Immigration

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The latest immigration madness: prove you love your wife (or husband)

Sometimes it is the small things that tell you everything you need to know about the madness afflicting British politics at present. Consider this small detail from the new immigration bill: All proposed marriages and civil partnerships involving a non-EEA national with limited or no immigration status in the UK are to be referred by registrars to the Home Office. This will give the Home Office more time and scope to identify and investigate suspected sham marriages and civil partnerships and to take effective enforcement action. Why does this matter? Because it alters the relationship between citizens and the state. Once upon a time the state presumed you were innocent

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Don't blame Theresa May – she did her bit. The problem is immigration from the EU

Theresa May is getting some stick this morning because she has admitted the obvious: that immigration is never going to get below the ‘tens of thousands’ target that David Cameron stupidly agreed to in opposition. She can only control immigration from outside the EU which she has successfully reduced to its lowest levels for about 15 years. But she has been blown off course by immigration not by the Slavs but Western Europe – Italians, Portuguese, Spanish coming here to flee the sclerosis of their debt-addled high-regulation economies and partake in the job-creation miracle underway in Britain. National Insurance registration data indicates that the number of Polish immigrants plunged, while immigration

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Will mainstream parties get the credit for turning up the volume on immigration?

David Cameron is set to give his big immigration speech this coming week, according to the Sunday Times, while James reports that Labour is to turn up the volume on the subject too. Both party leaderships are under pressure from their backbenches to take the Ukip threat seriously and give voters a clear sense that they would crack down on immigration. Both parties do need to deal with their legacies. Labour’s one has been much-picked-over and apologised for. But the Tories are also realising that they won’t have as much to boast about come the election as they’d hoped. That’s why Theresa May today finally moved from using weird words

Saturday

Douglas Murray

We're too frightened of appearing 'racist' to have a debate about immigration

A rather typical 24 hours in the life of modern Britain.  Everyone does another round of ‘we need to be able to talk about immigration.’  The main parties once again say (as though this were a great revelation to the rest of us) that it is not racist to talk about immigration.  The Labour and Conservative representatives then go on the BBC’s Question Time and claim that the Ukip candidate (now Ukip MP) for Rochester and Strood is a racist. And a Labour shadow minister mocks the awfulness of people who fly the national flag.   Meantime, if you scroll down the news stories you can read about the chief inspector of

Thursday

Michael Lind

How America’s right wing is becoming a lot more like Britain’s

   Washington DC [audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Michael Lind and Sebastian Payne discuss the growing similarities of the Britain and American right” startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Amid all the commentary about the Republican party’s triumph in America’s midterm elections, a remarkable fact was ignored: in style and substance, the American right is rapidly becoming a lot more like Britain’s. And that might be the key to its success. In the last generation, American right-wingers have stood proudly apart from their counterparts in Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia. They were more religious, and more supportive of mass immigration. But that is changing. Exhibit A is the dwindling influence of the religious right in the US.

Graham Robb

Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in France, France is ‘the sick man of Europe’. The land of liberty was once admired by the whole world. Then came May ’68, feminism, immigration, consumerism and homosexuality. On the surface, nothing has changed; espressos are still being plonked down on zinc counters, and ‘the legs of Parisian women still turn heads’. But ‘the soul has gone’. Gays and Muslims are taking over, and France is ‘dissolving in the icy waters of individualism and self-hatred’. The blurb calls Le Suicide français an ‘analyse’, but there is nothing analytical about it.

