The Diversity Illusion

What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

Ed West

• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781908096630
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

2002 - ICM Research polling for the BBC: 47 per cent of white Britons believed immigration had damaged British society (a belief shared by 22 per cent of black and Asian Britons) and 28 per cent believed it had benefited it. 2012 - YouGov polling for the Sunday Times: 11 per cent of people believe that immigration in the past decade has been 'a good thing for Britain' - 67 per cent think it has had a negative effect. Not only does a clear majority of the British public now seem to want immigration all but stopped, it has become hugely ambivalent even about multiculturalism, post-war immigration and the very idea of 'diversity'. How could this happen? In this ground-breaking analysis, Ed West investigates who is responsible for Britain's current state of affairs and why mass immigration has never been put to the vote. He uncovers mismanagement throughout a fifty-year state of denial by the British establishment on both the left and the right, and two recent governments increasing immigration for electoral advantage. Ed West compellingly argues that Britain should face up to the real impact of immigration against the mounting concerns -even on the Left -about its consequences. The picture of modern Britain he paints is a forceful warning to stop subscribing to the diversity illusion.

1

‘The Leftish Language of Social Justice’

Labour’s immigration experiment

As a player in the British General Election of 2010, Gillian Duffy cut an unlikely figure. The Rochdale grandmother had only popped out to the shops to buy a loaf of bread when she was accosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, doing what came unnaturally to him, that is engaging an ordinary person in conversation.

‘My family have voted Labour all their life,’ Mrs Duffy told the PM as he grinned manically. ‘My father in his teens went to free trade hall to sing the Red Flag. Now I’m ashamed to even say I’m Labour.’ Having collared him about crime, the state’s treatment of handicapped children, pensions and university education, she said: ‘Look, the three main things that I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who are vulnerable. There are too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable can’t get claim [sic].’ She then added: ’You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying you’re [trails off]… but all these eastern Europeans coming in, where are they flocking from?’

Saying you’re… racist? Brown, having smiled and been courteous to Mrs Duffy, got in his car and said to one of his aides ‘You should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Sue’s I think. Everything she said – she’s just a bigoted woman.’ The hapless Prime Minister did not realise that his microphone was on, and the episode, straight from the television satire The Thick Of It, became the highlight of the election campaign.

But it also pushed the sensitive subject of immigration into the media spotlight, highlighting two points: that society was split not down but through the middle over immigration, with the poor far more hostile than the rich, and that people felt they were unable to speak about it. In over sixty years of enormous change such debate had been restricted by taboo, fear and mockery. Immigration is the most thought about and least talked about subject in British history.

Some people were prepared to defend the Prime Minister’s description, and yet Gillian Duffy could quite reasonably look around her neighbourhood and wonder why she could not discuss immigration. She had seen her town change dramatically both socially and economically as a result of Asian and eastern European immigration. In just 20 years Rochdale’s ethnic minority population had doubled and in nine of its schools 70 per cent of pupils spoke English as a foreign language, while in one the figure was 100 per cent. And yet, as Douglas Murray noted in Standpoint magazine: ‘Of all the huge demographic and economic changes that have occurred, none has happened with the consent of Mrs Duffy or anyone else. Nothing she could have done would have stopped it. And yet, like the rest of the British people, Mrs Duffy apparently accepted this wholesale change to her home without recourse to violence or obvious hatred.’

Meanwhile she had witnessed the collapse of the values she, and millions like her, felt to be at their core: education, the health service and the welfare state. And yet the two issues were not unconnected; for all of these values were products of a national culture and a nation-state that many in power had come to see as the preserve of bigots.

The Hans Christian Andersen fairly tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ has become a dreadful cliché in political discourse, but only because the story explains a truth about human nature so well: that intelligent, decent human beings can sometimes delude themselves into thinking that an innovation is beneficial when in fact it is deeply flawed. This happens in the world of cinema, fashion, literature and any other area where most people are uncertain of what defines excellence, and so look to others for guidance. It occurs in politics, too, and it is often the most intellectually gifted and influential of people who will metaphorically gaze at a naked man and tell the world (and themselves) that he is dressed in the finest gold threads.

Two years before the General Election a BBC2 Newsnight poll of white British adults found that 77 per cent felt that they could not criticise immigration without being labelled racist.5 Their fear is not unjustified. Throughout the past thirty years the term has been thrown about increasingly casually, and become completely detached from any workable meaning. This has silenced people even as their own interests were under threat. The trade unions, fiercely anti-immigration in the 1960s, barely spoke out as enormous numbers of new arrivals depressed the wages of their members during the 2000s. Indeed the TUC, Unison, the GMB and the Communication Workers Union all backed a Government-sponsored pro-immigration pressure group, the Migration Alliance,6 when immigration levels were at their peak.

