Diary – 26 April 2008

It’s Powell week. I am due to speak at the site of his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech on Sunday, a rather clever idea dreamed up by my colleagues at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Kamal Ahmed and Patrick Diamond. I must admit I had initial reservations about the proposal. After all, I am a serious public official, and among our breed the idea of speaking in plain English to the Great British Public about things that actually bother them has never found much favour. However, I can see the value of trying to kick-start a new debate about immigration. We are no longer the country of colonial immigration into which I was born. The real migration issue today is economic — how we ride the tidal wave of talented people which is sweeping across the globe. Other nations are cherry-picking the best while we fret over whether we can ‘afford’ more immigrants. The truth is that if we don’t compete, our grandchildren will curse us for leaving them to survive in an economic backwater called Britain unless, that is, they can get work permits to the world’s dominant economies — China, India, Brazil, Australia and the USA.

I reflect on all this as I sit on the platform at the annual meeting of the gay rights pressure group, Stonewall. The QEII Conference Centre hall is packed, not with stereotypical Village People lookalikes, but earnest folk from Britain’s biggest companies, worrying about how to make sure that their companies gets their hands on the so-called ‘pink pound’, a billion-plus bonus that Ben Summerskill, the organisation’s chief executive, has deployed brilliantly. My guess is that most of the 300 or so people listening to me aren’t lesbian or gay at all, but just see this diversity thing as good business. The man from the Royal Bank of Scotland, who is middle-aged, and what our red-tops would describe as a ‘family man’, i.e.