I M M I G R A T I O N
It's the social issue that dare not speak its name, but the truth is Mr Blair is presiding over an irrevocable shift in the character of this country, writes Max Hastings
Daily Mail, March 22, 2005
There is only one Tory election issue seriously scaring New Labour, and of course it is immigration. The influx of hundreds of thousands of newcomers to Britain dismays a hug number of British people, and the report published this week by MigrationWatch UK will fuel their alarm.
The study, based on data from the government's own Office of National Statistics (ONS), shows that nationally, almost 20% of babies are born to immigrants, while in some areas the figures are much higher. In Inner London, for instance, 50% of children are born to migrants. In Birmingham, Bradford, Cambridge, Leicester and some other cities, the figure is more than 30%.
According to the ONS, of a 6 million increase in national population predicted for the next 25 years, 5 million will be immigrants and their children. This represents an extraordinary change in the make-up of the British people. The Government's own Cohesion Panel acknowledged last July that in some areas,,,, the pace of the influx is simply too great for local communities to cope.
Yet nothing effective is being done to stem the flow. Most ministers assert defiantly that Britain will need immigrants a generation hence to provide a young workforce to compensate for falling birth-rate among native-born British people.
But the truth is that Tony Blair is presiding over an irrevocable shift in the character of this country. He seems perfectly content that this should be taking place, irrespective of the clearly-expressed wishes of most British people to the contrary.
Pernicious
The implications for housing policy, and thus for the destruction of countryside, as well as upon our national culture, are enormous. Yet in debating this - or rather, in not debating it nearly as much as we should - we suffer the disastrous legacy of Enoch Powell. He made it politically disreputable to attack immigration, which has become the great national issue which scarcely dares to speak its name.
Those who demand curbs on immigrant numbers are often denounced - not least from the Labour benches in the House of commons - as racists. This is stupid, indeed pernicious. The British people inhabit one of the most overcrowded spaces in Europe, so it is reasonable to question whether we should welcome more people, even if each of the five million new Britons we are promised over the next generation were called Nicole Kidman or Russell Crowe.
As Gordon Brown seemed to recognise in some recent remarks, the United Kingdom faces a serious issue, if not a crisis of identity. In the mad pursuit of the folly of multi-culturism, more and more people of all races are confused about who and what, exactly, the British - which means themselves - are supposed to be.
If it is important to control the influx of migrants to preserve the stability of our society, it is even more important to ensure that those who come here learn to share with us a common sense of values. It is the unwillingness of some Muslims, especially, to do so that causes dismay to many thoughtful people.
There can surely be no place in any future vision of Britain for forced marriages, the subjugation of women or - in a society which has just banned fox-hunting because it is said to be cruel, for halal butchery.
The argument here seems perfectly simple, even if it is unacceptable to many Left-wing politicians: anyone who wishes to live in Britain must consent to do things our way.
That does not mean sacrificing their religion, food and friendships. It does mean accepting a commitment to liberal democracy and to the English language.
Yet we British should recognise that our identity problem goes deeper than anything to do with immigrants. For several generations now, our traditional bonds and loyalties have been weakening. All the forces that held us together for so long - Empire, the Monarchy, the Church, the memory of shared experience in two World Wars - have been fading as those to who they meant so much die off.
George Orwell, a passionate Englishman, identified 70 years ago some of the things he thought of as most English: 'Bad teeth and gentle manners ... the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to and fro of lorries on the Great North Road. The queues outside the Labour Exchange, the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs, the old maid biking to Holy Communion through mists of early morning ... solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.
Today, many of those sights have gone. Some cannot be lamented, for we are better without them. There is no future in nostalgia.
Challenge
We should acknowledge that in moist respects, for a great many people, Britain today is a much brighter place than it was in Orwell's time. The challenge is to create a credible British vision for the future. This is not easy when 66% of Scots, 43% of Welsh and 25% of English told researchers at Nuffield College, Oxford, a few years ago that their sense of Britishness was 'weak' or 'nonexistent'.
Most of us believe that, without wanting to go backwards, pride in our own history is an indispensable foundation. The decline of history teaching in schools and universities is a disaster - and I mean the fall in quality as well as quantity. How can any child be expected to feel much excitement about the past when asked to interpret it through a study of the early 19th Century Poor Law rather than battles, kings and queens.
Led by the Prime Minister, we have become absurdly apologetic about our past. In truth, for all Britain's past follies and failures, anyone who comes to live here is joining a society which has been one of the foremost, most creative and inventive on Earth.
Some educationists say that it is absurd to try to make an immigrant child interested in the Battle of Waterloo, when his own family's past in Pakistan, Afghanistan or the West Indies seems vastly more real. The answer surely, is that his family has chosen to break the link with his own historic legacy, and to invest in that of Britain. How can he or she expect to share this country's future without familiarity with its past?
Realistic
Norman Tebbit's proposed 'cricket test', which caused such ire in liberal circles 15 years ago, was flawed because cricket no longer stands at the heart of British life, for reasons which have to do with changing lifestyles and enthusiasms. Today, it seems much more realistic to talk about 'football test', a 'pub test', or a 'countryside test'.
In an age when most of us are middle-class, plenty of common strands of Britishness remain identifiable: a love of green places, if our Government allows us to preserve any of them, gardening, beer, P.G.Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, Jane Austen and Trollope; old buildings and bridges; Coronation Street and The Archers.
These things, and maybe also, somewhere in our hearts, a deep-rooted conviction that British is best. This latter quality is among the most important. It represents not foolish vanity, but a wholesome pride in what we have been - and in the fact that, for all our problems, today by any measure this is one of the most successful societies on Earth.
Our job is to keep it that way, by asserting our identity not in jingoistic ways, but with a quiet determination. We may welcome a tolerable number of newcomers of all races who want to share our lives and our Britishness, but are rightly suspicious when those numbers become so great that our very national identity is in danger of being submerged.
It seems absolutely right, however, to reject those who merely want to establish islands of their own culture and values in the midst of ours. Britain can continue to be all that we know and value only if the host of newcomers and their children accept the social terms of entry that we are entitled to demand. This is not racism, but common sense.