Immigration

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Shapps’s trinity of Labour weaknesses

Grant Shapps’ latest broadside against Labour shows how keen the Tories are to frame the next election not as a referendum on their performance in government but as a choice between them and Labour. Shapps wants voters to think about the fact that the alternative to David Cameron as Prime Minister is ‘Miliband and Balls’ driving up Downing Street before they cast their ballots. The Tory Chairman’s speech, due to be delivered at Policy Exchange this morning, also shows where the Tories think Labour are vulnerable. Tellingly, he talks about ‘Miliband and Balls’ rather than just Miliband; the Tories believe that Balls’ presence is a reminder to voters of the

Monday

David Blackburn

Boris the ironist treads a careful path through immigration row

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns are often works of mischief, but today’s is a carefully constructed piece of politics. His subject is immigration – about which the political nation has been warring over the weekend. Boris is, famously, pro-immigration – as one would have to be to win elections in London, irrespective of whether one was a Conservative. And his attitude to illegal immigration is pragmatic: illegals need to be brought into the fold or deported. Boris treads this line again today. First, he writes a paean to the runner Mo Farah – who personifies a ‘sermon as to what immigrants can achieve if they work hard’. Then he says that illegal immigrants

Sunday

James Forsyth

The three places where the Tories want to hit Labour hardest

In the last few months, the Tories have–quite deliberately—behaved like an aggressive opposition. They’ve sought to constantly attack Labour, trying to force them onto the back foot. Even with David Cameron and George Osborne away on holiday, the Tories are determined to keep doing this. On Wednesday, Grant Shapps will launch the Tories’ summer offensive against Labour. He, in the kind of language more commonly used to promote summer horror films than a political agenda, will invite voters ‘to imagine a world where Ed Balls and Ed Miliband end up back in Downing Street.’ This is all part of the Tories’ efforts to link Miliband to Gordon Brown and memories

David Blackburn

Commons committee worsens the Tories’ immigration headache

Yesterday saw a spate of articles about the government’s immigration van pilot scheme. And today the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) damns immigration figures as a ‘blunt instrument’ and not ‘fit for purpose’. The nub of the problem is that the methodology is outdated, having been designed in a time when migration was in the 10,000s a year rather than the 100,000s. A sample size of 5,000 identified through the International Passenger Survey, which is drawn from UK ports and airports, is not sufficiently broad to construct accurate estimates. New methodology is required, PASC says. You can read the whole thing here. This will – and should – raise further questions

Saturday

David Blackburn

The immigration van – success or failure?

Everyone in SW1, it seems, has an opinion on this controversial scheme. Most people hate it. The general assumption is that this is a Tory stunt clothed as a government policy. The question is, though, has the van campaign been a successful policy pilot from a presentational point of view? Here are some thoughts: 1). The right-wing press. The Mail is utterly contemptuous. A leading column claims that only one illegal immigrant has stepped forward. The leader goes on to say that voters punish cheap stunts; what people want is action. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper’s front page (below) is uncompromising. All of this will have gone down

James Forsyth James Forsyth

We can’t talk about immigration without talking about the EU

Harrods and The Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London don’t strike one as natural bedfellows. But they are both up in arms about the government’s immigration policies. Harrods is upset about the government’s plans to charge visitors from India, Nigeria and four other countries a £3,000 bond to come here, warning it will hit the London luxury goods market. While The Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London is threatening legal action over the vans going around various London boroughs warning illegal immigrants they could be deported. But, as so often, when we discuss immigration in this country we aren’t talking about the elephant in the room: Britain’s EU

Friday

Rod Liddle

The government’s illegal immigration van scheme is not aimed at illegal immigrants

I wonder how many illegal immigrants who’ve seen the government’s imprecations for them to leave the country have done exactly that? Seen the van driving around with its placard and thought: ‘That’s really tugged at my conscience, that has. I shall take myself, and family, to Gatwick Airport immediately. I am sorry to have been such a burden.’ More to the point, I wonder how many are able to understand a single word of it? I suppose a pictogram of a Romanian with an accordion being roughed up by the old bill, followed by a picture of an aeroplane heading for Bucharest, would have offended the sensibilities of the Conservatives’

Monday

Rod Liddle

What has happened to the deluge of Romanians?

Snoring in the sunshine down Park Lane, in London, last week was the latest gift to Britain from the Great God of Multicultural Diversity, sixty-odd snaggle toothed Romanian gypsies. I went to speak to them for a film I was doing for the Sunday Times. The only English the vast majority knew was ‘grwnka’, which they barked at me while pointing at their mouths. This is apparently their approximation of: ‘Do you possibly have a cigarette to spare, my good man?’ Some didn’t even say Grwnka, they just pointed at their mouths and looked at my cigarette. There are very serious fears that these new arrivals will unfairly compete with

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Immigration allows Britain to fake progress, not make progress

Is Britain addicted to immigration? I argued so in my Telegraph column yesterday and Radio 4’s Today programme held a discussion about it this morning and asked me on (22 mins in, here). You can say that that immigration has worked wonders for the economy – without it, we’d have a pathetic 2 per cent more people in work than in 1997. As things stand, our workforce has expanded by 11 per cent. We’d actually notice the number British people emigrating (the exodus has doubled to 400 a day under Cameron) so the ever-growing growing debt pile would be shouldered by a shrinking workforce. David Cameron would have no jobs

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

How many immigrants would satisfy the OBR?

