Immigration

We don’t quite know what Ed Miliband would really do about a lot of things just yet: this is the year when he plans (and desperately needs) to set that out so Labour isn’t just an Opposition that complains about things being expensive but a party that voters can imagine governing. But it’s significant that one of the policy areas where Miliband has felt it is important to get a lot of detail out pretty early is immigration. He, and everyone around him, is acutely aware that though their personal instincts might be to argue for the benefits of mass immigration to this country, the voters, rightly or wrongly, aren’t

The BBC made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting public concern about immigration, Nick Robinson has said. This is the latest case of BBC self-flagellation. (Now I think about it, a sort of Maoist-themed programme in which Beeb executives denounced themselves would make great TV.) BBC bias is a subject I know a bit about, having written a pamphlet on it last year. I thought that, while the BBC is a much-loved institution, it must carry at least some of the blame for the mistakes most people feel were made over immigration under New Labour. Especially in 2000-01, when Conservative politicians were making some quite modest criticisms of rising numbers,

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Nigel Farage has appeared to out-leftie the three main parties on the subject of asylum for Syrians. It just surprises me that anyone is surprised. Ukip as a party is opposed to mass immigration, and believes that the social costs of ‘diversity’ vastly outweigh the short-term economic benefits of migration. But the gift of asylum is something else; no one is saying that Syrians are needed to enrich our culture or add vibrancy or make cappuccinos for people who work at the Economist, they just need to escape from a hellish war or they may die. Of course we should give refuge to

There has been a stagey sort of surprise at the news that Nigel Farage has called for refugees from the conflict in Syria to be given asylum in Britain. He’s anti-immigration, see, so his call for generous provision for refugees of war has, at least for our major broadcasters, a paradoxical element. But it doesn’t quite follow that if you are in favour of curbing immigration that you are therefore Scroogish on asylum. Paul Collier, the Oxford academic whom I interviewed for the Speccie after the publication of Exodus, his interesting book on the effects of migration on poor countries, was emphatic that countries had a moral duty to be

Earlier on today, I was asked by Angus MacNeil, a Scottish National Party MP if I would choose a Scottish or a British passport should they win the referendum. As he knows, the choice is anathema to those of us who are proud to be both Scottish and British and don’t see any antagonism that needs to be resolved by separation. SNP politicians, in my experience, are some of the nicest people in politics on either side of the border. Moderate, friendly, intelligent, open-minded, gentle: such decent types that you can end up being blinded to their agenda. Which is to destroy Britain, to force people to choose between being Scottish or British,

Fair’s fair. Ed Miliband might be a fish-faced ninny but that doesn’t let David Cameron off the hook. And not just because he’s trailing a fish-faced ninny in the polls. No, the Prime Minister can be a terrible poltroon himself. Witness his witless suggestion today that the United Kingdom might veto future EU enlargement unless something is done to  thwart “vast migrations” of people. It is a silly thing to say for a number of reasons and the first of those is that Cameron is in no position to make any such suggestion. He cannot bind future British governments and since there is no immediate prospect of any country being

Ministers don’t comment on leaked reports, as Theresa May said on the Today programme this morning, but they can jolly well make clear what they think of them, especially if those leaked reports are quite helpful to calming Conservative backbench grumbles. The Home Secretary didn’t distance herself from the leak in the Sunday Times that she wants a 75,000 cap on the number of EU migrants per year, and repeated David Cameron’s call for reform of freedom of movement, saying: ‘What the Prime Minister has said and what I said is that in looking at reform of the EU we need to look at this whole question of the arrangements

On Monday Douglas Murray blogged that I personify the ‘craziness’ of the British immigration debate. By criticising the views of both a Ukip councillor and a Labour pollster I was apparently guilty of a doublethink, as if there were no political space between open borders and ‘send the lot back’. But there’s nothing contradictory about opposing both those on the hard right who favour the mass deportation of anyone who wasn’t born here and those on the liberal left who want to shut down the immigration debate altogether. We need an immigration policy which works for Britain, one which delivers us economic benefits while addressing longstanding public concerns about the