Immigration

Friday

David Blackburn

Desperate times

You have to hand it to the Eurocracy: it is nothing if not determined. The recent horrors on the stock market have concentrated minds in Brussels and across continental capitals. The headline news is that France, Italy, Spain and Belgium have placed a temporary ban on short-selling, but that’s just one counter-measure that has been introduced in the last 24 hours. And you’ll notice that these schemes are piecemeal; there is no grand plan as yet to calm the markets. First, Spain has bent a suppliant knee before the European Commission to secure restrictions on Romanians seeking work. This is momentous: the first time that border restrictions have been re-imposed

Monday

David Blackburn

Bitter Turkish delights

Turkish accession to the EU is apparently no more than a dream of those who desire it at present, but it remains a point of contention across Europe. The British government, for instance, are in favour of enlargement, believing Turkey’s economy to be essential to Europe’s continued economic strength. Accession would also hamper the goal of political integration in the EU, which is expedient to Britain. Not everyone in Britain shares the government’s unqualified enthusiasm for Turkey. The Home Affairs Committee has issued a report this morning, criticising aspects of the government’s policy and insisting on careful management of accession. Specifically, the committee argues that the errors made when EU

Friday

David Blackburn

Long-term problems

It is fashionable to say that the nation is divided: the North and South, the haves and have nots, the politically engaged and the apathetic. Educational attainment has been added to that list, following yesterday’s apocalyptic report from the University and College Union (UCU), which found that there are more people without qualifications in one impoverished part of the East Midlands than there are in ten other affluent constituencies across the country. The report concludes that those from the poorest backgrounds have been “short-changed for generations”. What’s so striking about this report is that it follows hot on the heels of an OECD investigation into grade inflation under the previous

Monday

Alex Massie

Blue Labour’s Blood-Red Rivers

Guido – or Harry Cole, actually – asks Where’s the Outrage? about Maurice Glasman’s declaration that all immigration to these fair islands should cease forthwith. Ed Miliband’s advisor or intellectual guru or whatever he’s termed these days believes immigration makes Britain little more than “an outpost of the UN” and we should cease being so generous to beastly foreigners and concentrate on oor ain folk. Of course Harry is right in one respect: if a Tory thinker had come out with this stuff the BBC and Guardian and the Labour machine would have denounced him and called for his defenstration or permanent exile and so on. So, yes, there’s a

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Cooper takes on the coalition from the right

What an intriguing interview Yvette Cooper gave to Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan show this morning — and not just because she was standing, ruffled and incongruous, in a field somewhere. I was live-tweeting proceedings here, and there was much to anticipate even before she appeared. On top of today’s stories about housing benefit, social care and immigration, the shadow home secretary would also have to deal with the comments made by Lord Goldsmith during the show’s newspaper review. “It’s not clear what Ed Miliband stands for,” said Goldsmith, to cheers from the Tory press team. “I don’t think the rifts in the party have been healed.” But, in the end, it

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Why IDS is right raise the link between immigration and worklessness

Before everyone gets too excited, Iain Duncan Smith is not saying in his speech today that immigration is a bad thing in itself. But he is saying that it has consequences, some of which impinge on native Brits. Many of these consequences are, as it happens, writ in the official statistics. As IDS highlights – and as Coffee House has detailed before – a good number of the jobs that sprang up during the New Labour years were accounted for by immigration; and there are signs that the process is continuing still. This is one of the reasons why the number of jobs in the economy can increase, while the

Saturday

David Blackburn

Immigration is so much more than an electoral issue

Further to Daniel’s piece about declining immigration in Europe, it is worth highlighting this passage from Iain Martin’s column in the Mail: ‘But once in Downing Street, Cameron was confronted by research from his personal pollster, Andrew Cooper, which confirmed the true extent of public concern about high levels of immigration. Ironically, Cooper was one of the very modernisers in the Tory Party who did not want Cameron to be tainted — as he saw it — by being seen as tough on immigration in the run-up to the election. But now he has changed his tune — and taken the Prime Minister along with him. In fact, Cooper has

Daniel Korski

How many refugees are actually coming to Europe?

