Civitas Blog

This year’s annual Hay-on-Wye Festival has just ended. In his column in last week’s Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson wrote this about the annual twelve-day jamboree:

‘You might imagine that Hay is a lovely day out for all the family, a chance for children to meet all the authors they love… Of course, it’s no such thing. Mainly it’s a chance for ramblers and hippies to gather in a field and convince themselves everyone thinks the same way that they do.’

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Trevor Phillips urged us to hold a calm and measured debate about immigration. Despite his good intentions he still managed to malign the British people. On ‘the right’ he said that the issue became taboo because conservatives feared being branded racist. And ‘the left’ thought that a free and open debate would stir up reactionary sentiment among their working-class voters.

Public debate was suppressed, it seems, for purely self-serving political reasons. My recollection of the period since the 1960s is different. The bond that unites British people has never been based on race. It has long been an allegiance rooted in support for shared beliefs and institutions. It is a civic allegiance, symbolised by the Crown, and one of the core beliefs is moral equality. Everyone is not only equal under the law, but also entitled to fair play in any face-to-face dealings.

Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch has been arguing the point for ages. But it took a cross-party House of Lords Committee to join the chorus before what he has been banging on about all this time finally to make it to the front pages of the national press.

What the Lords Committee has joined Sir Andrew in pointing out is that, contrary to the Government’s much vaunted claim about how much economic benefit the country has gained from the huge influx in immigration over which it has presided this last decade, the vast majority of the country’s indigenous population has not enjoyed one iota of benefit from it. Indeed, many of the poorest groups have suffered economically as a result of it.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

‘Every citizen who answer[s] the call of the country - policemen and women, our security and emergency services, our health services - all le[ave] their mark on this island's story by keeping us safe. They are the pride of Britain.

‘Just as our armed services with bravery and heroism every single day also make us proud. We mourn those who have been lost and we honour all those who in distant places of danger give so much to our country.’

So spoke Gordon Brown yesterday at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.

In response to the patriotic sentiments here expressed, one feels tempted to respond:

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

This morning, Radio 4's Today programme aired a shocking report on the poor treatment of employees (mostly Polish immigrants) in a banana packing factory. Workers had to accept long hours or face being unemployed. Their breaks would be cancelled if the managers felt they had not packed enough boxes. In the most extreme example, a pregnant woman with a doctor's note was refused a less labour intensive job and, as a consequence, miscarried. Ironically, the bananas these workers park are marked 'fair trade' in many major supermarkets.

The first problem this highlights is the continuing difficulty of the fair trade brand. The complex journey that products embark on, from the raw resource to the processed goods on the shop shelves tend to involve a great many different types of workers in many different environments. Fair trade goods have frequently come under fire for having only one or two stages in the production process be conducted 'fairly' and yet still be officially sanctioned as fair trade. The other problem is that farmers and traders in the Third World become behoven to an unwieldy bureaucracy to ensure they receive a 'fair price' for their goods when, in fact, many of these workers could flourish with simple free trade under the right political conditions.

It seems that this issue has become even more fraught now that unfettered immigration is allowing working conditions to disintegrate in some sectors of the economy. The problem is a combination of newly arrived immigrants who are very willing to work intensively for long hours (an admirable quality in itself) and unscrupulous recruitment agencies whose tactics blur the line between 'robust' employment practices and defrauding workers who are not yet aware of their rights and duties in British society. This is the dark side of all those claims that immigrants are the main drive in growing British GDP (claims that remain highly disputable). No one can deny that immigrants can to contribute keeping down the price of 'fair trade' bananas to ease consumers' consciences that bit more cheaply. But at what cost to the wages and working condition of unskilled employment in the UK?

In his comment piece in today’s Times, entitled ‘Don’t try and put the ration into immigration’, David Aaronvitch takes exception to all forms of governmental limit to foreign immigration into this country.

His stated reasons for opposing all such limits are lame indeed.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

So, there we have it, at last, a final admission by no less than the Labour Minister responsible for immigration, Liam Byrne, that the large-scale volume of net immigration his party has deliberately engineered with such machismo these last ten years has 'damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country’, to use the words employed by the Times yesterday in its account of what he has admitted.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Professor Anthony Glees is Director of the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University. After the July bombings of 2005 but in that same year, the Social Affairs Unit published a report jointly authored by Professor Glees and a former student of his entitled ‘When Students turn to Terror’. It documented the security risk British universities pose through providing environments conducive to infiltration by Islamist extremists seeking to acquire useful skills for their deadly trade and on the look-out for potential jihadi recruits.

