Immigration

Danny Finkelstein says my Churchill analogy is “cute” but wrong. Churchill had his flaws but is primarily remembered for getting One Big Thing Right; Powell had his qualities but is primarily remembered for getting One Big Thing Wrong. In other words, the two aren’t really comparable and my argument is wrong. I confess this thought occurred to me this morning. I should have updated my argument to make that clear. In other words, Danny is right. That said, I also think that when a man is asked who his heroes and intellectual influences are and replies Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and, in a British context, Enoch Powell it

If a politician expresses admiration for Winston Churchill do you immediately think that he’s a great fan of, among other considerations, casual indifference to the Bengal famine, the use of chemical weapons in Iraq or the pulverisation and total destruction of German cities? Of course you don’t. But when a politician says he admires Enoch Powell it’s as if he’d decided to fill the Tiber with blood by scurrying around the country and slaughtering the children of every immigrant in the land. This is, as you might expect, also nonsense. But, lo and behold there’s a mini-rumpus and a song and dance over some comments made by Daniel Hannan to

So the Tories have announced their new international development policy. Apparently it’s going to be “results-based” and fit for a “post-bureaucratic age” (this latter being, mind you, the kind of phrase coined by bureaucrats). Iain Dale likes the sound of it and so does Tory Bear. I’m sure there are plenty of good ideas lurking in the new paper, but I’m also pretty sure that there’s not much sign of the Tories moving towards a truly radical approach to international development: open borders. Actually, it’s not quite open borders, more a question of creating a worldwide guest-worker programme. Harvard’s Lant Pritchett is perhaps the leading proponent of this sort of

There’s plenty of scaremongering about immigration these days but, even allowing for a proper degree of skepticism, this constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life: The curry industry will die if action is not taken to address tough new immigration laws, restaurant bosses have warned the Scottish Parliament. They claim food quality will deteriorate and up to half of the Indian restaurants currently in business could shut. The comments came as 100 restaurateurs staged a protest at Holyrood over the changes to immigration rules. They claim a shortage of kitchen staff has been created as a result. Restaurant owners said legislation which came in at the

Megan notes that there are now more than three million Britons living abroad and argues: I assume this has something to do with the fact that it is very easy for Britons to go to wealthy, English-speaking countries, and also that there’s a relative lack of migration opportunities in Britain. If you’re American or Australian, you can always pick up and try another city, but in Britain, you mostly move to London or you . . . move to London. This is an exaggeration, of course, but there’s nothing like the ability to say, “You know what, things aren’t going so well in Boston, so I’m moving to LA.” If

Via Andrew, here’s Huckabee on Benazir Bhutto’s murder: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country. We just need to be very, very thorough in looking at every aspect of our own security internally because, again, we live in a very, very dangerous time,” Huckabee said during a news conference Thursday night in West Des Moines. Over Christmas lunch a friend warned me not to be quite so dismissive of Huckabee. He’s not just a hick I was told. And perhaps he isn’t: this answer cannily ties security (whatever that