Immigration

Saturday

Douglas Murray

My night with Godfrey Bloom

On Thursday night I spoke at the Oxford Union on the motion ‘This House believes post-war immigration into Britain has been too high.’ In many ways this is an easy debate to explain and win, notwithstanding the fact that Lord Singh, Nadhim Zahawi MP and Monica Ali were lined up in opposition. The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has said immigration has been too high and that he wants to bring it down. The Labour Leader Ed Miliband has said the same. As have all major, mainstream British politicians. And no wonder. A British Social Attitudes survey from last year showed 77 per cent of the British public want immigration

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Downing Street holds crisis talks to revive Immigration Bill

What has happened to the Immigration Bill? I asked this question last week, and as it still doesn’t have a date for the report stage, it’s worth asking the question again. Now I hear that Number 10 has been holding crisis talks to try to get the legislation, which has been derailed by Nigel Mills’ troublemaking amendment calling for transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to be extended until the end of 2018. Yesterday, Mills and colleagues were summoned to Number 9 Downing Street, to talk to the chief whip and the Prime Minister’s backbench envoy John Hayes. The whips have previously approached Mills trying to strike a deal

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: On the Pope, Jesus and Mandy Rice-Davies

Papal blessing Sir: In his excellent article on Pope Francis (‘Pope idol’, 11 January), Luke Coppen mentions the satirical rumour that the new pontiff had abolished sin. It could never be said, however, even in a spoof, that he has abolished the Devil, whom he has named and shamed on a number of occasions. What Coppen calls ‘the cockeyed lionisation of Francis’ is surely itself a trick of the Devil: so too the ‘older son problem’ — the disgruntlement of obedient Catholics at Francis’s embrace of sinful prodigal sons and daughters. Virtue is surely its own reward, and no one who has experienced grace hankers after the fleshpots of Egypt. Piers

Ed West Ed West

Owen Jones’s letter to Ukip voters exposes the Left’s blind spot

I try to avoid mentioning Owen Jones because he already gets so much attention from people on the Right, including quite a lot of abuse on t’internet; the poor man’s probably blocked more people than have followed me. But his letter to Ukip voters in today’s Independent interested me as a study in what Jonathan Haidt described as the Left’s blind spot. Owen’s argument is that Ukip supporters have Left-wing views on the economy and therefore should desert former City trader Nigel Farage and join him in voting for a socialist party. A lot of Ukippers (horrible word but I can’t think of any other) do have fairly socialistic views

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Gendercide, abortion and hypocrisy of the pro-choicers

There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the same as in the population at large. Either immigrants from these groups are, more than the rest of us, having child after child until they have a boy or they are simply aborting second pregnancies where the foetus is a girl in order to ensure their next child is a boy: most probably, according to

Ed West Ed West

One solution to the housing shortage – build on Hampstead Heath

If I was going to measure possible reasons to desert the Tories at the next election, and I can think of a couple, plans to concrete over the countryside would score pretty highly. As a theoretical idea about something happening miles away from my home it almost makes me want to write letters to the Telegraph; if it were in my backyard I’d be shaking my fist at passing traffic or whatever people in the countryside do when they’re angry. This is moderately dangerous to the party, because what’s different now to, say, five years ago is that disaffected shire Tories have a plausible alternative to turn to, one that isn’t

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The mysterious absence of the Immigration Bill

What has happened to the Immigration Bill? It was supposed to come before the House of Commons for report stage before the close of play in December, but was cleverly bumped to avoid a hoo-ha over Nigel Mills’ amendment calling for transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. The problem is, this clever bit of manoeuvring by those in charge of Commons business didn’t make a great deal of difference to the amendment’s popularity: the latest publication from the Vote Office, released after the Bill was bumped into this year but before the end of the winter term, shows 74 signatures. Now the gossip in the party is that the

Friday

Douglas Murray

Is the startling rise in Muslim infants as positive as the Times suggests?

Today’s Times has a lovely example of positive spin.  The headline is: ‘Rise in Muslim birth rate as families ‘feel British’. The story which gives rise to this headline is that: ‘Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim, a breakdown of census figures shows.  ‘The percentage of Muslims among the under-fives is almost twice as high as in the general population. In an indication of the extent to which birth rate is changing the UK’s religious demographic, fewer than one in 200 people over 85 is Muslim.  ‘One expert said it was foreseeable that Muslims who worshipped would outnumber practising Christians.’  Incidentally – I

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: ‘The Truth About Immigration’ is anything but

Immigration. Were you aware that this has become a bit of a problem these past ten years? I wasn’t, obviously, because like all credulous idiots I get my news from a single trusted source, the BBC, and as a result I’ve known for some time now that immigration is great, regardless of what the facts and figures are. I know, for example, that all those warnings by evil right-wing MPs about a potential ‘flood’ which might ‘swamp’ Britain were dangerously inflammatory ‘dog-whistle’ politics; that eastern Europeans have a work ethic that puts our native population to shame; that all the cleverest think tanks tell us that immigration represents a boon

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s immigration nightmare

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”David Goodhart and Tim Finch on Labour’s immigration woes”] Listen [/audioplayer]Victor Spirescu came to Britain last week looking for work washing cars, but seems to have landed himself with a career in broadcasting. The Romanian, who arrived on the first flight into London after restrictions on workers from Bulgaria and Romania ended on 1 January, has now spent the days since touring studios and newspaper offices, obliging those who wish to talk to him about his new life. Those who bump into him as he weaves his way across television studios have the impression that he wishes he’d caught a slightly later flight. But someone had to meet

