Immigration

In today’s election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s ramped up rhetoric on the SNP threat to the Union, the Tories’ promise to create 50,000 new apprenticeships from Libor fines and Labour’s latest attempts to talk about controlling immigration. We also briefly look at the Liberal Democrats ‘red lines’ for future coalition negotiations and Ukip’s attempts to woo voters in the north. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

It’s St George’s Day so to celebrate Ukip held a press conference where they gifted red and white jester hats adorned with St George’s flags to journalists. Talk soon turned to the real crux of the matter: as a foreigner of alleged Turkish descent, would Ukip have allowed St George entry into the country? Patrick O’Flynn was on hand to answer the pressing immigration query: ‘If Ukip were in power in the third century then yes I suppose St George would be allowed in the country. He is a skilled migrant, he could slay dragons.’ A Ukip party spokesman has since gone one step further and suggested that St George

On Thursday night, David Cameron didn’t eviscerate the competition. But nor did he suffer any damage and that, to Tory high command, meant that it was job done. The Tory leadership didn’t want any debates at all, they’d rather not have taken the risk. So, to get through this one debate with the dynamics of the campaign unchanged was, to their mind, a result. As Cameron enjoyed a late night drink with Samantha Cameron, George Osborne and his key aides on Thursday, he reflected on how much better he felt than he did after the first debate five years ago when he knew that he had not only underperformed but

There are many grating phrases in modern British politics. ‘Best practice.’ ‘Fit for purpose.’ ‘Let me explain’ (just bloody well explain!). And that tendency of Labour politicians to preface pretty much everything they say with a schoolmarmish ‘Look’, as in ‘Look here’. As in: ‘You donuts know nothing, so I am going to put you straight.’ But even more grating than those, sat at the top of the pile of temperature-raising sayings, is ‘dog-whistle’. Everyone’s talking about ‘dog-whistle politics’. It has become the media and chattering classes’ favourite putdown of politicians they don’t like: to accuse them of indulging in dog-whistle antics, of making an ugly shrill noise — that

Immigration is a pretty important driver for voters who turn to Ukip. So you would have imagined that the party might have spent a while really making sure that its own policy on the matter is crystal clear. This morning in Dover, Nigel Farage said ‘I’m saying a net level of about 30,000 a year is roughly what we had for 50 years from 1950 almost until the turn of the century’. This seemed to be a bit of an about-turn from the Ukip leader’s decision earlier this month to ditch the 50,000 cap on the number of migrants arriving in the UK each year. Farage dropped the 50,000 target

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind’s column in the next issue of The Spectator, out on Thursday: The Labour party has put its five core election pledges on mugs. No, I don’t know why. Presumably the idea is that you buy all five, and then, when your friends come around for tea, you each drink yours out of the one featuring your favourite. Yeah, I know. As if the sort of people who’d buy these mugs would have friends. There’s an odd fuss, though, about mug four, which says CONTROLS ON IMMIGRATION on it. Quite widely, this has been perceived as a gaffe, a betrayal, a slump into Faragism,

There was something genuinely frightening about the disturbance aimed at Nigel Farage and his family this weekend; what’s scary is that there seem to be so many people in our country who think a man having lunch with his family is a legitimate target for such a stunt because of his views. If you’re prepared to do that in front of people’s kids, you can likely do anything. Their self-justification was telling; as one protester put it, Farage was a target because he ‘othered’ people. In my experience people who use the word othered are quite quick to ‘other’ anyone who disagrees with them. Likewise when another one of the

It is sometimes easy to forget that Boris is more than just a personality, that he has policy views too. In interviews with The Mail and The Times this morning, Boris sets out his own philosophy. It is, as you would expect from someone who voted for Ken Clarke in the 2001 leadership contest, a broadly one nation platform. Johnson argues that the Tories should not ‘simply shrug their shoulders’ about inequality and backs Iain Duncan Smith’s plan to extend the right to buy to housing association properties. He also talks about immigration far more positively than Cameron does, saying that ‘Politicians need to point out that immigration is a

For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative party should be the natural home of new voters who are ambitious, entrepreneurial, hard-working and family-orientated. The immigrant vote — to the extent it can be considered a coherent block at all — ought to be fertile Tory territory. By and large, these are families who have moved to Britain to get ahead and to avail themselves of what Michael Howard called ‘the British dream’. Yet at the last election fewer than one in five ethnic minority voters endorsed Conservative candidates and the party is unlikely to fare much better

There are not many things to celebrate about Gordon Brown’s time in office. He was a vilified leader; often quite rightly so. His Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, did not fare much better. However, a recent terror trial in New York showed that the criticism they received was not always deserved. On 8 April 2009, a large terrorist cell based in northwest England was arrested. The cell had been dispatched to the UK by al-Qaeda in 2006 in preparation for an attack, the majority entering the UK on bogus student visas. The plot is thought to have involved a car bomb attack against Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre, with a team of suicide