Those who think Britain is no longer a great and decent country should consider the events of the past two weeks: an alleged Islamist plot to attack airliners has already led to the charging of 11 suspects; our airports have been in turmoil; there is a furore over the effectiveness and propriety of ethnic ‘passenger profiling’; the Home Secretary warns that there are ‘dozens’ more terrorist plots under investigation.
Yet — in the midst of all this — the country is finally embarking upon a long-needed debate on immigration, and doing so (with a very few exceptions) in a calm and pragmatic fashion. Elsewhere in the world, such a conjunction of events would have led to inflammatory rhetoric by politicians and widespread social disorder. It is a tribute to the common sense of the British that the real target of abuse has been not immigrants or ethnic minorities, but the government.
Ministers predicted that 26,000 migrants would arrive from new EU countries between 2004 and 2006. The actual figure, it was announced last week, was 427,000 and Tony McNulty, the immigration minister, was forced to concede that the total may be closer to 600,000 when those who failed to register are taken into account.
For four decades, the British debate on immigration has been stultified, caught between the two extremes of Powellism and political correctness. Labour and Tory have both resorted to daft rhetoric in response to popular anxiety; William Hague, when he was Conservative leader, famously warned that Britain might become a ‘foreign land’, while No. 10 trumped him in May 2002 by floating plans to deploy Royal Navy warships and RAF warplanes to
intercept refugees.
Last week it was possible to see the seeds of a more mature argument. First of all, the issues of asylum and immigration are no longer lazily conflated. The number of asylum applications in 2005 was 30,800, the lowest figure since 1997. But the number of failed asylum-seekers being removed from Britain also fell to 58,200 last year, 10,000 fewer than in 2002. This is a shocking administrative failure: we shall see whether John Reid, the Home Secretary, is able to match tough words with robust action.
On the Tory side, one of David Cameron’s most impressive achievements since December has been his ‘decontamination’ of the Tory brand: the party is no longer frightened to talk about immigration lest it be accused of being ‘racist’. Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, sounded admirably moderate when he called last week for restrictions on migration from Bulgaria and Romania when they join the EU.
At the very least, a hiatus is clearly necessary before the doors can be opened to two more Eastern European countries. The reason for this is quite simply that the government is not in control of its own system, has no idea how many migrants to expect from Bulgaria and Romania, and no satisfactory plans to prepare local communities for their arrival. Until these basic administrative problems are resolved, the willing workers of Romania and Bulgaria should be made to wait.
That said, there is no doubt that a well-managed system of migration from such countries would be to the benefit of the British economy. Those who bleat that Polish workers depress wage levels should consider the benign impact migration is having upon wage inflation and therefore upon interest rates. If many of these jobs were not filled by migrants, they would not be filled at all: the work would be performed elsewhere in the world and tax revenues in this country would suffer.
A sharp distinction must also be drawn between migrants who wish to work for a limited period in Britain and immigrants who hope to settle here. According to the Home Office, 50 per cent of all migrants claim that they intend to stay for less than two years. Even so, the number of migrants given settlement last year rose to a record figure of 179,120, compared with 58,700 in 1997. Most of these came from Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent and most were dependants of migrants already living in this country.
Self-evidently, this is a completely separate question from the management of Polish plumbers. The total failure of ‘multiculturalism’ as a left-wing ideology since the 1970s is disgracefully clear: it has encouraged ghettoisation and deprived generations of children of Asian and African descent of a sense of what it is to be British, and the great national history of which they are now a part.
That said, those who hark back to ‘monoculturalism’ delude themselves. Britain has become and will remain a ‘multicultural’ country in the strictly empirical sense that these islands are now home to citizens from a huge variety of backgrounds. This can be a strength in a nation — as it has been in America — as long as there is an iron-clad insistence on conformity to certain norms. It is not enough to observe the rule of law and pay one’s taxes. To cohere, a society — however porous and tolerant — requires more of its citizens. Those Muslim leaders who think that Sharia law has a place in the families of the citizens they represent — British citizens, let us not forget — are sorely mistaken. The Islamic community must accept that the spread of Islamism is its own problem, and cannot be blamed on British ‘foreign policy’. On this, the government must stand absolutely firm. Much more is at stake than the sensitivities of one community.
One of Britain’s glories is its social variety, its pluralism and the welcome it extends to newcomers. But there can be no open doors, no unconditional citizenship. At last there is a chance that such things will be said without hysteria or fear.
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