Ronald Reagan was right about most things. Including immigration.

My political hero's last speech as President:

"This I believe is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier …"

When did conservatives stop thinking immigration - people moving to get a better life for them and their families - was a good thing? When did we start proclaiming, in that 'no nothing' way, that the nation is full? When did we start mistrusting people because of their face, their dress or their hat? How did we start wanting to deny people to right to religion, to a new home and to a better life?

It's not just America - for all of Reagan's exceptionalism - that is built on immigration. You don't have to look far in Britain to see the contribution from people who weren't born here but contributed to our success - from Brunel, the son of a French immigrant through Joseph Conrad, a Polish political refugee to sporting heroes like Mo Farah. Where then did we get this odd belief that people prepared to risk everything - money, health and life - to get to a better place are somehow going to tear down that new place, the land of their hopes?

Yes immigration needs control but we, if we are to be conservatives, need to believe that the strength of a good community is to welcome the stranger, to open our doors to them and to grant them our hospitality. This is what we mean by decency, civilisation and responsibility.

I read recently Thomas Freidman's report (in his book Thank You for Being Late) on the reasons why so many Africans are risking life and limb to cross the Mediterranean - they're not coming here to destroy us, they're coming here because Europe is their last, only, hope. This is the same reason millions crammed onto boats from Sweden, Italy, Spain and Germany to America - drought, prejudice, opportunity, hope.

What America does that we in Britain do poorly, is celebrate their culture and the symbols of their society. Everywhere you go there are flags flying, some of them enormous, and everywhere - even the most Mexican of rural towns - looks and feels like America. In Britain we embraced a form of multiculturalism that included the new arrivals by pushing aside the culture of home, especially if that home was ordinary, working class England.

Living where I live, I understand some of the fears and concerns - about jobs, about the loss of old familiar things and a sadness about change. But the response to this shouldn't be to push people away but rather to put out the flags, to celebrate Britain in the way most Americans, regardless of heritage, ethnicity or faith, celebrate the USA.

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Immigrants (even illegal ones) don't commit more crimes...

Of course, you all know this (just as you knew immigrants are more likely to work, pay a higher proportion of earnings in tax, are less likely to be ill and don't receive as much welfare - they also have fewer children so make less use of schools) but the continuing rhetoric about immigration - migrants, refugees, asylum seekers - still talks about such folk as a problem.

Here's the evidence on crime (it's from the US - one of those nasty right wing think tanks, no less - but I don't expect it to be much different elsewhere):

Previous empirical studies of immigrant criminality generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates, are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.5 Illegal immigrant incarceration rates are not well studied; however, recent Cato Institute research based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety found that, as a percentage of their respective populations, illegal immigrants represented 56 percent fewer criminal convictions than native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.6 The low illegal immigrant incarceration rate is consistent with other research that finds more targeting of immigrants does not reduce the crime rate, which would occur if they were more crime prone than natives.7

The reality is that, almost everywhere, the net benefit from immigration is positive. Our problem is that we're full or that immigrants put massive additional strain on public services but rather that we're really bad at integrating new residents into local communities. Some of this is about racism but it's also a consequence of multiculturalism - in a society where nine out of ten people live in one culture, making a false equivalence for immigrants with a different culture won't work. And when that false equivalence becomes an obsession, the result is resentful behaviour by the majority culture.

Immigration is great but it would be even better if our expectation of immigrants was to be part of our culture not to live what Herman Ouseley called "parallel lives".


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Quote of the day: On social planners and immigration

We're going to need immigrants. Even the most drooling of alt-right racists acknowledges this need (saying "high skilled" immigrants only). But who decides and how do we judge:

Like all central planners, the immigration planners exhibit what F. A. Hayek called "the pretense of knowledge." Do these presumptuous frauds know what specific skills will be demanded in the future? To know that, they would have to know what products will be demanded in the future. But we don't know what we'll want because lots of things have not been invented yet. And we can't predict who will invent them. People who today have few skills and who speak no English will be among those who make our lives better. Let them come here to make better lives for themselves. That's their right, which is justification enough. But we will benefit too.

Yep.

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Bars, birth rates and gentle decline - Europe's left behind places

Every Italy village has one of these. This one, Bar Centrale, is in Fontanelice a village in the Bolognese Appenines and it's pretty typical. Go inside and there's a bar (and a barman or waitress) dominated by the obligtory coffee machine and, sitting on the cheap plastic chairs around rickedy tables are a bunch of old men. They probably won't be drinking, it's not an Italian thing really, but may be playing cards, reading Corriere dello Sport or one of the seemingly endless local papers Italy enjoys, and talking in that 'putting the world to rights' way loved of men in bars everywhere.

The wall behind the bar will feature a large poster, maybe framed, of a football team - usually from some victorious season long, long ago rather than the current team. In Fontanelice it was a black and white framed photograph of a Juventus squad from (judging from the hairstyles) some time in the 1970s. I'm guessing that, like bar decor everywhere, it's just there not causing offence but gradually losing both definition and relevance as the years pass by.

Just as for us in England, the pub was the heart of the world, these bars represent that old Italy of community, the shared experience of the place we live. It's true that little Italian towns and villages also have trattoria and even full blown restaurants but the bar, its decor and regulars slowly fading, is the common factor, the thing that every little place has. And I guess that, just like the English pub, these bars are finding times tough. I'd note that the slightly posher place we stayed - Dozza just outside Imola - didn't have a bar of this sort in the old town (an osteria served this function in the evening but during the day there was just the cafe and gelateria in the public park).

There are lots of demographic factors driving this decline - the bars may still be there but for how much longer? The most important though, like a lot of other places in Europe, is that Italians are quite literally dying out:

Italy’s birth rate has more halved since the ‘baby boom’ of the 1960s, with the number of births falling to 488,000 in 2015 – fewer than in any other years since the modern state was formed in 1861.

“If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years’ time, 40 percent less than in 2010 — an apocalypse,” the minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, said in an interview with La Repubblica on Sunday.

“In five years we have lost more than 66,000 births (per year) — that is the equivalent of a city the size of Siena,” the minister added. “If we link this to the increasing number of old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country.”

Italy has Western Europe's lowest birth rate - just 1.39 well below the accepted replacement level of 2.1 - which is why you see so few children in these little towns and villages. The wonderful culture of these places - relaxed, welcoming - that us visitors want to celebrate is threatened by this low birth rate. And the result - just as we've seen in Japan - is that villages and small towns depopulate and are eventually abandoned:

The phenomenon is happening across the country, from mountain-top villages in the Alps and the Apennines to tiny terracotta-roofed hamlets in the sun-baked valleys of Sicily and Sardinia.