It is because of this fear, and of a fear of offending friends, that there has never really been a debate about mass immigration. You can say it has been a good or a bad thing, and there are arguments on both sides, but you can never say that the British people were consulted. Most of the supposed arguments one hears – that questioning mass immigration might make people feel unwelcome, that it could even inspire violence, and give comfort to racists – are arguments for not discussing the issue, not for the argument itself.

Never in modern history has a free population simply suppressed discussion of a major issue. As Kevin Myers noted, the people of Britain and Ireland ‘have taken a secret, Self-Denying Ordinance not to discuss immigration or race in any meaningful way’. In living memory barely a newspaper article, radio or television show has seriously questioned the diversity orthodoxy, and even in the intelligent Right-wing press scepticism has had to be couched in such a cryptic way that the paper’s horoscopes are more candid. Repression can be healthy, or at least healthier than explosive anger, but not when the underlying problem it masks is growing. The ideal level of diversity in any state may depend on any number of factors, but as we head for a society in which a quarter of all people are a member of a visible ethnic minority, the costs surely outweigh the benefits.

The previous October a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, as well as Labour Home Secretaries David Blunkett and Jack Straw, made a startling admission. Writing in his Evening Standard column, Andrew Neather said that the huge increases in immigration under Labour’s rule had been part of a deliberate strategy to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

According to Neather, Labour’s relaxation of border controls was a conscious plan to encourage mass immigration, but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear that it would alienate its ‘core working class vote’. He said that as a result the arguments for immigration focused on economic questions instead.

He recalled that the ‘major shift’ in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think-tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001. Neather wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, the previous year, which was largely based on drafts of the report. The final published version of her speech contained only the economic case for immigration, but ‘earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. As Neather concluded: ‘it didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year… was to open up the UK to mass migration’. This was at a time when the Conservatives had dared to raise the issue of immigration, increasingly a concern to the public, and were heavily criticised by the media and race relations industry; in 2001 the Commission for Racial Equality publicised the names of MPs who refused to sign its pledge promising to avoid the use of language likely to incite prejudice or discrimination, whether ‘blatantly or covertly’, a measure described variously as ‘blackmail’ and ‘intimidation’ by Tory MPs. Although many refused to sign, the party was cowed into downplaying the issue of immigration.

Neather’s admission initially did not cause much of a stir, and nor did the announcement in the same newspaper that the Metropolitan Police would now be routinely armed in three areas of London: Brixton, Tottenham and Harringay, in response to the large number of young men using firearms, marking the end of the British tradition of the unarmed constable. Both stories were overshadowed by the appearance of British National Party leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s flagship discussion show Question Time that night. Griffin’s invitation was a triumph for a group that in 2001 had won just 0.2 per cent of the vote in the General Election and had been on the very fringes of British politics, the epitome of the Gilbert and Sullivan outfit that George Orwell characterised of British Fascists. Yet earlier that year the party had achieved their best ever result when they won two seats at the European Parliamentary elections, with Griffin elected to the North-West Region. This success came in response to an enormous increase in immigration, and despite considerable incompetence on their part, and an inability to jettison the politically suicidal neo-Nazi language of their past.

Labour’s ‘conscious plan’ to change Britain was in force from 2000 and since that time the country has experienced unprecedented levels of immigration, barely declining even after the system was changed in 2008. A House of Lords Economic Affairs select committee later concluded: ‘The increase in immigration since the late 1990s was significantly influenced by the Government’s Managed Migration policies.’ According to estimates quietly released by the Government in September 2009, some 2.3 million migrants had been added to the population since 2000.

Gross immigration officially stood at 489,000 per year between 1997 and 2006, including 391,000 non-Britons, and from 1997 to 2009 about 1.6 million people were granted permanent right of residence, over two-thirds of them from developing countries.7 Immigration in 2004 alone was somewhere between 582,000 and 870,000, in terms of proportion to the population as large as the peak years to the United States before the First World War, when the huddled masses of Europe poured through Ellis Island.

People were admitted through various channels. In 2006, for example, 59,810 were given ‘leave to remain’ as a family member or dependant of a permanent UK resident, including 42,725 partners, 9,290 children, and 1,470 parents and grandparents.8 There were non-Europeans entering as students (309,000 in 2006 alone, up from 44,800 in 1992), bringing with them 17,000 dependants. Many of the colleges they attended were fronts for immigration through which people could work and never leave; the Home Office turned a blind eye to a system that was obviously being abused, with some 159,000 students currently overstaying. The number of work permits also shot up, from below 30,000 in 1994 to 167,000 in 2006, on top of 48,500 dependents. In some years migration was responsible for 80 per cent of Britain’s annual population growth, and overall net foreign immigration – the number of non-British citizens arriving, less the number leaving – rose from 221,000 in 2001 to 333,000 in 2007.

