One of the key bills to be announced in today's Queen's Speech is an immigration bill. This serves two key purposes: the first is to bring into legislation all those additional restrictions on access to public services for migrants that was briefed out following the Eastleigh by-election. The second is to answer Tory backbench concerns about deportation of foreign criminals.
One Sunday evening, while I was trying to avoid ironing my shirts, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to take Nigel Farage to Bulgaria or Romania. The Ukip leader is convinced that hordes of people from these countries are poised to pour into Britain when the rules are relaxed next year, so why not go there with him to see if he’s right? A few weeks later, I put my proposal to him. ‘But nobody will come here from Romania,’ said Nigel. ‘They’ve eaten all the transport.’ So we went to Bulgaria. ‘I am getting lots of funny looks,’ observed the scourge of open-door immigration as we walked past scores of wide-eyed Bulgarians settling down on the plane to Sofia.
Kenneth Clarke has always seemed, to me, a decent sort. By far the most likeable and least lordly and arrogant of those Euro-wanking wets who plagued Thatcher and, later, Major. Nonetheless, he is always wrong. About everything. If you are ever in doubt about where you should stand on a particular issue, find out what Ken’s thinking and immediately think the opposite. You won’t go far wrong. And so it is with his branding of UKIP as ‘closet racists’. It seems almost superfluous to say it, but of course it is not racist to feel a bit uneasy about the levels of immigrations we have endured in this country of late.
When I first came to this country nearly a decade ago, Britain wanted immigrants like me. Back then you could get a visa just for being creative. It was called the ‘Artist, Writer, Composer Visa’ — a Blairite flight of fancy if there ever was one — and all you had to do was fill out a form proving that you’d made a name for yourself in your country of origin in one of those three disciplines. The application, as I recall, made a point of including conceptual artists and sculptors. I’d published a novel in Canada, so I was in. It was that easy. Thinking about it now makes me want to weep. Back then, Britain was more upbeat. There were jobs in the media and journalists still had expense accounts.
MPs will debate the government's preparations for more Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in Westminster Hall today, as another survey suggests that there's no need to get unduly worried about the lifting of transitional controls. Ministers have in recent weeks managed to calm Tory backbenchers down by making announcements regarding restricted access to benefits and housing, but there's still sufficient appetite for this afternoon's debate, led by Mark Pritchard, and a session of the Home Affairs Select Committee tomorrow with the Bulgarian and Romanian Ambassadors and Immigration Minister Mark Harper. Pritchard tells me: 'EU migration and non-EU immigration is of real concern to many communities throughout Britain given the record numbers who entered Britain between 1997-2005.
It is 34 years since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Coincidentally, she entered Downing Street 34 years after Clement Attlee won the 1945 general election. The whole history of post-war Britain is cleaved, neatly, in two. If the first half of that story was dominated by a left-led consensus, the second has been a triumph for liberalism. We have lived in an era of liberal emancipation and are much the better for it. Mrs Thatcher, of course, was a great economic liberal. Her approach to economics, guided by Smith, Hayek and Friedman, stressed the importance of individual endeavour. Remove the dead hand of state control and Britain could flourish again. The many individual invisible hands of the market would improve our collective lot. Decline was not inevitable.
Here is David Cameron’s problem in a nutshell. During his immigration speech on Monday he said: ‘Put simply when it comes to illegal migrants, we’re rolling up that red carpet and showing them the door.’ Just two days later it was once again made clear that the red carpet is firmly in place and no such door in sight. Abu Qatada came to the UK illegally on a forged passport in 1993. He is wanted in Jordan to face terrorism charges. Abu Qatada is an illegal migrant. Yet he ‘cannot’ be shown the door. The government needs to realise one thing: that as long as we remain a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, words like those spoken on Monday only show the British Prime Minister to be a wholly insignificant figure.
Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency is to be abolished. In an unscheduled statement to the House of Commons, she described UKBA as ‘a troubled organisation’ with a ‘closed, secretive and defensive culture’. She said that the agency’s size, lack of transparency, IT systems, policy remit and legal framework ensured that its ‘performance was not good enough’. May declared that the agency will be split in two. One arm will deal with immigration and visa services, while the other tackles enforcement. May will also bring both arms back directly under the control of ministers, reversing the arms-length policy established by Labour in 2008.
You should take note when Benedict Brogan, an influential and widely sourced journalist who has been very close to the Cameron and Osborne operation over the years, writes of the fire-sale of Cameron shares. He says in today’s Telegraph that Cameron’s party view him as a ‘lame duck’ who makes ‘no difference’. This is an extraordinary claim for disaffected Tories to make. True: the economy is mired and the government has tied itself to only one course of action. There have also been disasters at the department of health; and energy policy ought to be giving Number 10 an enormous headache. But Cameron’s coalition is changing the landscape of education and welfare, both of which are enormous undertakings.
This morning’s papers have followed the lead of yesterday’s TV news bulletins: the prime minister’s immigration speech was not the success it might have been. The Times is lukewarm (£). The Guardian is suspicious. The Mail is derisive. And our own Douglas Murray is contemptuous of a speech which merely stated the ‘utterly obvious’. Yet again, the government has failed to convince the media. Part of the problem is that the numbers are inconclusive. The Guardian has built on yesterday evening’s BBC news reports, which claimed that only 13,000 migrants from that part of the EU have claimed JSA since 2009. This contrasts with Mr Cameron’s concerns about a widespread ‘something for nothing’ culture.