Nearly 2,500 villages are at risk of turning into ghost communities, with a startling two million homes abandoned or left empty by their owners, according to the report, which was compiled with the help of the National Association of Italian Councils.

We will see this process repeated elsewhere in Europe, at least in places that either don't attract or don't welcome immigrants. And, as we know, the problem with those immigrants is that they arrive without the cultural legacy that might sustain the bar, the cafe and the pub. Moreover they're not heading to those deep rural areas of Europe but to the towns, resorts and cities that provide the work they came here for. In France it's clear:

The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with these anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the United States decades ago. A survey of French towns found that commercial vacancies have almost doubled to 10.4 percent in the past 15 years. As these towns have declined, voters have often turned sharply rightward. Albi is traditionally centrist, but the same conditions of decline and political anxiety are present, too.

Politics aside (although this sense of decline is an important factor in the kick-back against the Great City of the West and its denizens) we're seeing the same problems. A glance at the people walking the high street - older, wearier, less content - in an English provincial town will be matched in France, Spain and in that lovely little bar in Fontanelice. We tend to talk of these people as 'left behind' which is unkind and largely untrue. What we should talk about is how the places themselves are left behind, victims of the ageing population, too few young people, out-of-town shops and the World Wide Web.

In Italy, with a sclerotic economy, high unemployment and Europe's lowest female participation rate (just 37%), the problems are reflected everywhere - in the deathly quiet daytime streets of small towns, in the industrial zones littered with empty factories, rotting teeth in the once mighty bite of Italian manufacturing, and it the desperation of a government offering payments of eighty Euros a month as a 'Baby Bonus' for new mums.

If we're seeking Europe's problems we shouldn't be looking at immigrant ghettoes in Montpelier or Rotterdam, nor should we be screeching about house prices in Central London or Barcelona, rather we should be turning our attention to the left behind provincial places where the things we treasure in our cuture are at their most profound. The slow death of the English pub, the struggles of the French provincial high street, and the decline of the Italian village's cafe-bar - these are what people see and don't understand even if, as we know, they are partly to blame.

International 'anywhere' people - Flat Earthers as geographer Harm de Blij called them - may be right about global trade and business (and my head tells me they are) but when I look at those quiet, backwater places once comfortable and thriving my heart tells me we've got something wrong. And worse that the only people talking about that feeling in my heart are those blaming others - immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, bankers - for the problem rather than looking for a way forward. If this doesn't change, if the Flat Earthers continue to see the Great City of the West as the answer, then Europe and America's political divisions will only worsen and deepen.

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When is not a ban a ban? Trump and the Muslims

During the presidential election campaign Trump was clear he wanted to 'ban' Muslims from coming to America. So it should not be a surprise to anyone that, early in his presidency, Trump has enacted tighter controls on immigrants coming to the USA from a specified list of countries that just happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim. It's not a 'ban' but extreme vetting and it's not a Muslim ban because not everyone from the countries in question if a Muslim.

Having got that out of the way, we need to appreciate that the intention - pretty much a stated intention - of the Executive Order is to prevent Muslims entering the USA. Now it's true that lots of big Muslim countries aren't included in the list, either because of Donald Trump's historic business interests or else because the seven selected countries were those excluded from the US 'visa waiver programme' in 2015 (or maybe some other reason nobody has thought of yet). For what it's worth, I suspect these were the Muslim countries where the law allowed Trump to enact an executive order in the manner he did.

This, of course, suggests that we will see further attempts to control the entry of Muslims into the USA - although it is likely that this will be couched in terms of terrorism rather than religion. There are over 3 million Muslims in the UK so, regardless of the stuff about terror, trying to ban Muslims places potential limits on the freedoms of UK citizens. We are right to criticise Trump's Executive Order but equally right to do so in a measured, directed manner that does not compromise other UK interests - not least the significant trading relationship with the USA.

Lastly, we should avoid the appeal of seeing Trump's purpose in terms of some sort of sinister anti-democracy conspiracy. The evidence so far is that, horrible though it might be, what you see with Donald Trump is what you get. It will be painful but it does seem that Trump's campaign rhetoric wasn't, as we've complained about all these years, mere rhetoric but was him actually saying what he intended to do in government. There is no coup.

So those folk complaining about the description of this action as a 'Muslim ban' - 'it's not a ban and it doesn't mention Muslims' they shout - are wrong. Trump's intention is absolutely that of banning Muslims. We know this because he said so. And all that's happened is the US law and constitution are making it hard for Trump to do what he said he wanted to do - ban Muslims. It may not be a ban but that is its intention. It may not mention Muslims but they are its target. It is, de facto, a Muslim Ban or at least an attempt at one.

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Immigration is a success. Integration is a disaster.

Immigration is a success. Britain is a richer place with a stronger economy because of immigration. We have kept the wheels from falling off our health and care system, maintained the provision of cheap fruit and vegetables, slaughtered a lot of chickens and built the world's greatest financial sector on the back of immigration.

Immigrants are more likely to be working, less likely to be claiming benefits, contribute more in tax than they take out and bring a bewildering variety of new experiences to our great nation. Immigration is not the cause of NHS crises, the lack of school places or the shortage of housing - short-term policy-making and a daft planning system are far more to blame for all this. And compared to similarly poor communities, immigrants commit less crime.

So why is immigration such a problem? How did migrants and refugees arriving in the UK cause such an outcry and, in part, contribute to the decision to leave the EU? Are the British incorrigibly racist? Is it the result of the drip drip of nasty bigotry from dubious newspapers? Or is there some other reason such as lousy public policy?

Let's begin with a couple of myths. Firstly, "it was the media that did it".

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation.

Now I don't want to get sucked into the vortex of the Brexit debate but the gist here - from LSE economist John Van Reenan - is that the driving force for Britain's 'anti-foreigner sentiment' was that 'rabidly right-wing press'. This is pretty much received wisdom amongst the intelligentsia but is just baldly stated, no evidence is presented to substantiate the argument that the British people - and the English working classes in particular - have been led by their ignorant noses by a corrupt and Fascist press working hand in glove with those 'unscrupulous liars and political zealots'.

This just isn't true. Not that the press is innocent or perfect, it's a long way from that, but that Van Reenan has cause and effect in the wrong order. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express are commercial enterprises - they exist to make money for those who own them. This means they deliver what they think the public wants, they are like the advertisers they depend on for income - mirrors of society not the creators of society's mores or values.

