Divisive rhetoric will not improve practices that put migrants' lives at risk
The day after George Osborne announces massive public spending cuts that will impact on the working poor, decimate councils and reduce police numbers, David Cameron plays the populist card with a speech on immigration.
Portrayed as a ‘one nation’ speech, it is a clear attempt to divert attention from the cuts and today’s immigration statistics.
Although details will not be set out until the Immigration Bill is published after next week’s Queen’s Speech, the highlights we have been shown are, at best, meaningless rhetoric. They also reproduce Labour’s mistakes of tough talking and over-promising – and can only act to reduce the public’s trust in the ability of politicians to deliver on immigration policy.
The prime minister’s proposals include:
- New powers for councils to crackdown on unscrupulous landlords and evict illegal workers/migrants more quickly. Councils already have a legal framework to regulate the private rental sector and tackle bad landlords. But housing regulation has been cut and this proposal will be meaningless without funding.
- Creating a new offence of illegal working and enabling the police to seize wages as proceeds of crime. Employers face civil penalties and since 2006 it has been a criminal offence to knowingly employ on irregular migrant. Most irregular migrants work below the radar in a low-waged cash economy and send money home at the soonest opportunity. Giving the police powers to confiscate wages is pure dog-whistling.
- Creating a new labour market enforcement agency to crack down on the worst cases of labour market exploitation. What is wrong with extending the powers of the Gangmasters Licencing Authority and increasing the numbers of National Minimum Wage inspectors?
Worryingly, Cameron’s proposals also included extending the ‘deport first, appeal later’ measures to all immigration appeals and judicial reviews. This already happens in immigration appeals that are not asylum and human rights cases. It seems that the government proposes to remove refused asylum-seekers to their home countries, where they can then appeal.
In the three months to 31 March 2015, 2,242 asylum appeals were handled by judges, of which 29 per cent were upheld in that the appellant was granted asylum or leave to remain in the UK.
Nearly one in three of the Home Office’s initial decisions are wrong, a figure that is higher for Afghan nationals (40 per cent of appeals upheld) and Eritreans (45 per cent of appeals upheld).
Sending someone back home when a wrong judgement has been made puts lives at risk.
Unsurprisingly, the Cameron speech made little reference to today’s migration statistics, which comprise administrative data from the Home Office on asylum and visas, as well as demographic estimates on net migration from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The Home Office statistics show that visas for family and student migration are steady, but a 9 per cent increase in work visas in the year to March 2015, compared with the previous year.
Asylum applications are also steady, with 25,020 applications in the year to March 2015, of which the largest numbers came from Eritrea, Pakistan and Syria.
Work, student, family and student immigration from outside the EU make up under half of immigration to the UK. The ONS migration estimates suggest that in the year to December 2014, 42 per cent of immigration to the UK was from other EU countries.
Continued immigration from the EU has meant that the target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands has been missed yet again. In the year to December 2014, it is estimated that 318,000 more people came to the UK than left as emigrants. Unsurprisingly, announcements from Downing Street and the Home Office did not mention the missed target.
Overall, there was little positive in today’s announcements. There were no proposals to promote integration which might help us live together better. Rather, today’s proposals are distracting rhetoric which create a vicious circle of ‘tough talk’ that reinforce negative public attitudes.
These, in turn, prompt ever more uncompromising statements. So, no change from the nasty party.
Jill Rutter is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward.
44 Responses to “Tough talk but no real change on immigration shows the Tories are still the nasty party”
Torybushhug
Unsustainable population growth is ruinous on so many counts from the environmental to causing us to import ever more food, relentless need to build, relentless rise in consumption. My priorities go far deeper than worrying about pensions and in any event that’s another lame argument as lots of nation have a decent state pension with little or no population rise. I don’t give the slightest shit about empire and shared history, I care about Britain now. In fifty years what will England be like with tens more millions of farting coughing Humans here?
ArthurPendragon
The mercantile and landed classes did have a land grab as has been common in every nation in the past, but any study of general British history shows it was based on an unspeakable crushing of the underclasses which endured high mortality rates, starvation, flogging, summary execution, and abuse of power. We only see a very skewed view of ordinary people’s lives at that time. Most writers for TV an film never see the historic records at the time and anecdotes. I do not understand why the public accept to airbrushed history they are told at school and in the media. On the other hand I have heard first hand from West African tribal chiefs were willing to trade persons they considered criminals and much worse. The language is very illiberal. You have to realise human nature is not very nice ever.
damon
I did read what you said, and have just read it again. I don’t know where you live, but here in London, we hear a lot about race and stories of immigration and minority people’s lives all the time.
