Yet again the Tories have been caught with their pants down in the playground and the Labour goody-goodies have rushed in to fuss and giggle, twiddling their pigtails and sneering delightedly.
This time Ed Matts, the Conservative candidate in the marginal seat of Dorset South who unwisely doctored a photograph of himself and Ann Widdecombe, is the naughty schoolboy. It wouldn’t be the first time a politician had compromised his views for an official party policy, but the decision to alter his campaign stance to hide the fact that he had opposed the deportation of a Malawian asylum-seeker has provided the Government with a perfect excuse for some pre-election sanctimony and scorn. Within moments of hearing about the scandal, John Reid hotfooted it down to the constituency to wring his hands and march around in feigned incredulity.
The important point is that both parties have conducted the debate about immigration more on the basis of opprobrium than principle. Which is why Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, pointed out that ‘people are having debates about perfectly legitimate subjects but maybe they’re doing it in ways which create tensions’: ‘Everybody is entitled to talk about immigration or gypsy camps and no subject should be off limits,’ he affirmed. ‘It is a question of how they go about it. We want grown-up leadership.’ Even accounting for the fact that fear of being labelled racist by the CRE has stifled intellectual debate, he is absolutely right.
The sad thing is that neither party has anything really useful to say. The Blair administration has dealt with immigration by fudging it, largely, in the sense that it has refused to accept – and take into account – the negative economic consequences of immigration when setting immigration policy, rather than only considering the positive ones. Even if its manifesto rhetoric secretes conservative ethics, its record is positively free love. As the number of registered net immigrants, continues to rise (120,000 in 2003, as opposed to 37,000 in 1997), bringing about a projected 5.2 million rise in the UK population by 2030, the government won’t accept any arguments – such as those made so cogently by Anthony Browne – about overcrowding, overstretched public services, housing pressures, unemployment levels, or the negative impact on integration, solidarity and social capital.
The Tories’ are not much better. Their greatest concern is defensive, in that they are desperate to counter the classic reductio ad absurdum that if you won’t admit everyone you’re a racist, but they do so through protest – ‘it’s not racist to impose limits on migration’ – not policy. The sick irony, of course, is that British ethnic minorities suffer from such immigration policies, not least in terms of thuggish violence and unemployment. As Labour rehearse their pious solecisms about immigrants not taking British jobs, it is worth remembering that over 30% of black African households are workless, as are a quarter of Bangladeshi and Pakistani households. Some regions suffer particularly badly, especially those areas that Labour insist are most in need of immigration. London, where most migrants come, is supposedly in greatest need of workers, yet there is already a vast surplus. Far from having full employment, the capital is the UK’s biggest unemployment nightmare.
What would help considerably would be a Conservative party prepared to make the altogether more humanitarianly unambiguous and economically astute – not to mention blatantly obvious – distinction between genuine asylum seekers and refugees, which any humane system should accept without quotas or qualms, and fakes, who should be reprimanded and repatriated, and immigrants, whose entry should be filtered and restricted according to the needs of specific sectors. Clear this up – as the Liberal Democrats say they will – and the whole issue starts to look less opaque; but under current law, it’ll never happen.
What the Conservatives also need to do, then, in order be able to close the doors on unneeded immigrants and phoney refugees, and what Michael Howard essentially discovered he had to do when dealing with the recent gypsy crisis, is to repeal the Human Rights Act and seek derogation from Article 3 of the EHRC. Not only has the Human Right Act has done little to safeguard our freedoms and, as has been argued in the Civitas blog before, much to restrict them. It is also dangerously vague, making it virtually impossible to discern between immigrants and refugees, which in turn makes it hard to deport illegal immigrants or failed asylum seekers. Get rid of the Human Rights Act and the debate can really get going - but would the CRE be prepared to be grown up about that?
Comments (1)
The debate, such as it is, is usually about quantity - and it would seem sensible to talk about quotas far smaller than the conservatives have been vaguely talking about.
The current government pretends it has (uniquely) conquered unemployment - yet it still stands at near 1 1\2 million with a recently much inflated number on "disablement" allowances.
Numbers imply building, and when brown field sites are gone in probably the ridiculously low rise favoured by the English as opposed to the Italian cities where 8 and 10 storey blocks are the norm, we then have to sacrifice our already scarce good agricultural land. Not a sensible long term option.
If the debate moves on to the "quality" of immigrants (and one cannot have in common humanity any such debate about genuine asylum seekers), we are oviously more interested in the better qualified individuals. But isn't it immoral for us to trawl the third world for those very individuals you would think the third world desperately needs for its own improvement?
Since the 1950s we seem to have allowed in a large preponderance of people from Middle Eastern, Asian and African societies with an outlook seemingly far from the old-fashioned description of "protestant ethic" (an ethic long since espoused by European catholics) but perhaps more accurately characterised as "male working ethic".
It is also difficult to think of any peoples from outside this area with the bare faced effrontery to even attempt the sort of large-scale fraud we saw recently with the Postal Vote scam. And this is only the most recent manifestation of electoral jiggery-pokery.
Most of the press gleefully and justifiably unloaded upon the Labour Party, but in truth the perpetrators, as in previous cases which occasionally involved other parties, were all moslem - a fact carefully ignored in the papers.
There is patently still a large gap between British public morality and Middle Eastern. The width of this gap may have been exaggerated in previous generations in Britain, but currently fashionable ethical relativism dednies its existence. To me it seems both undeniable and a folly to ignore without attempts to face the differences in the open.
There are also large sections of the longer established immigrant descended Caribbean community (their youth) who, to judge by prison populations, have yet to be fully integrated into British society.
For these reasons I favour closing the doors of immigration until we can demonstrate we have our already present immigrated community much more fully assimilated than it currently appears to be.
Posted by Jim Bennett | April 13, 2005 10:57 PM
Posted on April 13, 2005 22:57