Wednesday

Ed West

I have more respect for Labour politicians who defend their record on immigration than those who pander

Wonderful: Labour has a new slogan on immigration, which appears to be the Conservatives’ old slogan from 2005, the one that Labour said was racist. I have far more respect for any Labour politician who actually defends their record on mass immigration – only a fifth of which was from Europe, incidentally, although that gets at least four-fifths of the coverage – than those who goes along with the current fashion. Someone who said that diversity made us more tolerant and kinder and was culturally-enriching; and that the economic benefits, although they are more helpful to the rich than the poor, are worth the downsides. That mass immigration was a Left-wing thing

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why Paddington is anti-Ukip propaganda

Well, I’ve just been to see the new Paddington film – the one Colin Firth bowed out of on account of not feeling up to being the voice of the most famous bear in literature, not including Winnie the Pooh. And yep, there were marmalade sandwiches at the launch. Two things. One, it’s nothing like the book, apart from a couple of episodes. In the original, Mr Brown spots Paddington among the bicycles and both he and Mrs B are willing to take him on. In this version, Mr Brown, as played by Hugh Bonneville, is an ol’ curmudgeon, a risk assessor who regards bears as trouble and this one

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Neither the Tories nor Ukip deserve to win the Rochester by-election

Let’s be honest, just for a moment. The Rochester and Strood by-election has been a disgrace. It has been a sewer race during which the two leading protagonists have done their best to demonstrate their lack of fitness for office. In this, if nothing else, they have been successful. I wouldn’t expect anything better from Mark Reckless and Ukip. We know who they are; the type of people they are. So it’s no great surprise that Reckless is happy to allow people to think Ukip’s revolution will lead to the repatriation of immigrants. As usual, Ukip are living down to expectations. But so, alas, are the Conservatives. Their own candidate,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Responding to Ukip shouldn't just mean talking about immigration

Can you out-Ukip Ukip? Depending on which day of the week it is, both mainstream political parties think you can and you can’t. Last week Ed Miliband said you couldn’t and that he wouldn’t, arguing that it was about time someone levelled with Nigel Farage’s party. Yesterday Yvette Cooper announced tough immigration measures that some in her party thought suggested Labour was trying to chase Ukip. The Tories have the same struggle. One of the problems for both Tories and Labour is that it is unhealthy for them to allow Ukip to become in effect a think tank that sets policy for other parties by spooking their own MPs. This

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The immigration arms race

Who is tougher on immigration? Neither the Tories nor Labour want to be left behind by Ukip, and have descended into an arms race over who can best crack down on EU migration. Today Ed Miliband’s party launched a two-pronged attack on the subject, with Yvette Cooper speaking in the morning about her plans to hire 1,000 additional border guards by imposing a charge on visitors from certain countries including the US, and Rachel Reeves announcing plans for a clampdown on EU migrants claiming out-of-work benefits. Amusingly, Reeves gave her policy to the MailOnline as an exclusive, just a few days after Ed Miliband spoke about dark forces out to get

Steerpike Steerpike

Yvette Cooper steals Tory immigration slogan from 2005

At the height of the 2005 election, the then Tory leader Michael Howard (advised by one Lynton Crosby) declared: ‘Let’s be clear. It’s not racist to talk about immigration. It’s not racist to criticise the system. It’s not racist to want to limit the numbers. It’s just plain common sense.’ Howard was lambasted by Labour for the speech, with cabinet ministers wheeled out to slam the Conservatives for ‘scurrilous, right-wing, ugly tactics’. Fast forward nine years and Yvette Cooper’s soundbite sounds a little familiar. In a speech today, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary declared: ‘It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration or to call for immigration reform.’ Even one of the campaign’s

Saturday

James Forsyth

Hammond tries to thread the needle on EU immigration

Philip Hammond’s interview in The Telegraph this morning is striking for several reasons. First, Hammond admits that Britain isn’t going to regain full control of its borders in the renegotiation. As he puts it, ‘“If your ambition is that we have total unfettered control of our own borders to do what we like, that isn’t compatible with membership of the European Union, it’s as simple as that. And people who advocate that know jolly well it is not compatible with membership of the European Union. So if that’s what you want, you’re essentially talking about leaving the European Union.”   But he does seem to think that agreement on something

