Immigration

I guess the ‘unite the Right’ memo has not got through to some Tories, with Michael Heseltine calling Ukip ‘a racist party’ and James Wharton saying they’re ‘an awkward group of strange people’. That may be unwise — rather like attacking your customer-base — but it’s also untrue. Small Right-wing parties have a huge disadvantage because, although lots of people are socially conservative, soc-cons tend on average to be low in social skills and charisma and so the normals are easily driven away by the weirds, especially when immigration is an issue. But the early stages are the hardest, when any party right of the mainstream can become toxified and

We had a Bulgarian chap do up our house. Lovely guy, worked all day and never wanted a break, and I didn’t have to drop my aitches or pretend to like football around him. Actually he turned out to be Polish but after weeks of me asking questions about Bulgaria he presumably felt too embarrassed and just played along with it. But there are many Bulgarians working in north London, and Birmingham, and they tend to be quite skilled, there being restrictions on who can work here. Naturally as those restrictions are removed, and as the quantity of immigration goes up, the quality goes down. MigrationWatch claim that net migration

Following this morning’s car crash radio interview, this is how Chris Bryant tried to win over the audience at the start of his speech on immigration to the IPPR… Come back Les Dawson, all is forgiven. PS: The full speech is here. The Telegraph’s Matt Holehouse has compared the pre-briefing and the delivered speech. As expected, the sections about Tesco and Next have been substantially rewritten. Yet to no avail; the damage has been done. Will Bryant survive Ed Miliband’s reshuffle?  

First the white vans, now the spot checks – Nigel Farage is being given fresh voice by the Home Office’s attempts to tackle illegal immigration. He has said of the spot checks: ‘Spot checks and being demanded to show your papers by officialdom are not the British way of doing things. Yes of course we want to deal with illegal immigration but what’s the point of rounding people up at railway stations if at the same time they are still flooding in at Dover and the other nearly 100 ports in this country. I’m astonished that the Home Office has become so politicised…before long they will be live video-streaming of these arrests.

Grant Shapps’ latest broadside against Labour shows how keen the Tories are to frame the next election not as a referendum on their performance in government but as a choice between them and Labour. Shapps wants voters to think about the fact that the alternative to David Cameron as Prime Minister is ‘Miliband and Balls’ driving up Downing Street before they cast their ballots. The Tory Chairman’s speech, due to be delivered at Policy Exchange this morning, also shows where the Tories think Labour are vulnerable. Tellingly, he talks about ‘Miliband and Balls’ rather than just Miliband; the Tories believe that Balls’ presence is a reminder to voters of the

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns are often works of mischief, but today’s is a carefully constructed piece of politics. His subject is immigration – about which the political nation has been warring over the weekend. Boris is, famously, pro-immigration – as one would have to be to win elections in London, irrespective of whether one was a Conservative. And his attitude to illegal immigration is pragmatic: illegals need to be brought into the fold or deported. Boris treads this line again today. First, he writes a paean to the runner Mo Farah – who personifies a ‘sermon as to what immigrants can achieve if they work hard’. Then he says that illegal immigrants

In the last few months, the Tories have–quite deliberately—behaved like an aggressive opposition. They’ve sought to constantly attack Labour, trying to force them onto the back foot. Even with David Cameron and George Osborne away on holiday, the Tories are determined to keep doing this. On Wednesday, Grant Shapps will launch the Tories’ summer offensive against Labour. He, in the kind of language more commonly used to promote summer horror films than a political agenda, will invite voters ‘to imagine a world where Ed Balls and Ed Miliband end up back in Downing Street.’ This is all part of the Tories’ efforts to link Miliband to Gordon Brown and memories

Everyone in SW1, it seems, has an opinion on this controversial scheme. Most people hate it. The general assumption is that this is a Tory stunt clothed as a government policy. The question is, though, has the van campaign been a successful policy pilot from a presentational point of view? Here are some thoughts: 1). The right-wing press. The Mail is utterly contemptuous. A leading column claims that only one illegal immigrant has stepped forward. The leader goes on to say that voters punish cheap stunts; what people want is action. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper’s front page (below) is uncompromising. All of this will have gone down

Is Britain addicted to immigration? I argued so in my Telegraph column yesterday and Radio 4’s Today programme held a discussion about it this morning and asked me on (22 mins in, here). You can say that that immigration has worked wonders for the economy – without it, we’d have a pathetic 2 per cent more people in work than in 1997. As things stand, our workforce has expanded by 11 per cent. We’d actually notice the number British people emigrating (the exodus has doubled to 400 a day under Cameron) so the ever-growing growing debt pile would be shouldered by a shrinking workforce. David Cameron would have no jobs