Immigration

In a better, more sensible, world David Cameron would make a virtue of the opportunity UKIP has given him. He would appreciate that defending his party’s record is actually an opportunity for a counter-attack. UKIP complain – loudly – that 4,000 people arrive in the United Kingdom from the EU each and every week. This, they suggest, is awful and Something Must Be Done to limit the number of people coming to the United Kingdom. The Conservative party appears, in its dark heart, to share this concern. It suspects the Kippers might have at least half a point. There’s something nauseous about all this immigration, isn’t there? No wonder the

[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

The Tory leadership is not best pleased with James Brokenshire, the Immigration Minister whose ill-judged speech turned a media spotlight onto the Cameron’s nanny. There are mutterings in Downing Street about the speech having being submitted for clearance very late. But Number 10 can’t escape its share of the blame for this fiasco. First, the speech should never have been cleared. The problems it would cause were obvious, which is why one Lib Dem tells me ‘we all fell out about laughing when we read it.’ Second, Brokenshire should never have been appointed to this job. When Mark Harper resigned as immigration minister because his clearner was working in the

Great excitement in Westminster today over David Cameron’s Nepalese nanny (as a member of James Brokenshire’s metropolitan elite) and whether the Prime Minister had a role in Gita Lima obtaining British citizenship. At this morning’s lobby briefing, a Number 10 spokesperson was asked whether Cameron had played a role in getting Lima a British passport. The spokesperson replied that they were ‘not aware’ of any involvement from the PM. Now I understand that Number 10 have checked the relevant documents and are shortly to release a statement confirming that the Camerons did not write a letter in support of their nanny’s passport application. Samantha Cameron was simply named as the

With a mere whimper, the government has released its controversial report (pdf) on the effects of immigration on ‘native UK employment’. Following Newsnight’s revelations that the report was being ‘held back’, Labour demanded its release. 24 hours later, it was put online while Theresa May was informing MPs of an inquiry into undercover policing after revelations about the treatment of Stephen Lawrence’s family. Here are the top five things you need to know from the paper: 1. There’s minimal evidence of migrants taking British jobs The Home Office report titled ‘Impacts of migration on UK native employment‘ reveals there is ‘relatively little evidence’ of British workers being displaced — i.e. migrants taking

Sometimes what doesn’t occasion interest or drama or controversy is more interesting – or at least more telling – than what does. So perhaps it is a tribute to the extent to which Nigel Farage and UKIP are now entrenched in the body politic that Farage’s speech to the party’s latest conference appears, as best I can tell, to have been treated as just another routine appearance by just another politician. Move along now, not a lot to see here. Not much news, not many dead. That is, the reaction has been There he goes again. We know Farage’s thing these days and it no longer shocks or even, I

Tell me: does this passage from American director Spike Lee’s recent rant against the gentrification of Brooklyn not sound like a press release from UKIP? ‘I’m for democracy and letting everybody live but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here.’ Admittedly it’s a little street for Nigel Farage. But reread it with a Bucks bray and it’s pretty bang on; the voice of Little England undeniably rings out. In fact, if anything, it’s the kind of thing that New

How fitting that on the day Angela Merkel pops in to London to natter about EU reform, new figures show a big increase in net migration driven by a rise in immigration from within the European Union to the UK. Net migration in the year to September 2013 rose from 154,000 the previous year to 212,000. This morning, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said that it was ‘absolutely the objective’ to reduce net migration to below 100,000 by 2015. But today’s figures are a blow to the government’s chances of doing that. The problem is that while the Home Office is doing its best to control what it can control