England to survive in this heartless unmeaning world. Why criminalise so tender and so necessary an emotion? Why moralistically ram the multi-culti nowhere down the throats of a perfectly tolerant people? You say you are a free trading liberal. So were Gradgrind and Scrooge.

English Electric

It's both.

I worry about another 5 million people in our crowded island.

I worry about cultural change.

I'm sorry if that offends you.

JohnBUK

Alex, look, if this immigration policy is so obviously good for the country then why didn't NuLiebor state it at the time so that we could all have nodded and said, "get on with it, let them all come"? Or did they perhaps forget there were other people in England apart from the London Yoghurt-knitters Caring Club? If you are right then shouldn't we have had the chance to vote on it, or is that voting malarky all a bit passe these days? "Can't trust the old plebs to get this at all can we".
Annoyed? Of course not, just bemused that I don't get it at all.

bnpvoter

let them go and enrich some other country's culture