On BBC London radio for example, which I often have on. They give a lot of coverage to black history month and diversity issues.
There’s a story being discussed right now that could be said to have racial implications. I’ll tell you what in a minute.
I do realise that most of us are ”immigrants” of sorts if you go back far enough. We all started out in Africa remember. And in the preceding generations there has been much mingling and intermarrying. The Romans came and then the Vikings settled. Later the Normans.
We know all that. We know about the small communities of Chinese, Yemeni and African/Caribbean people who settled in port cities in the last two hundred years, and the Irish of course. My own father was one of those 60s Irish builders you mentioned.
But what you then said doesn’t ”follow on” so easily IMO. We had the immigration we asked for after WW2. The Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants. We asked them over, no doubt about it. And the Pakistani men who we recruited to work in the northern mill towns. But how many of the Pakistanis who have since come to the UK ever actually worked in mills and such work must be a very small percentage now. Once small communities were established, they soon multiplied their numbers through direct immigration from family unification and marriage.
After that, that community had its own dynamic for coming to Britain that was not connected to any needs this country had. It’s the normal way things happen.
Some communities struggle in some areas, and the Pakistani and Bangladeshi ones certainly have. They have quite acute needs generally, and are always in the bottom of the league table of wealth and poverty. Probably due to cultural factors. Indians on the other hand, while still basically the same race, have done far better. So it has to be cultural. (See the recent Tower Hamlets fiasco for an example).
While I might agree that much of the media plays fast and loose with the immigration and diversity issues, they are no worse in my opinion than the left, in the way that they are dishonest and sectarian about the subject. This blog’s above the line pieces can be as bad as Richard Littlejohn’s in the Daily Mail are bad.
But just from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Massive amounts of immigration and emigration can be unsettling for society. It changes it radically of course, and the areas that have the highest rates of turnover (or what is sometimes is called ”the churn”) can be rundown and shabby. Think of the most diverse areas in London and Birmingham. Areas where houses are divided up for multiple occupation and people come and go all the time. I know loads of places like that. They become ”bedsit land”. Just last night on the news they refered to the phenomenon know as ”beds in sheds” – this time in Ealing. Do you know what the scale of it has been? Google the words.
Lastly, that BBC London story I mentioned.
It’s about a 14 year old Croydon girl who’s been sent to young offenders prison for eight months for attacking a boy which was filmed and put on YouTube.
The girl is white – as is the boy, but here’s why I think it has race overtones.
She speaks and swears at the boy in pure ”Multicultural London English”.
Ghetto speak that ”was invented” by black young Britons and then went mainstream.
Her housing estate is right in the southern part of suburban Croydon, where the open fields of the Green Belt start. But ghetto gang culture has found its way even out there.
I grew up around this area and when it was still 98% white British, that wasn’t how the local people spoke.
The indigenous accent is more south London Cockney/Estuary. But now for a lot of young people it’s the dreadful ”MLE”.
That is down to immigration, and even has a link back to that YouTube I did in my last post about the black people from the Mangrove community association in Notting Hill back in the 70s.
They used to march with placards calling the police ”pigs” etc, and as I said earlier, if you listen to radio phone in programmes in London, you will hear black callers insisting that not that much has changed and that we are still a deeply racist society. That’s why black youngsters developed a new way of talking, as a way of showing they were proud and standing up for their race etc.
A bit sad all round in my opinion, as I know this cultural difference is actually something that feeds white racism. I know people who would rather send their children to private school or move out of the area rather than send them to a school where MLE was the accent of the classroom.
Here’s a link to the Croydon schoolgirl story:
‘I’m going to smack this yute!’: Video of foul-mouthed attack by Croydon girl goes viral
http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/m-going-smack-yute-Video-foul-mouthed-attack/story-26523826-detail/story.html#ixzz3arYKOU2m
stevep
very good reply, it has been said many times that the victors rewrite history. they do and they control the narrative too. The public will accept any old skewed tosh that passes for history, Downton Abbey being a recent example, fiction though it was, it has still influenced a generation and there are very few alive today who were in service then to redress the balance.
We British like to think of ourselves as a free, independent even belligerent race, but we have been subjugated for centuries by the exact means you have described, even in recent history. Given the chance to doff the cap and bow down before their masters the British willingly oblige.
stevep
Pretty much the same as it is now with millions of coughing and farting cows contributing to global warming.