Immigration

The next set of net migration figures are, conveniently, released on the day of the European and local elections. Some wonder whether this will add grist to the mill of those on the Tory Right who want to cause trouble for Cameron as they can demand that he crack down further on immigration. But I’ve discovered that if there is one demand eurosceptics will make, it will be for the Prime Minister to scrap the target, rather than try harder to meet it. The reasoning behind this is that the Prime Minister could argue that freedom of movement in the European Union makes it impossible for the Conservatives to have

Inevitably the lowest attacks have been saved until the week of the election. For months now the neat drip-feeding of anti-UKIP stories from Conservative Campaign Headquarters direct to the UK press has done everything possible to depict UKIP as a racist, xenophobic, bigoted party. This has been significantly ratcheted up ahead of Thursday’s vote. Today’s pages include the Times repeating a story from last year in the hope of successful guilt-by-association. The story is that Geert Wilders (the ‘Dutch Xenophobe’ as the Times headlines him) would like Nigel Farage to join him and Marine Le Pen in an anti-EU Brussels voting bloc. What neither the Times nor any other newspaper wishes

We’re four months away from Scotland’s day of destiny, with the London-Scottish media fraternity becoming increasingly alarmed, and ironically (considering their total unionism) far more noticeably Scottish. At the Telegraph Graeme Archer made a characteristically elegant appeal to Sir Malcolm Rikfind to step forward, and there would indeed be something touching and rather beautiful about the grandson of Jewish immigrants being the man who saves Britain. The film script would write itself, if someone were to make a film about the Scottish referendum (which I admit is pretty unlikely). Sir Malcolm’s son Hugo meanwhile seems to think that the end of a 300-year union that helped export liberal democracy and

Dan Hannan makes many good points in today’s Telegraph as he considers the Conservatives’ grim failure to attract support from black and ethnic minority voters. This isn’t merely a problem for the Tories, it is a crisis. As I pointed out yesterday, the Tory share of the BME vote in 2010 was exactly the same as their share of the vote in Scotland: 16%. True, this was an improvement on 2005 when only 11% of BME voters endorsed Conservative candidates but that’s a matter of only modest solace for Tory modernisers. Naturally (this being British politics) there is a thirst to look elsewhere for examples or lessons that might point

Why do the Tories have a problem with black and ethnic minority voters, daddy? It is, with all due respect to Isabel and Paul Goodman, the British political question that is easiest to answer. We all know the answer too, even those of us on the right. Race might not be the Conservative party’s original sin; it’s still a pretty high-ranking sin. And, look, it’s not ancient history either. It’s not a Different times, different attitudes but, please, can we move on now? kind of thing. Nor did it die with Enoch either. (Poor old Enoch, so brilliant but a touch troubled too, don’t you think?) It remains a virus at

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Alex Massie explain why we need more optimism in Scotland and Westminster” startat=1538] Listen [/audioplayer]There is an optimism deficit in British politics. Politicians seem incapable of making a positive argument for anything, including the country itself. The British government’s case in the Scottish independence referendum has been almost entirely negative. Those looking for an uplifting defence of the United Kingdom have been left sorely disappointed as the government has instead stuck to technocratic arguments about why Scotland would be worse off on its own. This failure north of the border reflects a broader failure to persuade people that Britain has a bright future. Fifty four

Globalisation is like a rising tide; we’re all living in our separate ponds with their own little social ecosystems until the floodwater starts to rise and turns them into one big lake. Many fish, especially, the big ones, are going to benefit but many will suffer in this frightening new world. It is that fear which Ukip’s new posters are aimed at addressing (or exploiting, depending on your view). Sure, Europe is about free movement of labour, but that movement is highly imbalanced and has been for a number of years. Far more people are seeking to come from southern and eastern Europe to work in Britain than vice versa, and

Nigel Farage’s strategy for winning the European Elections is based around winning over blue collar workers who normally vote Labour. Ukip believe that they can use immigration as a battering ram to break through Labour’s defences in the north. One of the party’s campaign billboards unveiled last night simply says, ’26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after’. (I suspect that Ukip will welcome the controversy these posters are attracting because it will help amplify their message) Ukip’s argument is that it is the only party that can actually do something about immigration. Its logic is simple: as long as Britain is in

My friend and critic Jonathan Portes obviously took exception to my remarks about Keynesianism having been disproven. His entertaining rebuttal claims to have exposed my misreading of data. That’s not quite how I see it. I agree with him that the appalling build-up of out-of-work benefits happened before 1997. The Tories badly miscalculated incapacity benefit; thinking it would be a one-off way to help those affected by deindustrialization. But, in fact, it created a welfare dependency trap, and the 1992 recession caught too many people in it. John Major had an excuse: a recession. Tony Blair had no such excuse. I wasn’t joking about a quarter of Liverpool and Glasgow

Mark Field, MP for Westminster, has set up a brand new campaign group of Tory backbenchers called Managed Migration – as opposed, you might think, to the unmanaged sort we have at present. But he’s not actually in favour of managing migration in the conventional sense; he wants the PM to drop the party’s commitment to containing overall numbers of net migrants to the ‘tens of thousands’ though there seems fat chance of that just now.  Big increases in net migration, he says, are a tribute to the recovering economy. He’s got a point in one sense. As the economy improves, fewer Brits want to leave, which has an effect on net numbers.

Last week, I spoke alongside Nigel Farage in a debate about immigration organised by the Evening Standard. It was good fun, as you’d expect, with David Lammy, Tessa Jowell and Simon Walker of the IoD on the other side, and David Goodhart alongside me and Mr Farage. You’d be startled, mind you, at the way Nigel Farage gets mobbed by an audience, and in a good way. I did get the chance to get to talk briefly to him myself and ask the question I’d wanted to put to him for ages: why it is that he keeps on about EU migration, when it’s non-EU migration that’s the greater problem. He