Not-so-little Britain

It is almost 40 years since Enoch Powell delivered his notorious speech on immigration to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre on 20 April 1968. ‘As I look ahead,’ said Powell, ‘I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

That Virgilian prophecy has not come to pass, but the effect of Powell’s incendiary speech — combined with the restrictive power of town hall ‘multiculturalism’ in the 1980s — was to make level-headed discussion of immigration all but impossible. That discussion is now, at last, beginning — better late than never — and it could scarcely be more important.

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.