The second myth is that the problem comes from the values of immigrants - most specifically that these are in some way not compatible with nebulous and vague 'British values'. We talk about honesty, decency, respect for the law, family and so forth as if these ideas only exist as values in the UK, that somehow immigrants - Muslims in particular - don't share these essentially fundamental views about behaviour. Now, while I'm happy for core values to be part of what we teach children and young people, I don't see that you can isolate a particular set of values and say they are in some way exclusive to Britain.

To suggest that, for example, Islam doesn't contain these values is to misunderstand that faith entirely. For sure different emphases are evident - more stress on justice than on rights for example - but these are nuances within those values not a different set of values. It's true, however, that these higher order values are a damn sight easier to elevate when we are economically successful and secure. And it is here, at least in part that the problem with immigration starts. Just as there is a tendency (not always without reason) for immigrants to see their status as a factor in their poverty, there's also a feeling among the poor communities where migrants arrive that these new arrivals contribute to the poverty of those already there. The lump of labour idea may be false but it is emotionally appealing.

So if it isn't media manipulation or differences in values and only partly economics, what is the reason for the rise in what Van Reenan calls 'anti-foreigner sentiment'? It seems to me that the problem is one of culture combined with a terrible failure of public policy. In economic terms immigration is brilliant and, for us successful folk with good jobs and good incomes, something of a boon but in cultural terms immigration over the past thirty years has been a disaster. We have left established communities across Britain - and particularly in England - with the feeling that, at best, their culture is something to be sneered at and, at worst, that it's based on bigoted, racist, Little Englander attitudes that have no place in the modern world.

In simple terms the adoption in the 1980s of a policy based on multiculturalism led to a complete failure of integration and sowed the seeds of today's 'anti-foreigner sentiment'. And once the feeling that the great and good considered immigrant cultures to be superior had established, it was a short step to concerns about immigrants taking jobs, stealing our women and generally ruining everything that's good about England. Public policy seemed to say that bangra was more important than brass bands, that Christmas should be turned into 'Season's Greetings', and the last night of the proms was a slightly sleazy exercise in jingoism. Strategies to 'celebrate diversity' featured every kind of imported culture and none of the home grown stuff. Integration failed because public policy deemed it unnecessary.

Nobody is suggesting here that English culture - and specifically English working-class culture - is somehow superior to cultures from elsewhere, merely that it ours and it deserves more prominence as the culture of the people who already live here. We tend to think that "when in Rome" refers to abiding by local laws but, while this is true, it goes a lot further - it's about respecting the mores, values and culture of the people you've come to live amongst. Multiculturalism, for all that it was well-meant, resulted in some immigrant groups feeling that this no longer applied.

None of this is to suggest that racism and xenophobia doesn't exist. Rather it is to say that multiculturalism is a failed policy that has contributed more to our current attitude to immigration than the media, populist politicians or misunderstandings about values. To go back to where we started, in economic terms immigration is a success, The problem is that in cultural terms we've allowed it to be a disaster. And unless we begin to give a greater prominence to indigenous culture and especially the culture of those some sneeringly refer to as 'the left behind', we will continue to face these problems.

Immigration is a success. We are all richer for people coming here and contributing to Britain's economy. We should direct our efforts to integration rather than pretending that closing the borders will solve the problem. Back in June I listened to some people express their concerns about immigration. Except, as I pointed out, their concerns weren't about immigrants but about people who were born here, for whom Bradford is just as much home. This makes it all our problem and not one solved by immigration control. It's multiculturalism that has failed us not immigration.

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A story of jobs (and why immigration is important)

We went to Harrogate yesterday afternoon. The sun was shining, it's a nice drive and we like the town. We'd nothing planned beyond a mooch followed by some food and drink. So this is what we did - window shopping (plus some actual impulse purchasing of a funky lamp that clamps onto a shelf) and then an Italian.

Harrogate has been undergoing what I'm sure the Council calls regeneration. At the top of the town centre by the railway there's a new Everyman cinema (interestingly about 100 yards from the existing Odeon) and, as happens these days, a collection of mid-market chain restaurants - CAU (who sell lumps of meat Argentinian-style), Byron Burger, Pizza Express, an Italian I forget the name of and a similarly unmemorable chain bistro. The cinema was having it's invitation only pre-opening shindig - the full opening is on Friday.

We'd originally planned to go to the Yorkshire Meatball Company for its advertised craft ales and artisan meatballs - what's not to like! But on arrival at said restaurant there's a big sign in the window (well actually quite a small sign) saying it's closed for September because the arrival of all these new chain restaurants has led to a staff shortage. Here's a little more from the Yorkshire Meatball Company's website:

Unfortunately, coinciding with the development of our retail products, the huge influx of chain restaurants into Harrogate – most notably those within the new Everyman Cinema development – has not gone un-noticed, as brands more commonly found in larger cities and retail parks now focus on regional expansion. Whilst we always welcome healthy competition, the recent openings have brought with them an unprecedented demand for hospitality staff, particularly kitchen staff, at a time when there is already a known national shortage of skilled chefs. This presents an incredibly challenging recruitment environment for small independents like us. Unfortunately, as a result we’ve had to say a sad goodbye to some; losing a number of our key staff in a relatively short period.

This piqued our interest and, as we continued our wandering around town we began to notice, in window after window, signs saying that there were jobs available. It was pretty clear that, right now, Harrogate is suffering a shortage of retail, waiting and cooking staff. And it struck me that, for all of Harrogate's attractions, it's an expensive place to live if all you've got is the sort of wage you'll get for most of these jobs. In other places ready access by public transport makes it relatively easy to travel a little distance but Harrogate lacks the public transport links that would make it possible to commute. Plus the bus company isn't going to put on a bus just so some workers can travel from Keighley or Harrogate for a job in a restaurant.

Now I'm sure that the situation in Harrogate will settle down, that I'll get my meatballs and craft beer, and most (if not all) of the chain restaurants will thrive on the back of that vibrant cinema crowd. But this situation rather reminds me of Cullingworth's chicken slaughterhouse (the food has to come from somewhere) and its workers.

When we first moved to Cullingworth in 1989, the chicken factory no longer employed many people from the village or indeed from surrounding communities. This was simply because most folk had better paying and less gory employment so didn't need work killing spent hens. So the company imported workers in a minibus - it used to stop just down from our house. These workers came from Doncaster recruited courtesy of an agency there who were willing to sign up the workers and arrange their transport to and from Cullingworth.

