Some truths about immigration

Something strange is happening when a left-wing government publicly accuses the BBC, riddled with institutionalised political correctness, of – can you think of a more wounding insult? – a ‘Powellite anti-immigration agenda’. The Pope publicly denouncing one of his cardinals as a Satanist would hardly be more surprising. It is not just cats of the postwar fractured Left scratching each other’s eyes out; David Blunkett’s intemperate outburst was in reality an admission that he is losing the most important political argument of the day. It is not only that Britain doesn’t want mass immigration but that, despite the government’s attempts to persuade us that we need it, even parts of the BBC are finally waking up to see that there are real problems.

The fact that the BBC found the courage to reflect the concerns of its licence-fee payers is a clear sign that the tide has turned in the immigration debate. The presenter of the programme, John Ware, declared in the Daily Mail that the BBC could no longer ‘sew up its lips’ on the issue, and that anyone with an ‘open mind’ has to face up to it.

Unfortunately for the government, more and more people on both the Left and the Right are becoming open-minded on the problems of the government’s policy of actively encouraging mass immigration. The pro-immigrationists’ trusty tactic of suppressing all inconvenient truth and debate by denouncing all critics as racist, fascist or xenophobic just isn’t working: there are too many intellectually honest people who can see that baseless insults aren’t answers to real problems.

The subject of immigration has been taboo in Britain since Enoch Powell’s infamous speech a third of a century ago: there has not, until a few months ago, been one debate in Parliament about the optimal types and scale of immigration, only debates on the minutiae of immigration laws.