One of the biggest controversies surrounding immigration is that no one knows exactly how many immigrants from the enlarged EU enter the UK; let alone how many currently reside and how many are working.

A simple method of inquiry, that the government should have implemented years ago, is one universally familiar to club bouncers: counting people in and out at the doors. A system to count legal migrants as they enter via tunnel, sea or air would have required just a little extra work at passport checks and keeping track of passengers as they exited the country. Since there re no limits on entry or staying in the country, there would have been little incentive for immigrants from the Accession 8 countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) to enter the country illegally and hence a relatively good indicator of the numbers currently resident in the UK could be created. This, for one reason or another, has never been implemented.

Today’s Times relays the contents of a speech, and accompanying paper, of economist David Blanchflower, the latest appointee to the Bank of England’s Monetary Committee, about the economic consequences of the recent large influx of workers to Britain from Eastern Europe.

I have been trying all morning to no good effect to make sense of what he is reported as having said on this subject and would greatly appreciate assistance from readers of the Civitas blog better versed in the arcane science of economics than I am.

No one today writes better than Mark Steyn about the challenge facing Europe from its declining birth-rate combind with the high fertility rates of its various Muslim minorities.

An extract from his recent book America Alone is available on-line at the web-journal Macleans. Entitled ‘The future belongs to Islam', it well worth reading. Those of a nervous disposition are advised to pour a stiff drink and keep it ready to hand before opening the link.

The British government is widely reported to be as yet undecided whether to allow Bulgarian and Romanian nationals the right to work in the UK upon their countries joining the EU next year. Regardless of whether it does, come the accession of their countries to the EU, Bulgarians and Romanians will as citizens of the EU be able to enter Britain freely.

In anticipation of that day, it was reported last month in the Daily Telegraph that Romanians and Bulgarians have been busy queuing up to obtain passports to enable them to leave as soon as it arrives.

The British government was profoundly embarrassed by its gross underestimate of the numbers of East Europeans whose countries acceded to the EU in May 2004 who migrated to Britain to obtain jobs. They predicted only 13,000 would come. To date, at least 345,000 have.

Could it be to spare itself similar embarrassment of discovering correspondingly large numbers of Bulgarians and Romanians show up in Britain come accession day, irrespective of whether they have been granted the right to work here, that, as was reported in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Britain is about to lift visa restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria in advance of their accession? The more allowed in prior to their accession the smaller will the head-line figure be of those arriving come that day.

Reading today’s newspapers about the worringly large number of foreign criminals who have been wrongly released into the community, rather than repatriated upon completion of their terms in prison as the judges who had sent them there had often recommended, put me in mind of that wonderful segment in Walt Disney’s film Fantasia known as ‘the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.

As the BBC reported this week, Britain now has a citizenship test. If you want the passport you will have to pass the official national test, be accepted as speaking sufficient English and then attend a special public ceremony held by a local registrar. The 45-minute test – covering government, society and practical issues and costing £34 – came into force yesterday. People seeking to become British will take the test at one of 90 centres across the country, before taking part in a formal citizenship ceremony. The ‘Life in the UK’ test is the last of a series of changes to how people become British brought in by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, now also the former Work and Pensions Secretary.

It is good to see that the government has decided to raise the bar slightly on immigrant naturalization by making some familiarity with Britain a prerequisite. But is it enough?

I recently attended a conference on Martin Luther in his hometown of Wittenberg.

To get there involved making a two-hour train journey from Berlin through the wastelands of former East Germany. For the most part, what I saw seems to have remained untouched for the last half-century or so, save to have acquired, yet with a quality of ferocious abandon that was as unsettling as it was unfamiliar, the all-too-familiar spray-paint graffiti that blights so much of our own urban landscape.

On arrival at Wittenberg, now valiantly trying to turn itself into a place of pilgrimage and an international tourist centre, yet in reality largely a ghost-town still, I was reliably informed that much of the population of former East Germany, though now amply provided by the state with welfare in comparison with how things were before 1989,remains deeply demoralised, with many of the young having gone west to seek their fortunes.

