Immigration

We're four months away from Scotland's day of destiny, with the London-Scottish media fraternity becoming increasingly alarmed, and ironically (considering their total unionism) far more noticeably Scottish. At the Telegraph Graeme Archer made a characteristically elegant appeal to Sir Malcolm Rikfind to step forward, and there would indeed be something touching and rather beautiful about the grandson of Jewish immigrants being the man who saves Britain. The film script would write itself, if someone were to make a film about the Scottish referendum (which I admit is pretty unlikely).

Dan Hannan makes many good points in today's Telegraph as he considers the Conservatives' grim failure to attract support from black and ethnic minority voters. This isn't merely a problem for the Tories, it is a crisis. As I pointed out yesterday, the Tory share of the BME vote in 2010 was exactly the same as their share of the vote in Scotland: 16%. True, this was an improvement on 2005 when only 11% of BME voters endorsed Conservative candidates but that's a matter of only modest solace for Tory modernisers. Naturally (this being British politics) there is a thirst to look elsewhere for examples or lessons that might point towards a solution to this particular Tory problem. Like Paul Goodman, Dan Hannan looks to Canada and not without reason.

Why do the Tories have a problem with black and ethnic minority voters, daddy? It is, with all due respect to Isabel and Paul Goodman, the British political question that is easiest to answer. We all know the answer too, even those of us on the right. Race might not be the Conservative party's original sin; it's still a pretty high-ranking sin. And, look, it's not ancient history either. It's not a Different times, different attitudes but, please, can we move on now? kind of thing. Nor did it die with Enoch either. (Poor old Enoch, so brilliant but a touch troubled too, don't you think?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Alex Massie explain why we need more optimism in Scotland and Westminster" startat=1538] Listen [/audioplayer]There is an optimism deficit in British politics. Politicians seem incapable of making a positive argument for anything, including the country itself. The British government’s case in the Scottish independence referendum has been almost entirely negative. Those looking for an uplifting defence of the United Kingdom have been left sorely disappointed as the government has instead stuck to technocratic arguments about why Scotland would be worse off on its own.

Globalisation is like a rising tide; we’re all living in our separate ponds with their own little social ecosystems until the floodwater starts to rise and turns them into one big lake. Many fish, especially, the big ones, are going to benefit but many will suffer in this frightening new world. It is that fear which Ukip’s new posters are aimed at addressing (or exploiting, depending on your view). Sure, Europe is about free movement of labour, but that movement is highly imbalanced and has been for a number of years. Far more people are seeking to come from southern and eastern Europe to work in Britain than vice versa, and therefore that puts pressure on some British workers (let alone the question of infrastructure).

Nigel Farage’s strategy for winning the European Elections is based around winning over blue collar workers who normally vote Labour. Ukip believe that they can use immigration as a battering ram to break through Labour’s defences in the north. One of the party’s campaign billboards unveiled last night simply says, ’26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after’. (I suspect that Ukip will welcome the controversy these posters are attracting because it will help amplify their message) https://twitter.com/Adrian_Hilton/statuses/458163441531097088 Ukip’s argument is that it is the only party that can actually do something about immigration.

My friend and critic Jonathan Portes obviously took exception to my remarks about Keynesianism having been disproven. His entertaining rebuttal claims to have exposed my misreading of data. That's not quite how I see it. I agree with him that the appalling build-up of out-of-work benefits happened before 1997. The Tories badly miscalculated incapacity benefit; thinking it would be a one-off way to help those affected by deindustrialization. But, in fact, it created a welfare dependency trap, and the 1992 recession caught too many people in it. John Major had an excuse: a recession. Tony Blair had no such excuse. I wasn't joking about a quarter of Liverpool and Glasgow being on the dole at the height of the Labour boom.

Mark Field, MP for Westminster, has set up a brand new campaign group of Tory backbenchers called Managed Migration - as opposed, you might think, to the unmanaged sort we have at present. But he's not actually in favour of managing migration in the conventional sense; he wants the PM to drop the party's commitment to containing overall numbers of net migrants to the ‘tens of thousands’ though there seems fat chance of that just now.  Big increases in net migration, he says, are a tribute to the recovering economy. He's got a point in one sense. As the economy improves, fewer Brits want to leave, which has an effect on net numbers.

Last week, I spoke alongside Nigel Farage in a debate about immigration organised by the Evening Standard. It was good fun, as you’d expect, with David Lammy, Tessa Jowell and Simon Walker of the IoD on the other side, and David Goodhart alongside me and Mr Farage. You’d be startled, mind you, at the way Nigel Farage gets mobbed by an audience, and in a good way. I did get the chance to get to talk briefly to him myself and ask the question I’d wanted to put to him for ages: why it is that he keeps on about EU migration, when it’s non-EU migration that’s the greater problem. He was unfazed, of course, and said, look, when we meet again in the future to talk about all this, it’ll be EU immigration that’ll be the problem.

The Tory leadership is not best pleased with James Brokenshire, the Immigration Minister whose ill-judged speech turned a media spotlight onto the Cameron’s nanny. There are mutterings in Downing Street about the speech having being submitted for clearance very late. But Number 10 can’t escape its share of the blame for this fiasco. First, the speech should never have been cleared. The problems it would cause were obvious, which is why one Lib Dem tells me ‘we all fell out about laughing when we read it.’ Second, Brokenshire should never have been appointed to this job.

Great excitement in Westminster today over David Cameron's Nepalese nanny (as a member of James Brokenshire's metropolitan elite) and whether the Prime Minister had a role in Gita Lima obtaining British citizenship. At this morning's lobby briefing, a Number 10 spokesperson was asked whether Cameron had played a role in getting Lima a British passport. The spokesperson replied that they were 'not aware' of any involvement from the PM. Now I understand that Number 10 have checked the relevant documents and are shortly to release a statement confirming that the Camerons did not write a letter in support of their nanny's passport application. Samantha Cameron was simply named as the nanny's employer on the application form, as is required.

With a mere whimper, the government has released its controversial report (pdf) on the effects of immigration on ‘native UK employment’. Following Newsnight’s revelations that the report was being ‘held back’, Labour demanded its release. 24 hours later, it was put online while Theresa May was informing MPs of an inquiry into undercover policing after revelations about the treatment of Stephen Lawrence's family. Here are the top five things you need to know from the paper: 1. There’s minimal evidence of migrants taking British jobs The Home Office report titled ‘Impacts of migration on UK native employment' reveals there is ‘relatively little evidence’ of British workers being displaced — i.e.