The Lawspeaker
10-27-2009, 08:29 AM
Don't listen to the whingers - London needs immigrants (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers---london-needs-immigrants.do)
Amid the sound and fury over Nick Griffin (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-46160-nick-griffin.do), there's a sad but unnoticed fact: it has taken this fiasco to make politicians talk about the impact of immigration.
Yesterday MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-8170-nicholas-soames.do) called for a 75 per cent cut in immigration and accused the Government of "clamping down" on any debate.
What's missing is not only a sense of the benefits of immigration but also of where it came from.
It didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.
Even now, most graduates with good English and a salary of £40,000 or the local equivalent abroad are more or less guaranteed enough points to settle here.
The results in London (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94056-london-england.do), and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It's not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners - although frankly it's hard to see how the capital could function without them.
Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.
My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.
But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.
It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.
Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.
But in my children's south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.
My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.
London's role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it's a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-230-caribbean.do) and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It's one of the reasons Paris (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94105-paris-france.do) now tends to look parochial to us.
So why is it that ministers have been so very bad at communicating this? I wonder because I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.
That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-4624-tony-blair.do)'s Cabinet Office think-tank.
The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.
Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.
Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.
But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94080-labour-party-uk.do)'s core white working-class vote.
This shone through even in the published report: the "social outcomes" it talks about are solely those for immigrants.
And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.
The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-4316-european-union.do) member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.
Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.
But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-2825-sheffield.do) or Sunderland (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-22377-sunderland.do).
In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.
But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital's capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There's not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-7789-south-yorkshire.do). And so ministers lost their nerve.
I hope it's not too late now, post-Question Time, for London to make the case for migration.
Of course we're too small a country to afford an open door - but, by the same token, if the immigrants dry up, this city and this country will become a much poorer and less interesting place. Why is it so hard for Gordon Brown (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-1356-gordon-brown.do) to say that?
Amid the sound and fury over Nick Griffin (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-46160-nick-griffin.do), there's a sad but unnoticed fact: it has taken this fiasco to make politicians talk about the impact of immigration.
Yesterday MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-8170-nicholas-soames.do) called for a 75 per cent cut in immigration and accused the Government of "clamping down" on any debate.
What's missing is not only a sense of the benefits of immigration but also of where it came from.
It didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.
Even now, most graduates with good English and a salary of £40,000 or the local equivalent abroad are more or less guaranteed enough points to settle here.
The results in London (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94056-london-england.do), and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It's not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners - although frankly it's hard to see how the capital could function without them.
Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.
My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.
But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.
It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.
Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.
But in my children's south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.
My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.
London's role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it's a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-230-caribbean.do) and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It's one of the reasons Paris (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94105-paris-france.do) now tends to look parochial to us.
So why is it that ministers have been so very bad at communicating this? I wonder because I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.
That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-4624-tony-blair.do)'s Cabinet Office think-tank.
The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.
Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.
Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.
But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-94080-labour-party-uk.do)'s core white working-class vote.
This shone through even in the published report: the "social outcomes" it talks about are solely those for immigrants.
And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.
The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-4316-european-union.do) member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.
Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.
But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-2825-sheffield.do) or Sunderland (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-22377-sunderland.do).
In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.
But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital's capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There's not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-7789-south-yorkshire.do). And so ministers lost their nerve.
I hope it's not too late now, post-Question Time, for London to make the case for migration.
Of course we're too small a country to afford an open door - but, by the same token, if the immigrants dry up, this city and this country will become a much poorer and less interesting place. Why is it so hard for Gordon Brown (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/related-1356-gordon-brown.do) to say that?