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. Today it signifies the unprecedented forces of change, labour mobility and social churn that are transforming what it is to be a citizen — not just in Britain, but throughout the developed world.
It is possible to argue, as the Tories have done, that the impact of immigration upon aggregate GDP should not be confused with its effect upon GDP per head. The fact remains that, as a Home Office report published earlier this month showed, migrants now boost economic output by £6 billion a year — and, it should be added, tend to be more reliable and harder working than British-born workers. The trade unions grumble that the influx of cheap labour has depressed pay. But another way of looking at the phenomenon is that the emergence of an increasingly free market in employment has also acted as a brake on wage inflation and (therefore) on mortgage rates.
Self-evidently, however, that is not the end of the matter. This government has failed dismally in one of its most basic tasks, which is to secure the nation’s borders. John Reid was quite right, when Home Secretary, to say in the wake of the foreign prisoner scandal that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate was not ‘fit for purpose’ (one of many reasons why Dr Reid’s departure from the government is a serious loss). Ministers have yet to give a satisfactory response to David Davis’s complaint that the new ‘Border and Immigration Agency is the old IND with a new name’. Public confidence in this core function of government is at a low ebb, and justly so.
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.
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