Immigration

Sunday

Camilla Swift

The View from 22 debate special: too much immigration, too little integration?

This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As event chair Andrew Neil put it: ‘What the Hay festival missed, The Spectator brought to you’, with a special panel on immigration last Tuesday, 9 July. Goodhart was joined on the panel by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor

Wednesday

Ed West

The British people are not wrong about everything

Imagine that you’re a passenger in a car driving down a country road at 20mph. All of a sudden the driver hits the accelerator and you’re now zinging away at 60mph. If asked what speed you were going at, what would you say? I’d imagine probably something like 80mph, at least until you became accustomed to your new situation. Yesterday it was revealed that the British public have some quite wildly inaccurate perceptions about the true level of crime, teenage pregnancy and immigration. Presumably this was seen as evidence that, although the public have conservative views on these subjects, they are misinformed and therefore cool policy reasoning should be left to

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Abandon all hope: the average voter thinks one in four Britons is a muslim

Last month I wrote a post arguing that an awful lot of opinion polling is worthless. The public mood matters – and measuring it is important – but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless. Well, whaddyaknow, but here’s a new Ipsos-Mori survey which confirms my suspicions. The Great British Public may have many virtues and they may be able to tell you that poor Mr Clegg is a wrong ‘un but when you peak beneath the bonnet you begin to fear that newspaper comment threads may not be quite as unrepresentative of the general public as you’d like to think

Friday

Peter Hitchens

SPECTATOR DEBATE: When did we stop caring about our national culture?

Peter Hitchens will be speaking at the next Spectator Event on 9 July, debating the motion ‘Too much immigration, too little integration?’ along with Ken Livingstone, David Goodhart, Trevor Phillips and others. Click here to book tickets. I used to go on left-wing demonstrations against Enoch Powell in the Sixties, and I’m still glad I did. I was against racial bigotry then, and I’m against it now. So it has been an interesting experience to find myself accused of ‘racism’, in many cases by people who were not born in those days. Likewise, I’m one of the few people I know who has lived, by his own choice, in more

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

The next Spectator Debate: too much immigration, too little integration?

When David Cameron announced ‘state multiculturalism has failed’, the chattering classes gasped in disbelief. Here was a Prime Minister, bull dozing his way into  the tricky area of immigration — one his predecessors had shied away from. The speech was praised by the right, and lambasted by those on the left — including his coalition partners. David Goodhart received a similar reaction with the publication of his book  The British Dream. In it, he examines the success and failures of post-war immigration in Britain. On the right, the book was welcomed as a thorough examination into multiculturalism. When the former Tory leader Michael Howard reviewed Goodhart’s book in the Spectator, he explained why he backs

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Vauxhall, by Gabriel Ghadomosi; Sketcher, by Roland Watson-Grant – review

At the grubbier end of my street in north London is the Somali mosque that was burned down earlier this month in an arson attack. The other day I asked at the police cordon if any arrests had been made. ‘Not that we know of’, said the duty officer. A smell of charred wood hangs over this dreary, out-at-elbow part of Muswell Hill. People complain that Somalis are heavily ‘welfare-dependent’, and have no wish to integrate into British society. It is true that immigrants today, with the internet, cheap flights and satellite television, are more likely to see themselves as members of a foreign country, hosted by, but not emotionally

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Review: Stir yourself — I am Nasrine is far from an Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who

Thursday

Steerpike

David Goodhart makes Hay

What a pity. It seems that Dave Goodhart, director of Demos and editor-at-large of Prospect, has made peace with the Hay Festival organisers, who decided against showcasing his new book on immigration on the annual luvvie field trip. Hay Director Peter Florence described Goodhart’s The British Dream as ‘sensationalist’, and apparently told Goodhart that Hay stood ‘for pluralism and multiculturalism’ and that he is half-Italian. Goodhart hit back at these ‘ultra-liberal, slightly lefty multiculturalist’ views, saying:  ‘it’s [the book] probably been more widely reviewed than any non-fiction book so far this year – both favourably and unfavourably, so when my publisher said there was no interest from Hay I was

Friday

Andrew Green

Why, once again, a fall in student immigration is good

Yesterday came the news that net migration has once again fallen, this time to its lowest level for ten years. In the year ending September 2012, net migration was 153,000. That is a fall of 89,000 on the previous year when it reached a dizzy 242,000. This is undeniably good news. The public have consistently shown their desire to see net migration reduced and we now have a government which is committed to lowering net migration and has so far had considerable success. Many on the left, who cannot bring themselves to admit that net migration of 200,000 per year is too much for a small island such as ours,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers hope to reassure backbenchers with Immigration Bill

One of the key bills to be announced in today’s Queen’s Speech is an immigration bill. This serves two key purposes: the first is to bring into legislation all those additional restrictions on access to public services for migrants that was briefed out following the Eastleigh by-election. The second is to answer Tory backbench concerns about deportation of foreign criminals. When it comes to restrictions for migrants – and these measures will, ministers hope, help calm nerves about the end of transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian nationals – temporary migrants will need to make a contribution before they can access the NHS, landlords will be required to check the

Thursday

Jonathan Rugman

A visit to Bulgaria with Nigel Farage

One Sunday evening, while I was trying to avoid ironing my shirts, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to take Nigel Farage to Bulgaria or Romania. The Ukip leader is convinced that hordes of people from these countries are poised to pour into Britain when the rules are relaxed next year, so why not go there with him to see if he’s right? A few weeks later, I put my proposal to him. ‘But nobody will come here from Romania,’ said Nigel. ‘They’ve eaten all the transport.’ So we went to Bulgaria. ‘I am getting lots of funny looks,’ observed the scourge of open-door immigration

