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Leading article

Not-so-little Britain

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

The Spectator on how Britain should respond to the new levels of immigration

This week, the Office of National Statistics predicted that, a decade hence, there will be 65 million people in the UK — an increase of five million — and that by 2031, the population will be over 70 million. It is suggested that at least 70 per cent of the population rise over the next 20 years will be the consequence of immigration. Wherever one stands on the desirability of population mobility, these are astonishing figures.

It is important to understand how radically what we mean by ‘immigration’ has changed. When Powell spoke, he was referring to the influx of Commonwealth citizens: the issue of immigration was therefore inextricably bound up with the hugely sensitive question of race. Today, when voters cite ‘immigration’ as a primary concern, they refer to a much more complex cluster of anxieties. Economic migrants are too easily confused with asylum seekers. A large proportion of immigrants in 2007 come from EU countries rather than the subcontinent, post-colonial Africa or the Caribbean. Many do not stay for long. Forty years ago, ‘immigration’ was shorthand for the change in the racial composition of the British population. Today it signifies the unprecedented forces of change, labour mobility and social churn that are transforming what it is to be a citizen — not just in Britain, but throughout the developed world.

It is possible to argue, as the Tories have done, that the impact of immigration upon aggregate GDP should not be confused with its effect upon GDP per head. The fact remains that, as a Home Office report published earlier this month showed, migrants now boost economic output by £6 billion a year — and, it should be added, tend to be more reliable and harder working than British-born workers. The trade unions grumble that the influx of cheap labour has depressed pay. But another way of looking at the phenomenon is that the emergence of an increasingly free market in employment has also acted as a brake on wage inflation and (therefore) on mortgage rates.

Self-evidently, however, that is not the end of the matter. This government has failed dismally in one of its most basic tasks, which is to secure the nation’s borders. John Reid was quite right, when Home Secretary, to say in the wake of the foreign prisoner scandal that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate was not ‘fit for purpose’ (one of many reasons why Dr Reid’s departure from the government is a serious loss). Ministers have yet to give a satisfactory response to David Davis’s complaint that the new ‘Border and Immigration Agency is the old IND with a new name’. Public confidence in this core function of government is at a low ebb, and justly so.