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) Britain must bring millions more immigrants into the UK to sustain our ageing population. As the Telegraph reports it, the OBR study has found: ‘…. that allowing more than 140,000 immigrants into Britain a year, equivalent to 6million people, would help increase the overall number of people who are in work and improve public finances.’ The trouble with the OBR – like so many official and unofficial bodies – is that it views immigration solely as an issue of economics. And this despite the fact that the leaders of both the Conservative and Labour parties have conceded that immigration on the scale

Sunday

Camilla Swift

The View from 22 debate special: too much immigration, too little integration?

This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As event chair Andrew Neil put it: ‘What the Hay festival missed, The Spectator brought to you’, with a special panel on immigration last Tuesday, 9 July. Goodhart was joined on the panel by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor

Wednesday

Ed West

The British people are not wrong about everything

Imagine that you’re a passenger in a car driving down a country road at 20mph. All of a sudden the driver hits the accelerator and you’re now zinging away at 60mph. If asked what speed you were going at, what would you say? I’d imagine probably something like 80mph, at least until you became accustomed to your new situation. Yesterday it was revealed that the British public have some quite wildly inaccurate perceptions about the true level of crime, teenage pregnancy and immigration. Presumably this was seen as evidence that, although the public have conservative views on these subjects, they are misinformed and therefore cool policy reasoning should be left to

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Abandon all hope: the average voter thinks one in four Britons is a muslim

Last month I wrote a post arguing that an awful lot of opinion polling is worthless. The public mood matters – and measuring it is important – but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless. Well, whaddyaknow, but here’s a new Ipsos-Mori survey which confirms my suspicions. The Great British Public may have many virtues and they may be able to tell you that poor Mr Clegg is a wrong ‘un but when you peak beneath the bonnet you begin to fear that newspaper comment threads may not be quite as unrepresentative of the general public as you’d like to think

Friday

Peter Hitchens

SPECTATOR DEBATE: When did we stop caring about our national culture?

Peter Hitchens will be speaking at the next Spectator Event on 9 July, debating the motion ‘Too much immigration, too little integration?’ along with Ken Livingstone, David Goodhart, Trevor Phillips and others. Click here to book tickets. I used to go on left-wing demonstrations against Enoch Powell in the Sixties, and I’m still glad I did. I was against racial bigotry then, and I’m against it now. So it has been an interesting experience to find myself accused of ‘racism’, in many cases by people who were not born in those days. Likewise, I’m one of the few people I know who has lived, by his own choice, in more

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

The next Spectator Debate: too much immigration, too little integration?

When David Cameron announced ‘state multiculturalism has failed’, the chattering classes gasped in disbelief. Here was a Prime Minister, bull dozing his way into  the tricky area of immigration — one his predecessors had shied away from. The speech was praised by the right, and lambasted by those on the left — including his coalition partners. David Goodhart received a similar reaction with the publication of his book  The British Dream. In it, he examines the success and failures of post-war immigration in Britain. On the right, the book was welcomed as a thorough examination into multiculturalism. When the former Tory leader Michael Howard reviewed Goodhart’s book in the Spectator, he explained why he backs

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Vauxhall, by Gabriel Ghadomosi; Sketcher, by Roland Watson-Grant – review

At the grubbier end of my street in north London is the Somali mosque that was burned down earlier this month in an arson attack. The other day I asked at the police cordon if any arrests had been made. ‘Not that we know of’, said the duty officer. A smell of charred wood hangs over this dreary, out-at-elbow part of Muswell Hill. People complain that Somalis are heavily ‘welfare-dependent’, and have no wish to integrate into British society. It is true that immigrants today, with the internet, cheap flights and satellite television, are more likely to see themselves as members of a foreign country, hosted by, but not emotionally

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Review: Stir yourself — I am Nasrine is far from an Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who

Thursday

Steerpike

David Goodhart makes Hay

What a pity. It seems that Dave Goodhart, director of Demos and editor-at-large of Prospect, has made peace with the Hay Festival organisers, who decided against showcasing his new book on immigration on the annual luvvie field trip. Hay Director Peter Florence described Goodhart’s The British Dream as ‘sensationalist’, and apparently told Goodhart that Hay stood ‘for pluralism and multiculturalism’ and that he is half-Italian. Goodhart hit back at these ‘ultra-liberal, slightly lefty multiculturalist’ views, saying:  ‘it’s [the book] probably been more widely reviewed than any non-fiction book so far this year – both favourably and unfavourably, so when my publisher said there was no interest from Hay I was

Friday

Andrew Green

Why, once again, a fall in student immigration is good

Yesterday came the news that net migration has once again fallen, this time to its lowest level for ten years. In the year ending September 2012, net migration was 153,000. That is a fall of 89,000 on the previous year when it reached a dizzy 242,000. This is undeniably good news. The public have consistently shown their desire to see net migration reduced and we now have a government which is committed to lowering net migration and has so far had considerable success. Many on the left, who cannot bring themselves to admit that net migration of 200,000 per year is too much for a small island such as ours,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers hope to reassure backbenchers with Immigration Bill

One of the key bills to be announced in today’s Queen’s Speech is an immigration bill. This serves two key purposes: the first is to bring into legislation all those additional restrictions on access to public services for migrants that was briefed out following the Eastleigh by-election. The second is to answer Tory backbench concerns about deportation of foreign criminals. When it comes to restrictions for migrants – and these measures will, ministers hope, help calm nerves about the end of transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian nationals – temporary migrants will need to make a contribution before they can access the NHS, landlords will be required to check the