I have no doubt that this sorry condition in which East Germany languishes as a result of the long years of Soviet domination has been replicated elsewhere throughout the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Small wonder is it today, since the accession to the EU of so many of these countries whose populations have been debarred from taking jobs within the EU save for Britain and Ireland, there has been a massive influx to this country of young East Europeans eager to throw themselves into whatever work they can find.

And jobs they have found in plenty: jobs in the domestic and service sector as well as construction work and other areas of employment, in both the official and, doubtless, black economy.

One can only admire and wish these young workers well, although one fears for the lands they have left which have been deprived of their more enterprising young folk.

Is their steady immigration to Britain a good thing or a bad thing – not for them, which it clearly is, but for Britain?

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.

Michael Howard has sparked a calm and measured debate about immigration that is long overdue. For too long, false accusations of racism have intimidated many people into remaining silent. Of course, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the CRE, did his best to fan the flames in the Guardian, where he is quoted as saying: "It appears that Mr Howard has, against his own better instincts, and for purely political reasons, surrendered to the provisional wing of his party to base this campaign, not on measured and rational debate, but on the ill-informed propaganda of some of the more demented anti-immigration groups."

The Government opted not to play the race card. Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, claimed that the opposition would be unable to afford a new system because of its planned £35bn spending cuts. "Everybody agrees with controlled migration," she said. "That requires investment in both effective border controls and immigration systems. Michael Howard's words and the Tories' spending plans are at odds."

Even if ‘everybody’ does agree that a change of policy is needed, there is still no consensus about some of the fundamental facts. For instance, what have been the economic consequences of immigration? One Home Office report estimated that in the fiscal year 1999/2000 Britain’s 5 million migrants paid in aggregate £2.5 billion more in taxes than they received in government expenditure. However, Professor Bob Rowthorn (among others) has challenged these estimates on the Civitas website. He shows how some unusual factors led the researchers to exaggerate the benefit by about £2.1 billion and how many costs were left out of their calculations.

European legislation and judicial rulings that override English law increasingly disable policies that in their intention and application are designed only to address practical problems. If any present or proposed policy can be represented with any trace of plausibility by the now widely state-subsidised pressure groups of self-defined “races” or “ethnic communities” as one that implies that members of their “race” or “community” are disproportionately at fault, then the policy is denounced as “racist”.

In everyday discourse, anti-racist rhetoric increasingly stifles discussions of various possible policies by labelling as “racist” wide swathes of opinion that has to do with empirical matters of conduct or culture, and nothing to do with race.

David Blunkett has admitted that he intends to give up Britain’s ability to veto EU policies on immigration and asylum. He claims that we will not have to accept any policies we do not like, but the EU has never operated that way. The European Court of Justice will impose policies agreed by a majority vote against the Britain’s will. Moreover, once power has been surrendered it has been the custom for it never to be given back.

Mr Blunkett has claimed that abandoning our veto will allow us to force other countries to follow policies we prefer. Mrs Thatcher made the same mistake over the Single European Act in 1986. She acknowledges in her book, Statecraft, that she thought Britain would be able to force other countries to de-regulate trade and commerce. Instead, Britain was coerced. Immigration and asylum will be no exception.

A country that cannot control who lives in its territory has lost the capacity for self-government. Our system of liberty demands much of ordinary citizens. It is only feasible where there is a common language and shared beliefs about fundamentals and it takes time for newcomers not used to the ways of a free people to settle in. Yet in 2002 the net number of foreign immigrants to the UK was nearly 250,000, double the rate before 1997. For accurate information about immigration check the MigrationWatchUK website. For further discussion of immigration take a look at Anthony Browne’s Do We Need Mass Immigration? (PDF).

Tory proposals to reform immigration policy will, no doubt, lead to talk of racism. Making false accusations of racism has become the weapon of first resort of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia who refuse to accept that there are any valid reasons for limiting the influx of newcomers.

Most developed countries have an immigration policy, usually because of two main concerns. First, there is the sheer weight of numbers. The more crowded the country, the more necessary is an immigration policy. The UK is already one of the most densely populated parts of the world, with double the population density of France and eight times that of America. England, on its own, is more densely populated than India. The consequences for house prices, traffic jams, school places and hospital waiting lists are there for all to see.