Where has the truth gone?

There were two remarkable things about Emma Raducanu’s wonderful win at the US open last week. The first was the win itself. The second was the reaction to it. For the fact that Raducanu happens to be of Romanian-Chinese descent and was born in Canada meant that her triumph was immediately spun through the same political cycle as everything else.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan proclaimed that the star’s story is ‘London’s story’ and showed the virtue of ‘diversity’. Other politicians and hacks joined him. A columnist from the Times declared that Raducanu’s victory showed that ‘immigration enriches us, and always has done’, while an ITV presenter said the win was a victory against ‘the haters’, as though there were well-known anti-tennis-prodigy forces out there. This diversity, right here, is ‘the Britain we love’, he said. ‘Quite right,’ chimed in the Conservative MP Steve Baker.

By that logic these people ought to have been thrilled at the news from Dover last week, where almost 1,000 future winners of the US Open crossed the Channel in a single day. Perhaps we ought to warn the folks who organise the American sporting event that given this trend they should tell other countries not to bother to send their stars in the future, and prepare for an entirely Union Flag-based podium.

It is rather remarkable that after almost seven decades, a country like Britain is still incapable of having a discussion about immigration that does not fall into this dishonest binary. There may be some people who think that all immigrants to the UK are suicide-bombers, but they have no voice in the national debate. By contrast, those who like to pretend that all migration is an unmitigated good still have a clear run of it and make their claims largely uncontested.