Some while later, when I next encountered the workforce of the factory it came as a result of a visit to a house on Lees Moor, about a mile from the village, who had a problem with an overloading and polluting septic tank. This tank served two houses, that of the couple who'd contacted me and another which was rented out. It was the tenants who had (inadvertently I hasten to add) caused the problem with the septic tank. These tenants were eight or ten Romanian women who were employed to kill those spent hens at the chicken slaughterhouse.

And what is the first thing ten women who've been killing chickens for eight hours do when they get home? Have a shower - a long and thorough shower. The septic tank was designed for the regular sort of use from one farm family and simply couldn't take the strain. I can't remember the solution we came up with to resolve the problem but all this tells us that the factory was no longer ferrying workers to and from Doncaster but was, instead, putting up workers from Eastern Europe in rented property nearby. Today, things have moved on with the (still mostly East European) workforce now coming in to work by car and bus from Bradford or Keighley.

It may indeed be the case that Harrogate's hospitality and retail staff shortage will disappear - or at least get under control allowing everywhere to open - but the story of the Yorkshire Meatball Company and the job vacancy signs in shop windows suggests that, as the UK's job market continues to tighten, it will become more and more of a problem. In one respect this will be good news for staff as it will tend to push up wages but there's obviously a limit to that as those costs end up on the price of food thereby risking fewer customers.

Even in Bradford, which may be a fabulous place but isn't a tourism mecca, local business people tell me there's a problem with recruiting good hospitality staff. This isn't because folk are sitting around doing nothing but rather because the sort of people who might in times past have chosen a hospitality job are now getting jobs with 9-5 hours in sales, marketing and financial services. And, just as is the case with killing chickens (and for that matter building houses, cleaning toilets and picking fruit), without immigrant labour these businesses struggle to fill the jobs they produce.

It is for this reason that the sort of UKIP (and sadly Tory right) policy of 'points-based immigration' is a daft idea. Here's Raedwald:

Agriculture and horticulture is utterly dependent on EU migrant labour to get strawberries into our dessert bowls and vegetables to the freezer plant. There have been harvest labour schemes long pre-dating freedom of movement from the new accession states.

None of these would get in under a points system. Nor would young European Erasmus students spending a year in 'intern' type jobs in our hotels and restaurants. Nor would the French Mauritian delivery driver who delivers French goods in London from 'French Click' with care, passion and pleasure.

To agriculture and horticulture we can add hospitality, retail, construction and facilities management - without immigration these things just don't happen. With a points-based system based on "high level skills" these unskilled workers who are essential to our economy simply aren't available. This has nothing to do with whether we're in the EU or even with what that malign body calls free movement. Rather it's about our economy and tells us that if someone arrives in Harrogate or Cullingworth with a job to go to, it doesn't matter whether they're from Keighley or Karachi, Basingstoke or Bucharest they should be allowed to go and do that job.

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Learning the language of populism - a lesson for the elite

I've been curious about the way in which language is used to, as the trendies put it, 'other' people - make them out to be pariahs. Most commonly this language is used to validate the prejudice of its user. Take this example:



The anonymous author of this comment doesn't like vaping and explains why (although heaven knows where they got the science from - Daily Telegraph maybe). Which is all fine, even if I disagree. What's interesting is the final sentence - "...it does seem to be the chavs who use them most."

Imagine - and this is Bradford so entirely possible - if most of the vapers this person saw were from our fine city's Asian population. You can be absolutely sure that, not only would the commenter be unlikely to use the term 'paki' but the newspaper would have taken down the comment sharpish had they done so. Yet comment after comment can cheerfully use the term 'chav' without facing any sort of opprobrium.

Now you know me well enough to understand that I don't see this as a problem - people shouldn't be punished for what they say only, should it harm others, for what they do. We've created this idea of 'hate speech', embellished and polished it to the point where things that are merely stupidly unpleasant become 'hateful' - we're encouraged to report all of this stuff to the cops without actually knowing at what point 'hate speech' becomes a 'hate crime'. Worst of all we've begun to use this as justification for considering anyone not sharing the established view of what is 'hateful' as beyond the pale - xenophobes, bigots, ignorant. Or in the words of the commenter - chavs.

As a result of this enforced language moderation, we are shocked when people like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump or Katie Hopkins seem to get through to a load of ordinary people by ignoring what the elite has decided is 'hateful'. We assume that this is hate finding hate and stop there (hoping that there aren't enough of these nasty xenophobes, bigots and ignoramuses to actually get any power - risky given Brexit). We even misunderstand what people hear:

This kind of liberal dismissiveness is common but does not reflect the way that many Trump supporters actually talk about his statements. To use some terms from linguistics that actually may apply to the candidate, we can observe that Trump supporters are highly cognizant that what his words denote (building a wall, for instance) are not as important as what they index (his stance toward the world: that he is against the status quo, that he is willing to offend, that he is not phony, that he is willing to discuss racial animosities that other politicians dance around).

This conforms well to the way in which many in public health believe that, while they are immune to the blandishments of advertising, others (by which they mean those sort of people who use e-cigarettes and go to KFC) are not able to resist. The result being calls for all sorts of advertising bans and marketing restrictions.

If us liberals - and I use this in its proper English sense rather than its corrupted American meaning - are to make our case, we need to understand how folk like Trump, Hopkins and Farage communicate. It's as much about positioning as it is about content. We're familiar with the phrase 'sticking it to the man' but what we've not spotted yet is that we are 'the man'. And this is hard for folk who consider themselves to be bang on trend, caring, socially responsible citizens.

Keven Meagher wrote an article in Labour Uncut that set it out:

You don’t own an Apple Mac. You can’t taste the difference between Guatemalan and Colombian coffee beans. You voted to leave the European Union and you don’t regret it one tiny bit.

You want to buy British and be proud of your country. You like your politicians in suits. You wonder why we can’t just jail or expel Muslim fanatics who hate us.

You drink lager or real ale, not craft beer. If you go out for a meal, it’s to a Harvester pub, not a bijou Vietnamese canteen.

You’ve started shopping in Aldi and Lidl these past few years. You think climate change is overblown. Overseas aid is misspent and the benefits system is a soft touch.

The problem is that plenty of people "of the left" simply failed to get what Meagher was saying. These folk chose to think that he was arguing for an anti-immigrant, anti-union, union flag wrapped policy platform rather than making a plea to change how we talk to people, to learn the lesson of Trump and Farage, to listen to folk rather than lecture them about their failings and inadequacies.