A human wave of refugees is supposedly setting off for Europe from North Africa. But what are the real figures? The first thing to note that refugees from North Africa come at a time when there has been a sharp decrease in the number of asylum applicants in the 27 EU member-states. Eurostat says that in 1992 there were 670,000 applications in the EU-15 and in 2001 there were 424,500 applications in the expanded EU-27. But according to the UN, the 27 EU member-states registered only 247,300 asylum claims in 2009 and 235,900 in 2010, a 5 per cent annual decrease. Within this group, the 15 ‘old’ EU member-states saw

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Texas Lessons for Glasgow and Liverpool

Since Rick Perry’s campaign theme – assuming he runs – will be It Worked In Texas, it’s worth observing that Texas’s success in recent years is partly based upon the fact that it is easy and often cheap to move there. That’s because, as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s easy to build houses in Texas. In fact the average family in Houston is actually better off – once housing and transportation costs have been considered – than a comparable family in New York City. Since the great eastern seaboard cities have the advantages of antiquity and immense reserves of cultural capital that will always make them popular places in which

Friday

Fraser Nelson

How the coalition hopes to fix Britain’s economic dysfunction

The largest welfare-to-work programme on the planet is launched today by Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan Smith. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the future of this country — and, perhaps, David Cameron – depends on its success. The lead article of this week’s Spectator looks at it, and we used various metrics — some of which puzzled David Smith of the Sunday Times. He understandably challenged our claim that 81 per cent of the new jobs created are accounted for by immigration. We had a Twitter “conversation” about it earlier this morning, but some things you can’t explain in 140 characters. So here is my argument:

Thursday

Alex Massie

An Interesting Interview with John Major!

Yes, really. Like his American contemporary George HW Bush, John Major has suffered from being sandwiched between two far more glamorous premiers and like Bush Sr this probably means he’s under-rated these days. At the time his government often looked hopelessly weak and of course it often was, riven with feuding and driven to distraction by Europe and the Thatcherite legacy. Then there was Black Wednesday and the destruction of the party’s economic credentials. Nevertheless, all these years later it seems remarkable that Major was able to hold it all together for as long as he did. As his successors’ fate demonstrated leading the Tory party, not always a cakewalk

Tuesday

Alex Massie

British Cities Are Not “Full”

Further to this post on population increase, it’s useful to remember that despite the undoubted pressures population growth causes for public services and other facilities, it is not accurate to suggest that Britain “is full”. In fact there’s ample room for more people as even a cursory comparison of urban population density demonstrates. Chart? Would it be disastrous if English (and Scottish!) cities were as densely populated as Boston or Chicago (12.75)? I suggest it would not. Indeed there’d be advantages to this. But that means reappraising planning and zoning regulations and permitting developers to build up as well as out. Otherwise there’s little alternative to suburban sprawl. Now sprawl

Friday

Alex Massie

An Increasing Population is a Good Thing. So is Immigration.

Plenty of folk seem to think otherwise. Including George Bridges who has written a very curious post for the Motherblog in which he seems most perturbed by the prospect of this happy isle’s population increasing. He even suggests he’s not doing his bit since Mrs Bridges is expecting their third child, presumably furthering the onrushing demographic apocalypse. Piffle. Good for Mrs Bridges and her fecund husband. Congratulations to them. May they produce this and many more little Bridges. A rising population is a feature of a healthy society, not the beginning of the end for this sceptered land. Of course an increasing population puts pressure on any number of public

Thursday

George Bridges

The challenge of demographic change

There may be a lot of debate about what the “big society” means, but there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on: we live in a big society – and it’s getting bigger. 62 million today. 64 million in five year’s time. And then on up to 70 million by 2028, according to the government.  (No, I’m not doing my bit, as my wife is about to have our third child.) What’s odd is how little debate there’s been at Westminster about all this. Why? Partly because it means you have to talk about immigration (still seen as toxic by many in SW1); partly because it is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who cares about immigration? (Or education?)

