The issue of immigration won’t go away, because it threatens the soul of the nation.
Nobody in political authority uses such language today, because they are unsure of the validity of ‘soul’ and of the political safety of the term ‘nation’. They will use the term ‘we’ in the context of Britain and its people, but would surely dodge defining it. Try as he might this election year, neither Cameron nor Miliband can do anything to persuade anxious voters they care about immigration, because they don’t use language which reaches the soul.
No one else does either, not even Nigel Farage — it just won’t do. Yet only this abandoned language will work if the issue is to be faced up to and the electorate is to hear it and believe it.
Half a century ago — in 1964 — I stood for Parliament, more or less for the hell of it since I was already fully employed as a journalist. I had covered more than 115 countries, almost all in a state of tension or conflict, usually arising out of ethnic sources or the rage for race-and-place self-determination.
Mine was an unwinnable seat and I duly lost. So did my party, the Conservatives, under Alec Douglas-Home, by a whisker. The newspaper I wrote for, the Sunday Times, had me provide an op-ed piece for the paper the following weekend on the issue of whatever had meant most in my community of Shepherd’s Bush. It was immigration, I wrote, virtually unvoiced and certainly unarticulated, in a west London constituency where it was estimated that since the 1959 general election the proportion of Commonwealth immigrants in the population had risen to 9 per cent. They were mainly Quashies (in the Caribbean vernacular) from the back streets of Kingston, Jamaica, a city I relished.
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