There was also the issue of asylum. By 2007 there was a backlog of 450,000 asylum seekers waiting to be processed,9 who under UN treaties had the right to ‘freedom from persecution’ and ‘family reunion’. The UN treaties, based on humane ideas that worked in the mid-20th century when the world was home to 2 billion people, most of them ruled by a handful of empires, had become unworkable in a world of 6.9 billion people, 200 countries and countless civil wars, insurgencies and famines, far easier travel and established non-European communities in major Western cities. On top of this there were illegal immigrants, the numbers of which no mortal knows. In 2001 Professor John Salt of University College London’s Migration Research Unit put the figure at between 310,000 and 570,000;10 MigrationWatch UK, a pressure group set up in 2002 to counter Labour’s policy, gave an estimate of between 515,000 and 870,000.11

The face of England changed with revolutionary speed. Between 1998 and 2007 two million people left London for other parts of the country, while the city experienced net international migration of 1.8 million. Throughout this period of rapid growth journalists compared the number of projected immigrants arriving in Britain to ‘a city the size of’, using such varied places as Milton Keynes, Leicester and Birmingham, until by the end of Labour’s rule the only city it could be compared to was London, such was the rapid expansion in Britain’s overseas population. It was a demographic change not just unprecedented in British history, but in almost any country that has not suffered catastrophic military defeat.

A Nation of Immigrants

In September 2000, a month before publishing the paper which did not highlight the social objectives of mass immigration, Immigration Minister Barbara Roche gave a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in which she said: ‘This country is a country of migrants and we should celebrate the multicultural, multi-racial nature of our society, and the very positive benefits that migration through the centuries has brought.’

This was indeed the version of history that had become accepted as fact; a few years earlier, in 1996, the Committee for Racial Equality, forerunner to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had published a pamphlet, Roots of the Future: Ethnic Diversity in the Making of Britain, in which it commented that ‘People with different histories, cultures, beliefs, and languages have been coming here since the beginning of recorded time. Logically, therefore, everyone who lives in Britain today is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant.’

Precedence is justification; something is right because it has always been, so it is important for the advocates of diversity to backdate the process to before 1948. Britain should be a nation of immigrants because it has always been a nation of immigrants, from the Normans and Flemish to the Huguenots. And yet almost nothing could be less true than the statement ‘Britain is a nation of immigrants’ – this is what makes the changes of recent years so startling.

Daniel Defoe’s poem, ‘The True-Born Englishman’, is often used to illustrate the truth of England’s multicultural history, telling of a country marked by various migrations through the years, the true-born Englishman being a hybrid of races. It was written in defence of the Dutch-born King William III, who in 1688 had seized the throne from his father-in-law, the British (but unacceptably Catholic) James II. Despite being invited by the ruling clique, William was a charmless character whose favouritism towards Dutch friends at court caused much resentment. His opponents often used his nationality as a stick with which to beat him, and Defoe was making a valid point that as the English, like every nation, have foreign blood themselves, so William’s Dutchness did not make him an illegitimate ruler.

William (who was, it should be added, paying Defoe) was also unpopular because he used the English throne to pursue his lifelong obsession, fighting Louis XIV. The fanatically Catholic French king, although a grandson of the Protestant Henri IV, was locked in battle not just with Protestants abroad but at home. The minority Huguenots had been granted toleration with the Edict of Nantes in 1598, following a series of especially brutal civil wars that had drenched France in blood. But believing them to be a ‘state within a state’ and an obstacle to his goal of un roi, une loi, une foi (‘one king, one law, one faith’), Louis revoked their rights with the passing of the Edict of Saint-Germain. Hundreds of thousands of French Protestants fled to England, Ireland, Germany, South Africa and the American colonies. But while the Huguenots’ contribution to English society was considerable, their iconic status as Britain’s multicultural forebears is somewhat over-emphasised. Most historians believe that between 40,000 and 50,000 arrived in England over a century, well below one per cent of the English population, and equivalent today to 500,000 people. And they were, proportionately, the largest immigrant group in Britain between 1066 and 1945.

Far from being a nation of immigrants, Britain’s genetic make-up has barely altered in millennia. There have been many waves of immigrants, and a non-European presence on these islands for some time, but in minute numbers. Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford and author of Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of our Tribal History, wrote that most British DNA dates back to the first Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlers who crossed the English Channel around 10,000 years ago and: ‘By about 6,000 years ago, the pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles and very...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1‘The Leftish Language of Social Justice’
• 2 Rivers of Blood
• 3 The Shadow of Auschwitz
• 4 Doing the Jobs Brits Won’t Do
• 5 Diversity and inequality:
• 6 Happiness
• 7 Dynamism and Ghettos
• 8 Multiculturalism
• 9 British Values
• 10 The War on Racism
• 11 The New Blasphemy Laws
• 12 The Revolt of the Elites
• 13 A Tribal Society
• 14 When Prophecy Fails
• Further Reading
• Notes