During the referendum campaign I was asked to speak with the Denholme Elders, a group of old people who meet at the village's Mechanics Institute. It was inevitable that the discussion moved to immigration and I made clear that, whatever the outcome of the referendum, we'd still have significant immigration. One woman, not liking what I'd said, told us a story of how her daughter had been insulted and spat at by some young Asian men in Bradford. This tale resulted in nods and murmers of agreement - immigration was a problem.

Now I could have simply moved on and, in the manner of Gordon Brown, ranted about Little Englander bigots once I'd left. Indeed that's how the bulk of the commentariat feel about these situations. How does this help? Isn't it better to say to them - "those young Asian lads aren't immigrants, they were born here and it's their city too - their nasty attack on your daughter is our problem but not something made worse or better by immigration." After a bit of argument back and forth, most people in the room accepted that the bad behaviour and criminality of some Asian lads isn't resolved by stopping future immigration.

Now I'm not suggesting that all these folk have become open borders advocates but they went away having had a conversation - on their terms - about immigration. None of this patronising "how can you think immigration is a bad thing" language that so many use and a recognition that immigration should never be used as a prod to nudge people into changing the fundamentals of their culture. If anyone changes it should be the immigrant not the folk those immigrants have come to live amongst.

We've spent a couple of decades sneering at white working class culture - attacking its diet, its music, its dress and its language. And at the same time we've rammed the celebration of other cultures - food, dance, dress and festival - in the faces of these people whose lifestyle we disparage and dismiss. We need to stop a moment and think what we're doing. And recognise that what we call promoting order, what we call public health, and what we call multiculturalism - all this represents a consistent and unjustified attack on the traditions of England's working class.

The people many of you call xenophobes and bigots, the folk you dismiss as stupid - even morons, are no longer there to be herded. Unless we change our language, recognise the effectiveness of that blunt incorrectness used by Trump, Farage, Hopkins and others, we will see these people continue their support for such populists - they are, after all, the only politicians actually listening to them. The only ones offering anything to the chavs.

We have to learn the language of populism, to be less sensitive, to reject the word police and to start painting - in blunt terms - a picture of a society that celebrates the beery, smokey, loud culture of the chav just as much as it celebrates the cultures of Muslims, Hindus and Jamaicans. And a society that doesn't condemn the simple pleasures of a pint, a fag, a burger and some banter.

....

Why stopping immigration is good politics but lousy policy

****

We need immigration. This shouldn't be a matter of argument or dispute, it should be a matter of fact. Without immigration our society - the civilisation too many claim is threatened by migration - withers and dies.

Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.

Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.

One of the world's oldest and greatest civilisations, Japan is slipping slowly away. Whole abandoned villages, towns populated almost exclusively by the old, shuttered businesses closed from lack of a workforce. Without new blood Japan will die - not a sudden violent shock but a gradual decline to the point where the assets and value of the nation are devoured by the old. Yet Japan still keeps one of the world's strictest immigration systems:

Abe, however, ruled out any significant change to Japan’s closed-door approach to immigration at the UN general assembly in New York in September.

“It is an issue of demography,” he said. “I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

This is the demographic equivalent of tilting at windmills or commanding the tide not to come in - yet it is actively promoted as a policy by politicians eager to exploit people's distrust of migrants, a distrust built on race, religion, culture and language:

“Look at nurses, they believe their income will be cut if we let in Filipinos and Indonesians,” said Katsuyuki Yakushiji, a sociologist at Toyo University in Tokyo. “They also say that these people can’t speak Japanese well and that could be risky. Yet, at the same time, they complain about severe overwork and say we need to add nurses.”

Familiar rhetoric to Europeans and now, tragically for an immigrant culture, in the the USA - short-term fears and self-interest are placed above the fact that there aren't enough people to do the jobs we want done. And that it's not just high skills we need but also old-fashioned labour from people willing to kill chickens, clean lavatories and help old people get in and out of bed.

It's great politics - easy pickings - to wind people up about immigration, to claim that it's damaging our culture or society. But it's lousy policy - we need those immigrants for, as Japan shows us, without them the basis of society, the social compact that forms our civilisation, slowly washes away.

....

It's not for the left to decide what is freedom

Freedom... we're talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother's interrogation
Freedom to live your own life...

A chunk of lyrics from Tom Robinson's 'Power in the Darkness', a song that became a sort of anthem for Rock Against Racism and the birth - or was it a rebirth - for Britain's cultural left. And, you know, I can't disagree with a word in that mantra, that statement of freedoms. As a child of '70s South London the events and culture of Rock Against Racism couldn't be avoided - at school badges sprouted, the radio echoed to a different set of musical sounds, there was a strut about Brixton, West Norwood and Crystal Palace that hadn't been there before.

Yesterday I went to the opening at Bradford's Impressions Gallery of an exhibition of Syd Shelton's photographs of the Rock Against Racism days along with my friend and former colleague, Huw Jones, who sort of famously features in the exhibition as (in his words) the 'token white' in the world's only Asian punk band - Alien Kulture. Now bear in mind that I'm a Tory, indeed I joined the Conservative Party as a teenager in 1976 almost in the teeth of this anti-establishment rock and roll sentiment. Even now, in an audience of now older Rock Against Racism aficionados I'm pretty much an exception. So Sid Shelton can - albeit a little hesitantly - include the Conservative Party in the parade of today's wrongness and racism.

All of which takes me to those lyrics and why they matter to me. Too often we forget that freedom - free speech and free choice - is central to our idea of civilisation. Indeed we trap ourselves in mealy-mouthed justifications of restrictions of speech or choice, always for good reasons never simply to oppress. It's not just concepts like 'hate speech', safe spaces or no platform but also the idea of preventing imports, the demonising of free enterprise and the banning of others' pleasures because we deem them unpleasant, unhealthy or unsightly.

Speech is central to this and we live in a society where the desire to prevent other voices is at risk of being institutionalised. Just as back in the 1970s the voices of black and Asian minorities weren't heard (and still fight for space), today there's a voicelessness about what some call the 'traditional working class'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of racism out there (and that 'traditional working class' is no averse to a bit of it) but there's also a sense of a new excluded group - that 'traditional working class'.

In its slightly clunky sociologist way, The Guardian has spotted this problem. Here's Lisa McKenzie (whose from the same Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining communities where my grandfather started life) talking about the issues:

Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it. Consequently they have stopped listening to politicians and to Westminster and they are doing what every politician fears: they are using their own experiences in judging what is working for and against them.

In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the “stupid”, “ignorant”, and “racist” working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime.