Monday

Rod Liddle

Ken Clarke: decent chap, but wrong about everything

Kenneth Clarke has always seemed, to me, a decent sort. By far the most likeable and least lordly and arrogant of those Euro-wanking wets who plagued Thatcher and, later, Major. Nonetheless, he is always wrong. About everything. If you are ever in doubt about where you should stand on a particular issue, find out what Ken’s thinking and immediately think the opposite. You won’t go far wrong. And so it is with his branding of UKIP as ‘closet racists’. It seems almost superfluous to say it, but of course it is not racist to feel a bit uneasy about the levels of immigrations we have endured in this country of

Thursday

Leah McLaren

My battle with Britain’s mean, ineffective immigration system

When I first came to this country nearly a decade ago, Britain wanted immigrants like me. Back then you could get a visa just for being creative. It was called the ‘Artist, Writer, Composer Visa’ — a Blairite flight of fancy if there ever was one — and all you had to do was fill out a form proving that you’d made a name for yourself in your country of origin in one of those three disciplines. The application, as I recall, made a point of including conceptual artists and sculptors. I’d published a novel in Canada, so I was in. It was that easy. Thinking about it now makes

Monday

Isabel Hardman

MPs to push government on plans for new migrants

MPs will debate the government’s preparations for more Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in Westminster Hall today, as another survey suggests that there’s no need to get unduly worried about the lifting of transitional controls. Ministers have in recent weeks managed to calm Tory backbenchers down by making announcements regarding restricted access to benefits and housing, but there’s still sufficient appetite for this afternoon’s debate, led by Mark Pritchard, and a session of the Home Affairs Select Committee tomorrow with the Bulgarian and Romanian Ambassadors and Immigration Minister Mark Harper. Pritchard tells me: ‘EU migration and non-EU immigration is of real concern to many communities throughout Britain given the record numbers who

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Margaret Thatcher: An Accidental Libertarian Heroine

It is 34 years since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Coincidentally, she entered Downing Street 34 years after Clement Attlee won the 1945 general election.  The whole history of post-war Britain is cleaved, neatly, in two. If the first half of that story was dominated by a left-led consensus, the second has been a triumph for liberalism. We have lived in an era of liberal emancipation and are much the better for it. Mrs Thatcher, of course, was a great economic liberal. Her approach to economics, guided by Smith, Hayek and Friedman, stressed the importance of individual endeavour. Remove the dead hand of state control and Britain could flourish again.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The British Prime Minister’s insignificance

Here is David Cameron’s problem in a nutshell. During his immigration speech on Monday he said: ‘Put simply when it comes to illegal migrants, we’re rolling up that red carpet and showing them the door.’ Just two days later it was once again made clear that the red carpet is firmly in place and no such door in sight. Abu Qatada came to the UK illegally on a forged passport in 1993. He is wanted in Jordan to face terrorism charges. Abu Qatada is an illegal migrant. Yet he ‘cannot’ be shown the door. The government needs to realise one thing: that as long as we remain a signatory of

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Theresa May’s abolition of UKBA shows how the immigration consensus favours the Tories, and her

Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency is to be abolished.  In an unscheduled statement to the House of Commons, she described UKBA as ‘a troubled organisation’ with a ‘closed, secretive and defensive culture’. She said that the agency’s size, lack of transparency, IT systems, policy remit and legal framework ensured that its ‘performance was not good enough’. May declared that the agency will be split in two. One arm will deal with immigration and visa services, while the other tackles enforcement. May will also bring both arms back directly under the control of ministers, reversing the arms-length policy established by Labour in 2008. May also called for

David Blackburn

Tories who say that Cameron is making ‘no difference’ underline the coalition’s communications failure

You should take note when Benedict Brogan, an influential and widely sourced journalist who has been very close to the Cameron and Osborne operation over the years, writes of the fire-sale of Cameron shares. He says in today’s Telegraph that Cameron’s party view him as a ‘lame duck’ who makes ‘no difference’. This is an extraordinary claim for disaffected Tories to make. True: the economy is mired and the government has tied itself to only one course of action. There have also been disasters at the department of health; and energy policy ought to be giving Number 10 an enormous headache. But Cameron’s coalition is changing the landscape of education and

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s immigration speech fails to capture the imagination

This morning’s papers have followed the lead of yesterday’s TV news bulletins: the prime minister’s immigration speech was not the success it might have been. The Times is lukewarm (£). The Guardian is suspicious. The Mail is derisive. And our own Douglas Murray is contemptuous of a speech which merely stated the ‘utterly obvious’. Yet again, the government has failed to convince the media. Part of the problem is that the numbers are inconclusive. The Guardian has built on yesterday evening’s BBC news reports, which claimed that only 13,000 migrants from that part of the EU have claimed JSA since 2009. This contrasts with Mr Cameron’s concerns about a widespread ‘something for nothing’

Monday

Douglas Murray

Despite the fanfare, David Cameron still isn’t doing anything on immigration

Well, it was right not to expect much. The full text of David Cameron’s speech on immigration is here but it can be summarised in one sentence: ‘mass migration has brought some good things, but it has also brought problems so here is some tinkering we propose.’ There are so many problems when our politicians speak on this subject. Not least is that they expect to be congratulated for saying the utterly obvious. For instance, most British people worked out a long time ago that those of us who already live here ought to have priority in housing over people who have just arrived. We also worked out some time