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The question on immigration that Labour must answer before 2015

We don’t quite know what Ed Miliband would really do about a lot of things just yet: this is the year when he plans (and desperately needs) to set that out so Labour isn’t just an Opposition that complains about things being expensive but a party that voters can imagine governing. But it’s significant that one of the policy areas where Miliband has felt it is important to get a lot of detail out pretty early is immigration. He, and everyone around him, is acutely aware that though their personal instincts might be to argue for the benefits of mass immigration to this country, the voters, rightly or wrongly, aren’t

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the fantasy Pope Francis, Labour’s immigration nightmares and the Profumo affair

Is our perception of Pope Francis simply an invention of the liberal media? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, The Catholic Herald’s Luke Coppen and Freddy Gray discuss how the world has fallen in love with this ‘Fantasy Francis’, what might happen if the real Francis (whoever he may be’) is discovered and why he’s replaced Obama as a leftie pinup. Demos’ David Goodhart, The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman and Tim Finch from the IPPR also discuss Labour’s immigration nightmares. Is the party in a more difficult position than the Conservatives? And has Ed Miliband apologised enough for the mistakes they made? Plus, author Richard Davenport-Hines discusses William Astor’s article on the Profumo

Wednesday

Ed West

The BBC isn’t Left-wing as such, it’s elitist

The BBC made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting public concern about immigration, Nick Robinson has said. This is the latest case of BBC self-flagellation. (Now I think about it, a sort of Maoist-themed programme in which Beeb executives denounced themselves would make great TV.) BBC bias is a subject I know a bit about, having written a pamphlet on it last year. I thought that, while the BBC is a much-loved institution, it must carry at least some of the blame for the mistakes most people feel were made over immigration under New Labour. Especially in 2000-01, when Conservative politicians were making some quite modest criticisms of rising numbers,

Friday

Ed West

Economists – the scourge of mankind

Are there any disciplines on earth as hyped-up and overrated as economics? Every subject depends to some extent on others; you can’t, for example, understand history without a bit of geography or human biology, and you can’t master either of those without a bit of chemistry, for different reasons. The same goes for all disciplines – except, for some reason, economics, where the opinion of the experts seems to count for a great deal in discussions where their field is only one aspect. The great example of this was the euro, which was promoted by the great and the good of the dismal science as a brilliant idea because, of

Wednesday

Andrew Green

Romanian and Bulgarian migration – What next?

So there was no great rush of arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria on day one – nor was there ever likely to be. The numbers will build steadily as they did from Poland in 2004. How many is another question. The key difference with Poland is that other countries, notably Germany, France, The Netherlands and Austria will be opening their labour markets at the same time; other members have already done so. The other major difference is that about a million, mainly Romanians, have already gone to Spain and a similar number to Italy. In Spain unemployment is now about 25% and youth unemployment is just over 50%; the same

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Keith Vaz personally welcomes Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to the UK

Ministers have spent the past 12 months in an almighty flap about how to stem a feared flood of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants once transitional controls on their freedom of movement lift. They’ve announced and re-announced measures on benefit tourism, housing and access to public services. But while they’ve been tinkering with these measures which may or may not make any difference to the number of people who do pitch up, they’ve managed to forget one very effective measure indeed. If only David Cameron had exclusively revealed to the worried press months ago that the best way of deterring an influx would be to deploy Home Affairs Committee chair Keith

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Exodus by Paul Collier – my political book of the year

Paul Collier is an Oxford economist specialising in the poorest African economies, and the striking thing about his important book on migration, Exodus, is that his focus is largely on the effects on the countries the migrants leave behind. We’re so self-obsessed when it comes to the issue that we forget that emigration may not be in the interests of immigrants’ countries of origin – and no, remittances don’t really compensate. The critical thing is that it is the ablest and most prosperous who manage to bail out of poor countries – and our confused notion that we should take as many immigrants as possible in order to be nice to impoverished states is, he

Monday

Ed West

Nigel Farage is right – let the Syrians come, but let them stay

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Nigel Farage has appeared to out-leftie the three main parties on the subject of asylum for Syrians. It just surprises me that anyone is surprised. Ukip as a party is opposed to mass immigration, and believes that the social costs of ‘diversity’ vastly outweigh the short-term economic benefits of migration. But the gift of asylum is something else; no one is saying that Syrians are needed to enrich our culture or add vibrancy or make cappuccinos for people who work at the Economist, they just need to escape from a hellish war or they may die. Of course we should give refuge to

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Nigel Farage is right about Syrian refugees, but asylum should not be permanent

There has been a stagey sort of surprise at the news that Nigel Farage has called for refugees from the conflict in Syria to be given asylum in Britain. He’s anti-immigration, see, so his call for generous provision for refugees of war has, at least for our major broadcasters, a paradoxical element. But it doesn’t quite follow that if you are in favour of curbing immigration that you are therefore Scroogish on asylum. Paul Collier, the Oxford academic whom I interviewed for the Speccie after the publication of Exodus, his interesting book on the effects of migration on poor countries, was emphatic that countries had a moral duty to be

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The ugly, cynical EU immigration debate

Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, is an intelligent and articulate individual but like everyone in politics, has the handicap of having to square his views with the record and policies of his own party. His interesting interview with the Fabian Review is a case in point. He attributes some of the education failures of white boys — the new educational underclass — in British schools to the influx of large numbers of East European immigrants in areas like Kent and East Anglia. His remedy for the problem is benign, namely, to educate indigenous youth to the standards needed by employers, so as to outflank the competition, and to focus on