Well, it was right not to expect much. The full text of David Cameron’s speech on immigration is here but it can be summarised in one sentence: ‘mass migration has brought some good things, but it has also brought problems so here is some tinkering we propose.’ There are so many problems when our politicians speak on this subject. Not least is that they expect to be congratulated for saying the utterly obvious. For instance, most British people worked out a long time ago that those of us who already live here ought to have priority in housing over people who have just arrived. We also worked out some time back that an NHS which provides for the whole world is unsustainable and that if people haven’t paid into the system then the system shouldn’t pay out.
David Cameron knows that immigration is an issue that bothers voters, and that the mainstream parties have snubbed it in recent years to their detriment. So his speech today is partly an attempt to regain ground from UKIP, which fought a campaign in Eastleigh that was all about immigration, bringing every gripe back to that. He also knows, as I explained on Friday, that Tory MPs are preparing for the first dedicated Commons debate on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants, and he wants to take some of the steam out of that by announcing clear measures to reduce the 'pull factor'. Those measures, which the Prime Minister will detail in a speech in Ipswich, include: Cutting access to benefits for non-UK nationals after 6 months.
The Prime Minister is giving a speech about immigration on Monday. I am sure we can all guess the content. If anybody is interested in a break from this — or indeed if the PM's speech-writers are curious — perhaps I could humbly recommend this debate I took part in a couple of weeks ago in Athens. The motion was 'Europe should shut the door on immigration'. I used my speech and time in Q&A to explain why although we should not slam the door, let alone lock it, Europe urgently needs to wean ourselves off the habit of mass immigration and, at the very least, to give the door of mass immigration a firm but gentle push.
It's not just Nick Clegg who is having a good long think about immigration at the moment: David Cameron is as well. He's got a big immigration speech on Monday, which shows how spooked the parties are by UKIP that they feel they need to at least address the topic, even if they insist that they're not adopting Nigel Farage's terms of debate. As he writes his speech, Cameron will probably have in mind the looming problem of how many Romanian and Bulgarian migrants are coming to this country when transitional controls lift at the end of 2013. If he doesn't, he should, because that backbench debate from Mark Pritchard on this issue now has a date: 22 April.
Nick Clegg gave his 'sensible' immigration speech this morning. He started off by agreeing with Labour's Yvette Cooper that politicians shouldn't enter an 'arms race of rhetoric', and then spent a considerable part of the speech either attacking Labour or backing a policy that his own colleagues had previously attacked: a security bond system for immigrants from 'high-risk' countries to cut down on people overstaying their visas. It's also a policy that Theresa May backs. And what he doesn't back anymore is the idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants, which was a big Lib Dem policy in 2010. Clegg said: 'But despite the policy's aims, it was seen by many people as a reward for those who have broken the law. And so it risked undermining public confidence in the immigration system.
Gove’s history lessons Sir: ‘The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered,’ says Professor Jackie Eales, ‘but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age.’ This is not true. Primary education is, or should be, all about just such a body of knowledge. This gives children a foundation of fact, preferably facts learnt by heart. Without it, they cannot begin to reason, and develop valid ideas, in the secondary stage. It may be a tight squeeze to get them through English history up to 1700 by the age of 11, but it is better than not covering the ground at all. The bizarre result of 25 years of the national curriculum is that schoolchildren don’t know English history.
Yesterday Ed Miliband reiterated his party's existing policies on immigration for voters, today Yvette Cooper went into further detail about how Labour would address the policy area in government. Like Miliband's PPB, Cooper's speech speech to IPPR included an acknowledgement that politicians don't like to talk about immigration, and a mea culpa. She said Labour should have been quicker to bring in the Australian-style points-based system, that the party should have kept transitional controls for Eastern Europe, and that as a government it should have 'looked more at the impact, and been ready to talk about problems.
Britain isn't the only country whose politicians are getting just a little bit jittery about an increase in Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. In this week's Spectator, Rod Liddle examines the German and Dutch response to the lifting of transitional controls. We were enjoined by the Romanians to believe that our fears of being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’, or whatever emotive term you wish to use, were greatly overstated, and that the citizens of Romania would prefer to travel to places with which the home country had historic links. Such as, for example, Germany. But that simply isn’t going to happen, is it? The Germans won’t let it happen.
‘Can you imagine anything worse,’ a Hungarian once said to me, ‘than a Slav who thinks he’s Latin?’ He was referring to the Romanians, of course. There is a certain degree of tension in Romania between the ethnic Romanians, who run the place, and the ethnic Hungarians, who feel that they have been press-ganged into a chaotic and useless country and, worse, forced to learn a stupid language. The Hungarians hole up in the beautiful wilderness of Transylvania, yearning for the old empire and metaphorically spitting upon their political masters. But the enmity dissolves entirely when a third racial group is brought into the equation: the gypsies.
Today is, according to the party's own institutional memory, the first time Labour has talked about immigration in a party political broadcast. As I blogged yesterday, the party struggles to raise its voice when this policy area is debated in parliament because of the mistakes ministers made on migration when in government. Ed Miliband knows this, and so tonight television audiences across England will be treated to this party political broadcast: The first thing that's clear, aside from the emotional backing music that would be more at home on an animal rescue programme, is that this isn't about announcing big new policies. Miliband announced all of these ideas on English lessons, tougher restrictions and a focus on skills for those competing with migrants back in December.