This analysis - reflecting the patronising, dismissive, even uncomfortable response of us middle-class professionals (regardless of our politics) to that traditional working class - cuts close to the bone of the issue. We don't talk about why boys from a white working class background do worst at school and are least likely to go to university, we don't look at how angry many of these pretty ordinary Britons feel left behind and we don't ask the impact of ignoring their culture in favour of a mish-mash of the elite's Britishness with assorted imported cultures. The idea of Englishness is seen as a problem - we are perhaps the only place where many observers see flying the national flag as an act of racist provocation or, in some ways worse, being ignorant and common.

As many readers will know, I have pretty liberal views on immigration but even I can see why many ordinary people are agitated by it. Yes some of the ways in which it's discussed can sound racist but get underneath that and you'll find a real set of concerns that have little to do with a fear of foreigners - frets about homes and schools, worries over jobs, the loss of community facilities like the pub and the post office, isolation, bad policing and a sort of feeling that lots is being done for some other people and nothing for you and yours.

Although Rock Against Racism started with the thoughts of mostly white middle class musicians, anger at the racism of the music establishment, it opened the door to a bunch of working class performers and, in the Ska revival, the first black-white musical fusion (as opposed to appropriation) since the height of the jazz era. It's right that we recall what happened back then but we also need to heed the words from Power in the Darkness and raise the banners of freedom again. Not just in the continuing opposition to racism but in liberating ordinary people from the oppression of the modern state with its nannying, its obsession with supposed anti-social behaviour, its demonising of pleasure and its desire to police your speech, your movement and your choices.

What I object to in all this is that Tom Robinson's presentation of freedom deliberately excludes the right in politics. Millions of ordinary people who will all put their marker down as supporters of freedom and choice are told by the left that their idea of freedom has no place because that freedom includes expropriation of assets, the belittling of wealth and success, and the sustaining of the state as an agent of oppression through advocating punitive taxation.

I'll stand side-by-side with anyone opposing racism, supporting gay rights or making the case for free speech. But when people want to deny the freedom to succeed, to limit the availability of pleasure and to attack the choice that's central to our consumer society then I'll be on the other side of the barricade defending liberty from attack. And when - as we see from the middle-class left time and again - you're dismissive, rude or condemning of the words some ordinary Briton expresses, when you seek to close down what they say because it offends you, then you have become the enemy of freedom. An enemy of the ideals Tom Robinson set out in those lyrics I quoted.

...

The case for immigration...

****

Here's a projection on Japan's population:

Japan's agency responsible for projecting population, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a stunning reduction of population to only 42.9 million residents in 2110. For every three Japanese residents today, there will be one in 2110 according to the National Institute of Population. If this projection is realized, Japan's population would drop to a level not seen since the middle 1890s.

The National Institute of Population projects a population loss to 97.0 million residents by 2050, for an annual population loss rate of 0.7 percent from 2015. By 2100, the population would fall to 49.6 million, for an annual loss rate of 1.3 percent. Over the 95 years from 2015, the annual population loss rate would accelerate from 0.4 percent annually to nearly 1.5 percent.

Now I know there's some folk who rather want humanity to die out (Jeremy Corbyn, for example) but Japan really does face a crisis because for much of the time between now and 2110 that country will be sustaining an ever bigger population of very old people with a smaller and smaller population of active working age people. This is essentially unsustainable. Unless, of course, you're like the UK and the USA and think immigration is rather a good idea.

....

On moving home...

We moved house on Friday. And while is was, in some respects, pretty stressful and just a tad chaotic there are some things that it didn't involve. We didn't need need permission from any sort of public authority to make the move. It was our decision, we negotiated the sales and purchases and made appropriate arrangements to box up all our stuff and shift it to the new house. Arriving at our new place, we were greeted pleasantly (except for one person and in her defence I had parked in her spot), given helpful advice and generally made welcome in our new little community.

We moved because we thought that the home we had was too big, too expensive to run and that we rather wanted to have money to spend on nice stuff rather than gas or electricity bills (not to mention the ever escalating council tax). Others have more pressing reasons to move - civil war, rape, pillage, murder, destruction, destitution, the collapse of an economy. Quite a few just lift their head up from the despair of the life they're living and tell themselves that there's something, somewhere, better.

Right now we're screaming about 'migration'. It is a confused debate flipping from rampant xenophobia to demands that tens of thousands of refugees (or migrants or asylum seekers or whatever we're calling them this week) are allowed into the UK. And that's just the Labour leadership candidates. In the wider world we witness calls for "an Australian-style points system" - the latest panacea to the problem with those people who have very good reasons to move to somewhere else than the war zone or economic catastrophe where they live right now. Or else just endless repetition of the 'we're full' mantra that is too often just a convenient fig leaf for 'we don't want those coloured folk coming over here, we've too many all ready'.

This racism is what drives the ghastly reactions to reports of how London's population is a lot less white than it was in grandma's day (and I can say this because, unlike most white Londoners, my grandma really did live in London back in those days). Why exactly does this matter? How does being a darker skin tone somehow make someone less of a Londoner - or for that matter less of a Mancunian, Scouse or Geordie? Isn't it the case that being English isn't defined by skin colour but by living and contributing to the things that make England great?

If you peel back the skin of Britain's greatness, look under the bonnet of our nation, you'll quickly find that the contribution of people who left somewhere else to make a new life here - whether through flight or that maligned (and I think pretty wonderful) idea, "economic migration". I don't need to make a list, you know the names and the peoples - from Huguenots through Irish, Jews, Spaniards and Italians through to Indians, Jamaicans, Chinese and Ukranians. No-one can say honestly that these peoples haven't contributed to the wonderful nation that is Britain, the great country that is England and the brilliant cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Bradford.

Latterly those new Britons have come from new places - Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Romania and Latvia. Is there any reason - any reason at all - why these newcomers won't make the same positive contribution as the newcomers who've arrived here from across the world in the last thousand years? Yet our debate - right across the political spectrum - seems set on trying to paint today's immigrants as a problem, as unfitted to our society, as exploiters of our goodwill and as corrupters of our fine society.

I do feel we must mind about the impact of new arrivals on a place but this is just the same as the folk in Cullingworth worried that the big new housing development means in 'won't be a village any more'. It will still be a village, a little bigger but still recognisably the place it was. For that national picture we need to do the same - the arrivals add to our nation, to some degree change our nation meaning it isn't quite what it was, but their contribution still adds and make the sustaining of our civilisation possible. It matters that we teach them the history and culture of the place - those who oppose the teaching of English history and English literature merely demonstrate the social and cultural iconoclasm that is multiculturalism.

