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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Blair believes mass immigration is good for Britain - do Britons? Blair believes mass immigration is good for Britain - do Britons? By Charles Moore (Filed: 16/04/2005) Warrior Square, St Leonards-on-Sea, has tall, imposing houses, the remnants of late Victorian gentility. At its lower end, the Queen Empress herself, in statue form, gazes out to sea. I have known the town all my life, and remember it from the Sixties as a respectable place where lots of High Church old ladies would promenade in their hats. When they died, their effects found their way into capacious second-hand bookshops and antique emporiums. There were outstandingly good tea-rooms and neat public gardens. It has changed. On a wet morning this week, I parked in Warrior Square and embarked on an unscientific questionnaire of passers-by. St Leonards is in the constituency of Hastings and Rye, a fairly marginal Labour seat, with Conservatives second. My opening question was, "What is the most important issue for you in this election?", and I asked it first of an athletic-looking man in his late fifties. "Oh, immigration," he said. "Look at that place," and pointed to the Adelphi Hotel, once a haven for bourgeois holiday-makers and now occupied by more than 200 asylum seekers, mainly Afghans and Somalis. "Why do they drive around in new cars and wear expensive clothes? I'm sorry for real refugees, but I feel this is a racket." Next I stopped a woman in her early thirties, a nursing auxiliary. "Immigration," she told me. "Why do they get all these benefits?" Along came a man in his mid-sixties. He was a retired furniture-restorer, garrulous and humorous: "Well, it's immigration, isn't it. Immigration and crime. It's become a Third World country here," and he pointed to the Adelphi. He said he'd narrowly escaped death or injury twice recently, once when a rocket was fired at him out of derelict premises and once when someone threw a heavy weight out of an upper window into the street. I turned into a side street and approached two men in a car repair workshop. "We'll be voting Conservative," one of them said, though I hadn't got round to asking their voting intention. "It's this immigration and crime." The man speaking was a north African immigrant himself, but he said he couldn't stand immigrants being looked after and not working. I found a youngish woman delivering freesheets to the social housing. She said she admired immigrants who "did good for themselves", but she didn't like the fact that it "feels like a foreign country round here". Into an electrician's shop. "I didn't use to be racially prejudiced," the proprietor told me, "but now I've met them all, I am. I hate them. I wouldn't want to be in a war zone, and we should help people like that, but it's all this crime." Another trader said he had family in Canada and there, he'd heard, immigrants had to show they knew English and "accepted the way of life". Why couldn't they be made to do that here, he wondered. Did everyone think this way? Up the hill I came across a middle-aged man with a friendly, slightly naive face. "I think schools are the most important thing," he said. Immigration? "I like the way Tony Blair lets everyone in. Also, it's good under Labour because you can just go along to the dole office and get the money without any trouble." I asked him his occupation, and he smiled a little shyly: "Well, I've just come out of a psychiatric ward." In the course of the morning, I questioned 16 voters. Only two, including the psychiatric patient, were optimistic. One raised abortion (against). Two raised stealth taxes. Two praised Labour for low interest rates (the memory of negative equity in the Major years is still strong). Two mentioned the NHS. At least two were Liberal Democrat. Three thought they would switch to Conservative. No one was switching to Labour, but two said they thought well of Tony Blair and another admired Gordon Brown. No one mentioned the war in Iraq. There was no enthusiasm for Michael Howard, but no antagonism either. Ten brought up immigration and 11 crime. Of these, eight had been the recent victims of crime. How to unpick all this? The first thing that struck me was that crime and immigration mix in people's minds, sometimes unfairly. One man, who runs a long-established chain of local baker's shops, was emphatic that the two were quite separate, with the criminals being solely the white underclass. Most, though, had personal experience of crime committed by immigrants. The real mental link between the two subjects relates to injustice and to "ownership". The sense of injustice arises because of the welfare state. It seems simply wrong to people that those who come to this country for a better life should receive automatic benefits like free housing and television and cash allowances. It equally seems wrong that bad white people - lazy, drunken, fighting yobs - should be similarly looked after. When well-off, well-educated people dismiss complaints of this sort as bigoted, they do not realise how humiliating it is to find others given for nothing things for which you have worked. One man thought his own little flat was worth £75,000: he was only human to be upset that what he called "pikies" were being put free into pleasant new houses just round the corner, worth double that figure. The mess they make of their gardens rubs salt in his wound every day he walks past. In the minds of such disappointed, independent, but sometimes struggling people, the question is: "What can we call ours?" If you are very rich, you can buy distance from all these problems. If you're not, you can't, and the sense that British people are entitled, in this non-financial sense, to own the streets and parks and public services and culture around them is very strong. That ownership is stolen if there are drunks in the park, muggers on the streets, and people who can't speak your language filling up the housing or the hospital beds. This is a classic "many, not the few" question, and one in which Labour appears to be on the side of the few. My sense - not just from one morning on the south coast - is that the Conservatives are making some headway on all of this. The imprisonment this week of the failed asylum-seeker terrorist Kamel Bourgass has reminded voters that the system of control doesn't work. He is one of 308,000 refused asylum since 1997: only 72,000 of these were returned. But in a way asylum is not the main issue. What matters even more is the sheer numbers of new (i.e. excluding returning British) people now coming into Britain, a total of 240,000 in 2003, of whom asylum seekers make up less than 15 per cent. There is, at heart, a simple reason why immigration has more than doubled under Mr Blair. It is because Labour wants it. Its current policy states: "Controlled and managed immigration is essential to the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom and the health of the public services." This sentence sounds reassuring, but actually it is saying that mass immigration is a good thing. I do not believe that most British voters accept this. It is high time it was submitted to a clear electoral test.
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#1. To: Tauzero, Zipporah, 1776, Robin, noone222 (#0)
Controlled and managed legal and illegal immigration into white countries is essential to dismantle the power of those countries.
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