Immigration

The public still doesn’t trust Labour and Ed Miliband on immigration. His speech last year — admitting ‘the last Labour government made mistakes’ — was aimed to draw a line under the past and start afresh. How helpful for him to have two key figures of the New Labour era popping up again to remind Britain of where Labour went wrong. First, David Blunkett told the BBC yesterday that an influx of Roma migrants could potentially lead to riots, akin to Oldham and Bradford in 2001: ‘We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming Roma community – because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise…if

There’s a rumour doing the rounds that Anna Soubry’s comments on immigration during Thursday night’s edition of Question Time did not come as a surprise to Tory High Command. Apparently, Soubry refused to take direction from the party machine and made clear that she would say, more or less, what she said. Coalition has certainly bred independent-minded ministers. The Lib Dems pick and choose which government policy to support in public, so it’s not wholly surprising that Tories sometimes follow suit. But, tough immigration policy is a key part of the Tories’ grand strategy and Soubry’s open disregard for the party line was striking. Plainly Lynton Crosby and Craig Oliver

I can just about take bien pensant lefties attacking UKIP for ‘scaremongering’ about immigration and accusing the party of being racist and prejudiced and so on. After all, a good many of them would have unlimited and unrestricted immigration to this country – and I can at least see a logical and moral case to that argument, even if I don’t agree with it. But from a front bench Tory? I don’t know if you saw the ridiculous Anna Soubry MP spouting hypocritical bilge on Question Time. It was emetic. Accusing Nigel Farage of ‘putting fear into people’s hearts’ over the issue of immigration. How she could do that with

Much of the coverage of today’s Immigration Bill has centred around those controversial ‘go home’ vans, now ditched because they only sent one person home. Theresa May told the Commons this afternoon that ‘we won’t be rolling out the vans, they were too much of a blunt instrument’. In response to a question from Keith Vaz, she said: ‘What I said to the right honourable gentleman is I didn’t have a flash of blinding light one day and walk into the Home Office and say, I know, why don’t we do this?’ What I have done is looked at the interim evaluation in relation to the vans. There were some

When you discuss Boris Johnson’s leadership prospects with Tory MPs, one subject nearly always comes up: immigration. The Mayor is a liberal on the subject while most of the party takes a far more sceptical view. Tory MPs wonder how he’ll explain to the electorate why he once backed an amnesty for illegal immigrants. But Boris’s Telegraph column today shows how he can make a better — and more demotic — case for immigration than any other politician. He is prepared to tackle the subject and, what he calls, ‘this sense of indigenous injustice’ head-on. He’s also surely right that the solution to ever-rising house prices in London is to build

Is immigration still a taboo subject? The debate may have opened up for politicians but voters are still anxious about discussing it, as a new poll from Sky News demonstrates. 42 per cent stated they think the current debate about immigration is being unfairly ‘shut down’ by accusations of racism, compared to just 24 per cent who think it is sensible and healthy. 40 per cent also believe they can’t discuss immigration openly because they are worried they will be seen as a bigot. As Nigel Farage has frequently warned, Westminster appears to take a rather different view of immigration. In the last 12 months, all three party leaders have

Say this for the government, they are at least consistent. Their contemptible lobbying bill is now followed by their equally contemptible immigration bill. Sometimes you think that if it weren’t for Michael Gove and for the fact that David Cameron isn’t Ed Miliband there’d be few reasons to support this government at all. And this immigration bill really is contemptible. Politics is often a question of signalling and what this bill signals, alas, is that the government prefers the presumption of guilt to the presumption of innocence. It is a bill that turns ordinary Britons into snitches for central government. A bill that will make life more inconvenient for millions

I guess the ‘unite the Right’ memo has not got through to some Tories, with Michael Heseltine calling Ukip ‘a racist party’ and James Wharton saying they’re ‘an awkward group of strange people’. That may be unwise — rather like attacking your customer-base — but it’s also untrue. Small Right-wing parties have a huge disadvantage because, although lots of people are socially conservative, soc-cons tend on average to be low in social skills and charisma and so the normals are easily driven away by the weirds, especially when immigration is an issue. But the early stages are the hardest, when any party right of the mainstream can become toxified and

We had a Bulgarian chap do up our house. Lovely guy, worked all day and never wanted a break, and I didn’t have to drop my aitches or pretend to like football around him. Actually he turned out to be Polish but after weeks of me asking questions about Bulgaria he presumably felt too embarrassed and just played along with it. But there are many Bulgarians working in north London, and Birmingham, and they tend to be quite skilled, there being restrictions on who can work here. Naturally as those restrictions are removed, and as the quantity of immigration goes up, the quality goes down. MigrationWatch claim that net migration