I moved home. It was a pain but I'm now delightfully settled in the new house. Why do we want to put so many barriers in the way of others who just want to do what I've just done - move home? I hear you saying it's not that same, that somehow moving from Asmara to Penge isn't the same as moving from Basingstoke to Bromley (or as we've just done from one side of Cullingworth to the other). But how exactly is it different except in those divisions we've erected, the borders, barriers and boundaries. And in our distrust of those strangers from across the world with their funny ways, strange food and odd clothes.

I moved home and am treated as a new friend. Too many others are moving - often for the most painful and cruel reasons - and are treated as a threat, a problem, even a curse. This is wrong and diminishes us as a civilised, decent society. We should stop it.

....

Authenticity and the British curry house - the case for immigrant chefs

****

I am, as you all know, not particularly bothered by migration. If I wish to be free to travel where ever, I guess I should allow that same freedom for others. So what follows isn't about the immigration but rather an attempt to get under the existential angst of the British curry house. It seems they might be dying out:

It's often been said that Tikka Masala is the British national dish.

But it might not be for much longer, as figures show two curry houses are closing in Britain each week due to a shortage of chefs.

This crisis is due in part to the retirement of the original wave of immigrants in the 1970s who set up curry houses.

The problem is that the children of South Asian immigrants - perhaps especially the children of those running the takeaways and curry restaurants - really have little interest in working very long hours serving cheap curries to often ungrateful (indeed regularly drunk) customers. They've watched as the older generation worked itself into an early grave, putting up with racism, ignorance and aggression so as to make a half decent living.

The same story went for the traditional (if that's the right word) Chinese takeaway - every town had one but the sons and daughters of the Hong Kong immigrants were just as uninterested in working a 60 hours week of late nights as the sons and daughters of Bangladeshi or Pakistani curry house proprietors. The way in which the business - along with a new generation of Chinese food sellers - has been sustained has been through immigration.

And this is precisely how the Bangladesh Caterers Association frame the problem - they can't recruit people to train here in the UK so need to go to Bangladesh to find the chefs needed to keep the restaurants and takeaways going. All this is happening in a fast food and restaurant market that is changing rapidly - not just with the success of new franchise chains like Nandos but with a new bunch of immigrants from the middle east, from Poland, from Africa and from Southern Europe. Where curry and Chinese had the world to themselves they now compete with Kurds running cafes, polish takeaways and Moroccan/Spanish fusion. Add in Vietnamese, Korean and Greek and there's a real pressure on those existing takeaways and curry houses.

Regardless of the immigration question (and I'd let the chefs in), it strikes me that relying on a stream of new chefs from the other side of the world isn't the most sustainable business model - the Bangladesh Caterers Association might be right about the difficulties in recruiting and training curry chefs here in the UK but this could say more about the job and the conditions than it does about the supply of potential chefs. Indeed, while I'm sure that the mainstream catering business has a good number of immigrant chefs, it's still the case that plenty of British-born people enter into the cheffing business. A business model based on selling cheap takeaway food will struggle where there's upward pressure on wages.

The truth is that, given the proliferation of other takeaways and cheap restaurants (not to mention the street food explosion), there perhaps needs to be a shakeout in the curry house business. The best probably have little to worry about but if a third of the UK's 12,000 or so curry houses closed would it really be a cultural disaster? I can't speak for anywhere other than Bradford but my observation is that, while the 'curry after a night on the lash' market is still there it's far less important than a more regular market including an important market for family dining. And this changes the sort of restaurants - we're less keen on tatty flock wallpaper and cheap photos of the Taj Mahal preferring places that meet the clean, sharp and smart image of other restaurants. But one thing we still demand is authenticity.

Staffing has always been a dilemma for restaurants offering culturally-specific cuisine. It's not that only a Bangladeshi can cook a biryani but that the customer is looking for authenticity - eating a curry cooked by a Polish woman and served by a Latvian waiter feels wrong even if the food is great. And this means that, if we want our rogan josh served by a slightly surly young Asian and our pasta carbonara from a tight-trousered Italian holding an outsized pepper pot, we have a allow people to come to Britain to meet this need (given we know that there aren't enough British-born Asians or Italians to satisfy our demand for authenticity).

....

"Bloody foreigners" is a lousy case for leaving the EU - I fear this will be the core of the 'out' campaign

****

European immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2000 have contributed more than £20bn to UK public finances between 2001 and 2011. Moreover, they have endowed the country with productive human capital that would have cost the UK £6.8bn in spending on education.

Over the period from 2001 to 2011, European immigrants from the EU-15 countries contributed 64% more in taxes than they received in benefits. Immigrants from the Central and East European ‘accession’ countries (the ‘A10’) contributed 12% more than they received.

There are very good reasons for leaving the European Union. And, right now, that is how I expect to vote come the referendum. This doesn't mean my mind is closed on the matter but rather that any renegotiation has to produce some really big changes for me to vote any other way. But in saying this I want to be pretty clear that my reasons for opposing the EU are not about 'sovereignty', 'nationhood', 'British values' or any of the usual tosh we see rolled out by some opponents. Nor is my opposition based on the fact that lots of great, hard-working people have come to make their home in Britain.

My opposition to the EU is for the following reasons - it makes us poorer, it is unaccountable, it restricts my liberty, and it prevent Britain from having any real influence over trade or international business. I'd also add that - as we see with Greece - the EU is undemocratic and authoritarian caring little about anything except the stability of its polity and certainly nothing for the ordinary citizen.

The EU is a protectionist ramp, something that only serves the interests of a limited number of producers rather than the mass of the population. Yet we line up enthusiastically behind its protectionism - cheering as Cornish Pasties are protected and nodding sagely at the continuation of subsidies for unsustainable upland farming. Here's an example from Tate & Lyle:

Tate & Lyle Sugars said its production has fallen from 1.1m tonnes of sugar to about 600,000 since 2009. The company said the slump began when the EU began scaling back its market regulation of beet sugar rather than the cane sugar that the firm imports.

“If we carry on down this route it puts our business and the jobs here under real threat,” said Gerald Mason, head of T&L Sugars in the UK. “We see the Government’s renegotiation as the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the last chance if you like, to keep what’s left.”

He said EU regulations are the “single biggest impact on our business”. The EU is unleashing Europe’s beet farmers in 2017 by removing a production cap, in a move that is expected to push down prices 15pc by 2020. Farmers will be subsidised to counteract this drop, while cane sugar imports continue to face tariffs of up to €339 (£246) per tonne.

We the taxpayers of Europe are paying more for our sugar than we need to do because more efficient sugar producers in places like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have a huge tariff slapped on their product so as to ensure that beet farmers in Europe are protected. Worse still us taxpayers then subsidise those beet farmers because they are making less money now the EU lets them produce more. We get taxed for the privilege of having more expensive food.