Who cares about immigration? In theory, everyone. It’s always mentioned as the policy that exercises voters but is ignored by politicians. (Europe generally comes second in this category.) Let’s see what YouGov reports. In one of their tracking polls this week they asked voters to pick the three most important issues. Chart? Fully 66% of Conservative supporters think immigration a vital issue, as do 54% of Londoners and 55% of C2DEs. Other points of interest: only 11% of Tories say Tax is one of the three most important issues, the same percentage as thinks education is in the top three. Europe is mentioned by just 9% of those polled (though

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Cameron quells the storm

David Cameron turned in an emollient performance on the Today Programme this morning. He declined to stoke the coalition row over immigration, heaped praise on Vince Cable and stressed that the Liberal Democrats have been good coalition partners. Even when pressed on the question of whether Britain would block Gordon Brown from becoming director of the International Monetary Fund, Cameron spoke softly. The only line of questioning in the interview that discomforted the Prime Minister was when Evan Davis pressed him on why a localist government was placing restrictions on what local government could charge residents for recycling or rubbish collection. Cameron seemed to think that Davis was asking him

Monday

Alex Massie

Vince Cable’s Marriage May Inform His Views on Immigration

Vince Cable’s disagreement with David Cameron over immigration seems entirely reasonable to me and much less problematic than his attitude to Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to purchase SKY. Sure, if he were a Tory he’d have been sacked. But he’s not a Tory and on a subject such as immigration – and the way in which the issue should be discussed – I can’t see why we have to maintain the fiction that everyone in the government must agree with one another on everything. Better, surely, to acknowledge that there’s a government-sponsored policy but even within the government, it being a coalition and all, not everyone considers the policy ideal. Or

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why Vince Cable can’t keep his peace on immigration

The row sparked by Vince Cable’s attack on David Cameron’s speech on immigration is still rumbling on. The Sunday Times reports that Cable’s opposition to the coalition’s immigration policies has even extended to advising a college to take out an injunction against the government’s policies limiting non-EU student numbers. Cable’s actions are undoubtedly straining the coalition; Nick Clegg was visibly uncomfortable on the politics show as he attempted to square Cable’s actions with Cabinet collective responsibility. So, why is Cable doing this? I don’t think the reasons are particularly Machiavellian. Months ago, one Lib Dem Cabinet minister said to me that ‘Vince comes from the place and generation where any criticism of

Thursday

David Blackburn

Cameron can make common cause to solve Europe’s immigration concerns

Vince, it seems, is Vince. But Britain is not alone in struggling to arrest immigration. A mass of displaced North Africans is descending on Malta and Italy. The United Nations estimate that more than 20,000 people have already landed this year and many more expected. Neither Malta nor Italy can cope alone. On Monday, Malta called for the EU to invoke a 2001 directive that grants migrants temporary protection in cases of ‘mass influx’. Italy also petitioned Brussels to spread the physical burden. The EU did not acquiesce in either case, which especially outraged the Italian government: both Berlusconi and immigration minister Maroni said that the European Union stands and

Peter Hoskin

Cable lashes out at Cameron

I wrote earlier that the immigration debate can bite back — and it’s already done just that. Speaking this morning, Vince Cable has labeled the Prime Minister’s speech as “very unwise,” and at risk of “inflaming extremism.” That, lest it need saying, is the same Vince Cable who’s a member of Cameron’s government. In theoretical terms, what this clarifies is the parameters of the Coalition Agreement. While almost every policy that Cameron highlights in his speech is part of that document, it seems that the Lib Dems don’t have to agree with the way he sells them. The point is being made, this morning, that the idea of reducing net