Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Leading article

Not-so-little Britain

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

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

Second, it is encouraging that the immigration minister, Liam Byrne — one of the most promising of his generation — has admitted that ‘the pace of change has been unsettling and has created challenges’. Gordon Brown’s ‘Britishness’ agenda has attracted scorn in some quarters, but the Prime Minister should persist in his efforts. While it would be very un-British to Anglicise Nicolas Sarkozy’s slogan ‘Love France or leave it’, Mr Brown is right to argue that immigrants must do more than pay taxes and obey the law. Social cohesion depends upon a common language and a kernel of shared values. The leftist multicultural ideology encouraged only fragmentation and relativism and — in its crazier municipal manifestations — gave financial reward to extremism rather than moderacy. As with border control, there is much work to do to restore public confidence.

The most challenging question is how our public services and housing stock will cope with what looks like a classic Malthusian mismatch between population growth and supply. To this problem there is no glib solution. But those who argue that — in general — more government planning is the answer are precisely wrong. New Labour’s custody of the public services since 1997 has shown that schools and hospitals need more freedom, not less.

It remains absurdly difficult for good schools to expand, for example. It is depressing that, in spite of the countless billions spent on the NHS, so much is still spent on administration rather than capacity. The public transport system is a national disgrace, scarcely able to handle existing numbers of passengers, let alone a dramatically increased workforce. Local authorities have worked to targets for house-building based on estimates in population growth before EU expansion had been negotiated. What all these services have in common is that they have suffered from the heavy hand of bureaucracy and are nowhere near nimble enough to respond to such rapid and unprecedented change.

Immigration raises fundamental questions not only about national identity but about the capacity of government to control the nation’s borders, preside over cohesive communities and manage public services in an age of hectic, sometimes pulverising change. There must, of course, be firm but fair rules governing entry, and equally robust mechanisms to ensure that those who should be deported are indeed expelled without delay. But that is only the beginning of the collective task. An expanding, increasingly diverse population has presented policymakers with a quite new set of challenges. For a decade New Labour has talked smugly about ‘joined-up government’: now let us see if it can turn rhetoric into reality.