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Politics

Immigration policy can ‘swamp’ a party’s message. But Cameron knows this

James Forsyth

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Cameron enters the immigration debate

Another danger comes, oddly enough, from an albatross that Nick Clegg, the favourite for the Liberal Democrat leadership, has hung round his own neck with his ill-thought-out proposal for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. The danger is that this offers such a good stick to beat the Liberal Democrats with that the Tories forget how they appear to the public as they set about attacking it. The appointment of the mild-mannered Damian Green to the immigration portfolio has so far guaranteed that the Tory party’s policy is presented in a calm way. Whether the parliamentary party as a whole can continue to exude this sense of reasonableness is far from certain.

Any British government can now only control non-EU economic migration. In reality, this is about a third of the total. (Cameron claims that it is actually substantially more than a third; but his failure to show his calculations makes his answer all but meaningless.) Indeed, the biggest thing that any politician could do to reduce immigration would be to move the 15 per cent of the working-age population who are on benefits into work. Brits can be baristas too.

Britain will be a country of mass immigration for the foreseeable future. There is nothing any prime minister can do about this, unless they plan to pull out of the EU. The challenges that this presents are varied: the overqualified Polish plumber poses a very different set of questions to those posed by the young Pakistani spouse with little or no English. Yet two things are certain. First, public confidence will only be restored and the poison drained from the debate when the government can demonstrate that it is in control of the border and knows who is coming in and going out. Second, Britain can only succeed as a country of mass immigration if it develops a positive sense of nationhood that immigrant and indigenous populations alike can embrace. A multi-ethnic, multi-faith society cannot survive as a series of hostile camps eyeing each other with suspicion — which is what makes so worrying this week’s revelation in a Policy Exchange report that one in four British mosques are giving house room to hate literature.

The real challenge for Cameron is not to reduce immigration but to come up with a compelling answer to the question that the Prime Minister has grappled with in public for so long: what is Britishness? Without an answer to that, and renewed public confidence in the sanctity of the country’s borders, reducing net immigration by 10,000 or 20,000 a year will make no real difference.