The Spectator

The Conservatives should be the party of immigrants — and here’s how they can be

Plus: The meaning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s election triumph

Getty Images

For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative party should be the natural home of new voters who are ambitious, entrepreneurial, hard-working and family-orientated. The immigrant vote — to the extent it can be considered a coherent block at all — ought to be fertile Tory territory. By and large, these are families who have moved to Britain to get ahead and to avail themselves of what Michael Howard called ‘the British dream’.

Yet at the last election fewer than one in five ethnic minority voters endorsed Conservative candidates and the party is unlikely to fare much better in May. Sajid Javid, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, admits that his friends and family were amazed when he joined the Tories rather than Labour. The objection was not ideological, but because they suspected — as do many other immigrants and children of immigrants — that the Tories just don’t like them. They assume that Conservatives are the party of the establishment, and suspicious of all newcomers.

Lord Bates, a Home Office minister, exacerbated the problem this week by suggesting that immigrants were having too many children. He cited the well-known statistic that a quarter of British births are to immigrant mothers — then added, ‘That is why we need to reduce immigration.’ This is an absurd notion and exactly the wrong approach for Conservatives to take. It was right of the campaign group Migration Watch UK to point out that immigrants to Britain tend to have more children than people born here and that this must be considered when assessing the impact of immigration. But the problem is not the healthy birth rate — it’s the government’s failure to respond and to make provision for the next baby boom.

Right across Europe, countries are worrying about low fertility rates.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in