Immigration

Who are Ukip’s new voters? The kind of people who decide elections

An opinion poll to be published next week will reveal that Labour leader Ed Miliband is slightly less popular with the public than the vibrant Islamic State commander ‘Jihadi John’ and the late BBC disc jockey Jimmy Savile, and only two points more popular than His Infernal Majesty, Satan. The same poll will also put Labour slightly ahead of the Tories and therefore on course to be the largest party in a hung parliament come next May, with Ed Miliband as prime minister. This is but one reason why the next general election will be the most fascinating within living memory; the pollsters do not really have a clue what’s

Don’t worry Brooks Newmark: paisley was sexy once…

Paisley power Paisley pyjamas were in the news. While associated with the town in Renfrewshire, whose mills produced the patterns from 1805, what we know as paisley was first popularised in France thanks to its part in the courtship between the power couple of the day: Napoleon and Josephine. — While stationed in Egypt in 1798 he sent her a shipment of Kashmiri shawls which did not immediately grab her eye. She described the design as ‘ugly and expensive but light and warm. I have serious doubts that this fashion will last.’ — But she later changed her mind and was painted wearing one of the shawls, leading to mass popularisation. Who sexts? Brooks Newmark resigned as minister for civil society

Cameron: I’ll put immigration at the heart of my EU negotiating strategy

If David Cameron needed reminding of how his conference agenda had been stamped on, it came on the Marr show. The Tories’ conference curtain-raiser of reducing the benefit cap, limiting access to benefits for the under 21s and creating more apprentices was eclipsed by Syria, the Reckless defection, the EU renegotiation and Cameron’s Royal gaffe. listen to ‘Cameron: ‘Immigration will be at the heart of my renegotiation strategy’ with the EU’ on audioBoom

Yvette Cooper’s excellent speech shows that the Labour party has saved the best till last

Yvette Cooper today reiterated her pledge to scrap the Tories’ net migration target as she addressed the Labour conference. Her speech contained the obligatory admission about their party’s past mistakes that Cooper and her colleagues must repeat whenever they talk about immigration, but the Shadow Home Secretary also suggested that the current government is still getting things wrong. She said: ‘Yes, Labour got things wrong on immigration – on transitional controls for Eastern Europe, on the impact of jobs, but look at what this government is doing now. David Cameron promised “no ifs no buts” he would meet his net migration target. Theresa May boasted last year that her progress on

The deficit and immigration: were there two worse topics for Ed Miliband to forget?

No notes speech have been Ed Miliband’s political party trick. His One Nation speech two years ago ended speculation about his leadership and last year’s energy price freeze effort knocked the Tories off their stride for months. But today, the no notes speech hurt Miliband rather than helped him. Without an autocue, Miliband skipped bits of the speech. This has happened to him before, one year he missed out the section on the environment. But this year, Miliband missed out the bits he could least afford to: forgetting the sections on the deficit and immigration. listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s speech: podcast special’ on audioBoom

Italy is killing refugees with kindness

The next time you eat a fish from the Mediterranean, just remember that it may well have eaten a corpse. As the Italian author Aldo Busi told the press just the other day: ‘I don’t buy fish from the Mediterranean any more for fear of eating Libyans, Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis. I’m not a cannibal and so now I stick with farmed fish, or else Atlantic cod.’ Personally, I prefer my fish natural, fattened on drowned human flesh, but there you go. I take the point. Foolishly, last October Italy’s left-wing government became the first European Union country to decriminalise illegal immigration and deploy its navy at huge expense to

The Afghans found in Tilbury Docks remind us that slavery is back in Britain

How seriously should we take modern slavery? To some, the very phrase sounds hysterical: slave markets are seen as something belonging to 18th century Jamaica (or present-day Mosul) but not modern Britain. It’s true that slavery has mutated, but it’s very much still with us – which is why, at 6.30am on Saturday, screaming and banging could be heard from a cargo container offloaded from a P&O boat in Tilbury Docks in Essex. It was found to contain 35 Afghan Sikhs, including 13 children. One adult died from dehydration. The facts of this case are still being established, but it fits a grim pattern. They likely fled Afghanistan seeking religious freedom:

Nigel Farage’s immigration deluge hasn’t arrived. But it doesn’t matter.

