Politicians haven’t been honest about immigration to Britain

What’s the most important story in Britain over the last 25 years? The financial crisis? Brexit? These events both changed our country dramatically. But neither has had such a big impact on the make-up of Britain than immigration.

In 1991, Britain’s foreign-born residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population. In 2021, one in six people (16.8 per cent) living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, according to Census data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. The pace of change is both staggering and accelerating. Some four in ten of that foreign-born population arrived over the last decade. To put this into context, from 1981 to 1990, total net migration of non-UK citizens totalled 445,000. The ONS says that 680,000 foreign-born residents arrived in 2020-21 alone (although this will include those who left the UK, then returned).

This flow has not been evenly distributed across the country; in parts of London like Newham, Harrow, Ealing, and Brent, people born outside the UK now outnumber those born within.

It is a testament to the remarkable tolerance of the British people that the change has taken place without a significant backlash, particularly when considering the delicate point that this was not, in fact, voluntary in the strictest sense of the word. Why? Because this change did not take place with the enthusiastic consent of the electorate. From 2010 to today, the British public have voted to restrict immigration at every opportunity given to them. In 2010, the Conservatives entered Downing Street running on a platform to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’ annually. They repeated this pledge in 2015 alongside a referendum on EU membership, and won an outright majority. When that referendum was held, Vote Leave won by promising to ‘take back control’ of Britain’s borders. When the time came to implement the vote, the Conservatives stayed in power in 2017, repeating the pledge. Even when they dropped it in 2019, they promised that numbers would come down.

Instead, immigration rose to record highs. To be fair to our politicians, it is true that if they simply let the public tell them what to do in each and every area of policy, we would have an even more dysfunctional and inconsistent mess than we already do. People want to pay less tax, have more public services, have less immigration, work less, have higher pensions, a larger army and a smaller state which is also larger. This is not surprising; it is a mathematical fact that it is essentially impossible to be both consistent and democratic.

This is, in part, why countries tend to settle on representative rather than direct democracy; the trade-offs between priorities must be evaluated, and decisions made. Your representative is not a delegate; they owe you their judgement, rather than being bound by your instructions. And their judgement has tended to be that more immigration pays for pensions, rents, and makes it easier to avoid the difficult structural questions about just why the UK economy is performing so poorly. It is substantially easier for politicians to turn the immigration tap on than to address falling rates of family formation.

For all that Britain does not live in the United States, we are starting to speed-run the Americanisation of British demography and politics; you can vote for whatever you want, but what you will get is high immigration and the country as an idea, where what matters is ‘British values’. That these values – ‘fairness, tolerance, respect’ – are not really any more British than they are Canadian or European is not the point.

Immigration has obviously brought the country benefits. It is also dishonest to pretend that it has presented no costs. As with anything else, there is a credit column and a debit column. In the view of our representatives in Parliament, the benefits have exceeded the costs. They may be right about this, but they have made little effort to persuade the public. Instead, the Conservative party has attempted to both have its cake and eat it, promising restriction while practising liberalisation. Our MPs may owe us their best judgement, but they also owe us honesty. On this, they have failed miserably.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/politicians-havent-been-honest-about-immigration-to-britain

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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

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http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
 
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