David Goodhart in The Mail writes a powerful mea culpa for the left on immigration, here's a few extracts:
'Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration.
Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice.
And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.
But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind.
Over 18 months of touring the country to talk to people about their lives for a new book, I have discovered minority Britons thriving more than many liberals suppose possible. But I also saw the mess of division and conflict we have got ourselves into in other places.
I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly.
For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.
I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was.
...
it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern ‘mill towns’ and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis.
In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself.
Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people.
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.
...
The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not.
One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews.
Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime.
Much of this happened by accident. When the 1948 Nationality Act was passed — giving all citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth the right to live and work in Britain — it was not expected that the ordinary people of poor former colonies would arrive in their hundreds of thousands.
Nor was it expected after 1997 that a combination of quite small decisions would lead to 1.5 million East Europeans arriving, about half to settle. But come they did, and a net immigration of around four million foreign-born citizens since 1997 has produced easily the most dramatic demographic revolution in British history.
Yet there was no general discussion in the New Labour Cabinet of the day about who Britain wanted to let in and in what numbers; no discussion about how the country could absorb them without pressure on public services.
By the time of the next census in 2021, the non-white minority population will have risen to around 20 per cent, a trebling in just 25 years.
By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority.
This is already the case in some towns and cities, including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton, with Birmingham expected to follow in the near future.
If Britain had a clear and confident sense of its national culture and was good at integrating people, then perhaps this speed of change would be of little concern. But this is not the case.
We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending.
The fact is that the whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all.
It is often said that the importation of people from the Indian subcontinent to work in textile mills that were soon to close — ironically, partly thanks to competition from India and Pakistan itself — was a poor piece of social engineering.
But the whole point was that no one really engineered it. It just happened.
And then no one came forward to grasp the consequences or even acknowledge there might be a problem.
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’
I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
Such grand notions run counter to the way most people in this country think or arrange their priorities.
The British political class has never prepared existing citizens for something as game-changing as large-scale immigration, nor has it done a good job at explaining what the point of large-scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve.
Crucially, they failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. On the contrary, the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start.
Then, whenever there were problems with immigrant communities, the tendency was for the host society to be blamed for not being sufficiently accommodating or for being racist, rather than considering the self-inflicted wounds of some minority cultures.''
So to add to my oft repeated quotation from Andrew Neather who let us
know why
the Labour government deliberately opened "up the UK to mass
migration", it was at least in part due to a politically motivated
attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the
Right's nose in diversity", we now have a very senior civil servant, saying ‘When I was at the Treasury, I
argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it
as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’
Also remember when you are being told that Britain is a land of immigrants that '
One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’
that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t
true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent
(excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly
Huguenots and Jews.
Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely
different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people
arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the
entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime.'
Also remember
this about the effect of immigration on jobs.
' The myth peddled by Blair's acolytes – that high levels of immigration
generated significant economic benefits for the existing UK population –
was demolished in 2008 by a House of Lords select committee. It
concluded: "We do not support the general claims that net immigration is
indispensable to fill labour and skills shortages. Such claims are
analytically weak and provide insufficient reason for promoting net
immigration." Reinforcing this point, the government's Migration
Advisory Committee recently confirmed that immigrants do "displace" some
British workers – ie, take their jobs, most likely those at the bottom
end of the pay ladder.'
Somewhere I wrote an analysis of the numbers of people who immigrated to the UK through history but I can't find it. Until I do here's a brief summary:
Hugenots - 40,000-50,000 in 17th century
Indians - 80,000 pre First World War
Africans - Around 15,000 pre First World War
Germans - Around 50,000 pre First World War
East European Jews - 120,000 pre First World War and maybe another 25,000 pre Second World War
Others fleeing Nazi Europe - 50,0000
Let's compare that with immigration post 1997.
Total net migration to the UK rose sharply from 1998 onwards, with levels being above 150,000 in all but one year since 1999. That's 150,000 a year but that's net of Brits leaving the UK. So an average of 150,000 net is equivalent to half of the immigration to this country across 300 years. Remember that the next time you're told that we've always ha immigration into the UK. Also remember that when you hear David Cameron hailing as a success cutting net immigration to under 100,000 a year.
Slightly off topic, I remember recently hearing an interview on the BBC radio with someone about why Muslim youths were not used to treating women properly. Apparently they have little contact with their own community's young women as they are not allowed to date before marriage. Instead they are meant to wait before getting a wife and then bring one in from Pakistan. The reasons are I presume clear to you.
The amount of immigration under the last Labour government was intended to change the UK into a properly multicultural country and to literally change the face of the country. After 13 years I think it fair to say that the Labour party succeeded and have indeed rubbed the right's noses in diversity. My personal belief is that it is too late to do anything about the results of this policy, the levels of immigration have been so high that even if there was nil immigration from today onwards, the population of descendants of immigration will increase year on year.
Interestingly I have heard figures on the left claim that the rise in immigration started under the government of John Major. However ONS figures show that from 1991 to 1997 there was net total
migration of 286,000.Still very much higher than the historical average but only a quarter of the rate under the Labour government of 1997-2010.
Returning to that article by David Goodhart, he says that by the time of the next census in 2021 the non
white population of the UK will have trebled to 20% and predicts that white Britons will be a
minority of the UK population by 2066. He also states, quite correctly, that in some towns and cities this
is already the case.
As a personal aside, I drove past a girls secondary school in Ealing on Thursday or Friday last week. It was the end of the school day and I drove down as the school was emptying. My estimate was that around 30% of the girls were wearing some form of Islamic head-covering, and that around 40% were of black ethnicity.