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

A lesson of Iraq in 2014: the nation-state is the future

The collapse of some of the Sykes-Picot states in 2014 will spur people to ask which way the world is heading and what it all tells us, just as with the fall of Communism in 1989. After Communism we had at first Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History,which foresaw the triumph of western-style liberal democracy, and then the more prescient, although equally controversial, The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntingdon, which viewed the world as essentially consisting of power blocks centred around ancient civilizational, religious ties. So what does 2014 mean? A clear lesson that the Yazidis and Christian Assyrians have learned is that without a patch of land for

Ukip need not fear Boris Johnson

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

Ukip: David Cameron’s immigration policy is vacuous and cynical posturing

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.

David Cameron aims at Ukip and attacks Labour with immigration clamp-down

The government has unveiled a set of measures to curb immigration. David Cameron has written an article in the Telegraph about what the government has already achieved and what it plans to do now. He has three themes. 1). To tackle illegal immigration. Cameron says that the government has shut more than 750 of ‘bogus’ colleges. He wants to go further: colleges will lose their licenses if 10 per cent of their pupils are refused visas. Cameron also repeats some of the provisions of the Immigration Act 2014. From November, for example, a system will be imposed to ensure that landlords have to account for the immigration status of their

The Ukip shuffle: Can the party become more than a one man band?

Nigel Farage has started his long awaited reshuffle of the Ukip top team tonight. Patrick O’Flynn, the former Daily Express journalist, becomes the party’s economics spokesman. Given O’Flynn’s writings, we can be pretty sure that he’ll make taking the middle class out of the 40p tax band one of Ukip’s defining policies. Steven Woolfe becomes migration spokesman. His tweets tonight indicate that his main emphasis will be how EU membership skews Britain’s immigration policy in favour of low skilled EU citizens and against high skilled people from the rest of the world. There’s no word yet on the other front bench roles. There’ll be particular interest in what role Diane

Any other business: trouble spots in European banking

‘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

Britain’s immigration debate must address three key issues

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

Why I’m now scared of book clubs

‘Hi Ian!’ the email began. ‘We are a group of mostly females who meet regularly in London to review really good reads. We are currently reading The Dead Yard, and were wondering if you would like to join us as our honorary guest while we fire you (gently) with questions about your book.’ The email concluded: ‘You will be well fed and thoroughly entertained! Kind regards, Phoebe.’ Very nice, but I sensed a danger. My book on Jamaica, The Dead Yard, has earned me a lot of enemies. For good or ill, it exposes a dark side of island life at odds with the ‘paradise’ of travel brochures. Bookshops in

The lower classes have serious – and justifiable – concerns about mass immigration

The light is at last beginning to dawn on the immigration debate. Today’s Migration Advisory Committee report on the impact of low-skilled migration to this country sheds a small amount of light on what has been blindingly obvious for a long time to people at the bottom. In total there were almost three quarters of a million Eastern Europeans working here last year. The number of citizens from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia living in this country grew from an estimated 167,000 in 2004 to just over one million in 2012. Working- and lower middle-class voters have serious and justified concerns about the impact

Confronting the Tories’ original sin: they are still seen as the party of the rich.

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

Rod Liddle is right about the faux Left

‘I deserted my children for my own personal happiness: it is as simple as that, regardless if I sometimes reassure myself with caveats, with a rationale which I have constructed for myself out of cardboard or tinplate over the years.’ So writes Rod Liddle in his brutally honest memoir-cum-polemic Selfish Whining Monkeys, which got a huge boost last Friday thanks to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s rational and entirely sane attack on him on Channel 4 (see above). I admit to being a fan of Rod. Like James Delingpole, I think of him as something of a  national treasure, although only in a sort of alternative reality — possibly a quite nightmarish one —

Rod Liddle: My run in with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Channel 4 News

I thought you might enjoy watching this debate between me and two eminently sane, rational and balanced women. If you haven’t seen it already. My publishers were anxious I should take part in order to promote my book, Selfish, Whining Monkeys. I said to them: ‘But it’s Channel 4 News. They won’t  have read the book or even given it a second thought. They’ll just sit there and shriek at me.’ Ever the cynic, huh? Join the resistance – and buy Rod Liddle’s £15 new book, Selfish Whining Monkeys, for just £12.99 from the Spectator Bookshop. Click here.