Thursday

The Spectator

Fort Lauderdale’s law against feeding the homeless still isn’t America’s dumbest

States of criminality A 90-year-old Florida man feeding the homeless was arrested under a Fort Lauderdale law which makes it illegal to share food with members of the public. Other laws from the ‘Land of the Free’: — In Indiana you can be arrested for statutory rape if you are caught driving a car with a passenger under the age of 18 who is not wearing socks and shoes. — In Ocean City it is illegal to eat while swimming in the sea. — In New York State it is illegal to walk around on a Sunday with an ice cream cone in your pocket. — In South Dakota it

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

You shouldn’t watch Dapper Laughs. But you really shouldn’t let the likes of me stop you

As you’ll know by now, I’m big on thinking the right things. Should a thought strike me that m’colleague Rod Liddle would not describe as ‘bien-pensant’, then I will of course shy away from it, in a blind panic, for fear that my pensée should be considered insufficiently bien. Right now, however, I’m having doubts about the catechism. The liberal elite may take away my badge. Presumptuous as it may be, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Spectator readers are not immediately familiar with the work of a comedian called Daniel O’Reilly, otherwise known as Dapper Laughs. He’s an internet phenomenon and — let’s not

Thursday

Ed West

There is no such thing as 'immigrants' - only Poles, Yanks, Somalis...

There was much glee about yesterday’s publication of a report into the economic impact of immigration, which concluded eastern Europeans had provided a net benefit of £4.4 billion to the UK economy. There was far less mention of the fact that immigrants from outside Europe in the same period cost the taxpayers £118 billion. But as Christopher Caldwell observed in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the immigration debate is not about economics, for ‘the social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certain Europeans, you are infuriated by polyglot markets and street signs written in Polish,

Kit Wilson

There's one obvious question about immigration, but nobody is asking it

If you were to close your eyes at any debate on immigration, you might reasonably picture the participants standing back-to-back, shouting and gesticulating to opposite corners of the room. On such occasions, there’s typically only one point on which everyone actually agrees: that very highly skilled migrants – doctors, engineers, scientists – are welcome here in Britain. Oddly, though, nobody ever seems follow up with the obvious question: what about the countries these migrants leave behind? Look at the four nations from which we take most foreign doctors – India, Pakistan, South Africa and Nigeria. Is it not unfair to deprive them of their brightest medical minds? South Africa has

Douglas Murray

To make asylum work, we’ll have to talk frankly

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Justin Marozzi, Douglas Murray and Fraser Nelson discuss immigration” startat=53] Listen [/audioplayer]It is the easiest thing in the world to say who should come to Britain and why. But if there are people who should be coming here, then surely there are others who should not? It is through our unwillingness to address the second part of this question that our problems arise. All polls show a majority of the British public want immigration reduced. But our politicians do not know what to do about it. One answer is to be honest. The Canadian and Australian ‘points-based systems’ we often hear about these days is just cover-speak for

Justin Marozzi

The shameful truth: Britain lets in far too few refugees

Pictures from Calais have returned to our television screens, showing desperate men and women trying to break into lorries bound for Britain. A Sudanese man died jumping from a bridge onto a lorry heading for Dover. Another perished after falling from the axles of a bus. The mayor of Calais has blamed Britain for being an ‘El Dorado’ offering aspirational benefits to migrants — but as she’d know, the Africans arriving in her morgues would never have qualified for welfare. They risked death due to a sense of desperation, and hope, that we can scarcely imagine. The same is true in the Mediterranean, where 2,500 have died after embarking on

Christopher Caldwell

What Angela Merkel really wants (it's not good news for Dave)

Angela Merkel is misunderstood. Last winter, when Russia moved to annex Crimea after the overthrow of Ukraine’s government, American officials put it about that the German Chancellor had described Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin as ‘living in another world’ and ‘out of touch with reality’. No evidence has emerged that she ever said any such thing. Europhiles in the press and in Westminster have now pulled the same trick on David Cameron. The Prime Minister has lately been ruminating about quotas for migrants from certain European Union countries. He complained last month when an unannounced £1.7 billion upward adjustment in Britain’s EU payment turned out to be triple the levy on