Immigration

So Nigel, where’s your flood? You know, the one involving Bulgarians and Romanians that you predicted last year. That deluge? You got it wrong, didn’t you? Ner-ner-di-ner-ner. It must be very tempting for people who don’t like Nigel Farage to spend today chuckling, scrolling through the ONS website and waving their mouse with a satisfied flourish at the finding that the number of people from these countries who are employed in the UK has risen by 13,000 from the same period last year, when transitional controls were still in place. The Ukip leader had predicted 5,000 a week, but his forecasts look as good as David Silvester’s attempts at dabbling in

So Boris Johnson is standing for parliament next year, triggering speculation about what would happen if David Cameron lost the election. Could we have Ed Miliband as prime minister, followed by Boris Johnson? Jon Stewart would have a field decade. Boris is easily the most popular Conservative politician around, both inside and outside the party, and is the only one to have genuine appeal with the public. People go up to him to shake his hand in the street, rather than just vomit everywhere, as is the case with most other Tories. Both he and Nigel Farage are jovial figures whose cheery, bumbling persona enables us to forgive any private

I have described David Cameron’s posturing on immigration today as vacuous and cynical, for that is exactly what it is. Cynical because once again he seems determined to fool the British people into believing that we can seriously have our own immigration policy whilst remaining inside the EU. We can’t. Vacuous because his policy solution seems to consist of tinkering around the edges of the problem instead of dealing with it head on. Under his government, net migration levels per annum remain in the hundreds of thousands, with citizens from twenty-seven other nations allowed to come and go as they please. What Britain really needs is a tough, solid, Australian-style immigration system.

‘1914: Day by Day’, the Radio 4 series by the historian Margaret MacMillan, is a gripping reminder that significant global events often arrive not in a single eruption but in a series of lesser happenings that only afterwards form an obvious pattern. Let’s hope that’s not what we’re watching in the banking sector as anticipation builds towards the results, due in October, of the European Banking Authority’s current round of ‘stress testing’. Last month’s trouble spot — with a certain resonance for the current centenary — was Austria, whose government forced losses on bondholders in the troubled Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank by overriding a guarantee from the province of Carinthia. A clutch

Politicians tend to get all the blame for immigration policies not working. But politicians are often doomed to fail on migration questions because there are deep-rooted problems with the way we all debate immigration and with what we expect of immigration policy. Following UKIP’s success in the European elections, and given the likely failure of the government to meet its net migration target by 2015, immigration is guaranteed to be a key focal point of public debate in the run-up to the general election next year. There is widespread agreement that Britain needs a ‘better’ immigration debate – but how can that be achieved? Over the past year I have

Dominic Cummings is at it again. Michael Gove’s former advisor has become a reliably entertaining guide to the Whitehall labyrinth. It is plain, too, that Cummings likes to think of himself as a Teller Of Hard Truths Many Of Which Our Masters Prefer Not To Contemplate Too Deeply If At All. This is fun. His latest post purports to be about swing voters, immigration and the EU but it is really about the biggest problem afflicting the Conservative party: who is it for? And who is it seen to be for? As Cummings puts it: The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it

A small Yorkshire town has been hugely enriched this year by the arrival of 500 Roma people. The village of Hexthorpe was once boringly, stultifyingly, monocultural – and you would think that locals might have welcomed this influx of vibrant diversity. Not a bit of it – they called a public meeting and complained long and loud in a manner which, frankly, can only be called racist. They warned, too, that there would be violence in the streets. Is it too much to hope that one day these uneducated and bigoted Yorkshire folk will understand that claiming benefits, fly-tipping, littering the streets, threatening people and playing loud music all night

Labour’s John Woodcock is being teased mercilessly by his colleagues. A recent fundraising event which he organised was secretly recorded – and embarrassing quotes from fellow Labour MPs and candidates, who thought they were speaking behind closed doors, leaked out. Woodcock should know about the sort of dirty-tricks that the parties play on each other. He was the young, wet-behind-the ears bag-carrier who Labour sent out to pretend to be a Tory in order to record events. He got lucky in March 2005 when he caught the Tories’ then Deputy Chairman Howard Flight claiming that the Conservatives would slash spending in power, contrary to their manifesto commitment in that election