Every UK government since 1979 has promised to 'reform' the Common Agricultural Policy. And loads of tinkering with the policy has taken place since - quotas replace tariffs, one subsidy replaces another subsidy, and some farmers get paid regardless of whether they actually do any farming. And, I guess, it's not a huge deal for most of us most of the time.

But think for a second about those polices. Add to this the policy of distributing agricultural surplus in the form of food 'aid'. Plus anti-dumping rules that mean cheaper solar panels are excluded (what sort of contribution to saving the planet is this). And the negotiation of bilateral agreements that are designed to serve those protected industries at the cost of economic development in Africa and Asia. Not only does the EU make Europeans poorer but it also makes Africans and Indians poorer too (and, as an aside, more likely to take huge risks coming here on leaky boats).

Half of what the EU does is about maintaining this protection - it is the central purpose for much of its bureaucracy and the primary purpose of most lobbyists in Brussels and Strasbourg. The other half of the EU is doing what it calls "harmonisation" - making sure that our rules don't give any advantage to home producers within the single market. And the trend has always been for that harmonisation to be upwards - adding regulations in places where there are none rather than reducing regulations where there are too many.

Finally there are some very bad reasons for leaving the EU. I will repeat again that my opposition to the EU is not about migration. Indeed, if anything about the EU is worthy of celebration then it is the fact that I can go and ply my trade anywhere across 27 countries without daft restrictions and constraints (unless of course I'm a ski instructor wanting to work in France). As can people from right across the continent - including a load who come here and contribute to the success of our economy.

What worries me is that, rather than making the very strong case that Britain will be richer and happier outside the EU, we'll end up with a load of scaremongering about foreigners coming here or foreigners buying up our businesses, or foreigners making our laws, or foreigners over-ruling our courts. Were that the only argument for leaving the EU I would be voting to stay in. It isn't so I'll most likely vote to leave.

....

Brotherhood. A political story.

So you arrive in a foreign country. A 'welcome to some but not to others' arrival. You've a few words of the language remembered from the smattering of English lessons you received in your all too brief elementary education. And you've a job. A dirty, unpleasant, poorly paid and anti-social job. But a job nonetheless and a better one than you'd have had back in dusty, crowded and poverty-ridden Mirpur.

The factory helps find you a place to live and you move in - sharing the drafty, unheated and damp terraced house with a dozen other workers. All men and all recently arrived from places not so far from where you came from. You miss your wife and the two little kids but keep telling them (when you can afford to send a letter or make an incredibly expensive phone call) that it's great, that England's a good place and will provide a better life for all the family. You don't mention the hacking cough from the factory, the routine racial abuse and that the food is awful. Back home they have to believe you made the right decision.

After a year or two, you find you're helping other new arrivals - men coming from your home village - to settle in. Showing them the ropes, how Bradford works, where to shop and where to get somewhere to live that doesn't rip you off. In the factory, you help those men get adjusted, protecting them from the worst that the supervisors throw at all the immigrant workers. So when they've got the routine down all the men can, with their heads down, get on with the work.

One day the big, loud man who's something to do with the Union (the Union you were told to join by one of the white day shift workers) came into the canteen. "Hey, Mohammed, can I have a word?" the man shouts. And you have that word - he wants you to be a shop steward, to "represent your lot - you speak the language and we need you on board."

So you become a union man, you sit on the works committee, and you do what you're asked - representing the concerns of the men from Mirpur working the night shift. Not long after you - along with a lot of others - decide to bring the family over. There's a terrace to rent and you can set up - get some decent home cooking rather than the cafe food you've been eating for the past few years. The family arrives and joins the growing community - a community with a mosque, a little restaurant and the shop selling vegetables, spices and such that Imran Akhtar opened.

You've not paid much attention to politics and elections. They came and went - posters, leaflets and the loud union man sounding off about "f*****g Tories". It didn't mean much to you but you knew the union guys were angry because those Tories were running the Council and "they don't care about working men like you, Mohammed". But then, one day, the loud union man came to see you and brought another man, a man in a suit.

"Mohammed," the union man says, "your community are important to us now." It seems that, with the influx of workers, the arrival of families and the growing up of children, the Mirpuri people now had enough votes to make a difference. And the bloke in the suit - he was from the Labour Party - wants you to stand for election as a councillor. And because you want to represent the men and women in your growing community, you agree. It's not an ideological decision, you're not a socialist, but the Labour Party asked and why not?

To get elected you concentrate on your family, on the network of friends and connections from back home - the biraderi, a brotherhood, as some call it. You know that the heads of families can make sure their wives, sons, daughters, nephews and nieces vote for you - you've helped them out, now it's time for them to return the favour.

You get elected. And soon are joined by other Mirpuri councillors - all Labour - who've done the same. Different networks, different families, different biraderi but the same process and the same reason for being involved.

This story - a story repeated by every immigrant group in one way or another - is the story of how family, clan, caste and a network of historic links help determine elections in Bradford. Some want to cast those biraderi in a bad light - just as, in another time and place, the same was said about the South London 'Irish mafia', about Catholic Priests telling congregations who to vote for and about the link between the Town Hall and a certain sort of businessman. There will come a time when those links stop mattering quite so much, when elections will become more 'normal', and when it won't be a dreadful thing if a son or daughter goes against fathers and uncles in the way they vote.

But in the meantime those biraderi matter. And because they matter we should respect them, where they came from and why they are important in our politics. Ideologues might cringe at people voting for someone because they're family, friend, caste or clan but is that really a worse reason for political choice? Some would say it's more honest, honourable and gets a better politician. Whatever the right or wrong in this though, it remains a fact of immigrant life - and will be so for those new immigrant groups, Poles, Somalis, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds. They will all have their 'community leaders' because these people are essential to the integration and inclusion of their community into the life of our nation- and politics, for all its faults, is part of our nation!

....

Taking us for mugs - Labour, immigration and a panic about kippers

Seeing this delightful mug I thought back through all my years of active involvement in politics - from smuggling Monday Club Tory, Sir Patrick Wall into a meeting of Hull students (in his own constituency) through any number of local and national elections all of which have featured at some point the implication, nay insinuation, that saying we need to 'control' immigration is tantamount to racism. Indeed that we didn't really mean 'control immigration' but rather that this was code for something worse, something nasty and sinister, something racist. Saying we needed less immigration was always portrayed by Labour as but a short step from 'send the blacks home' or some other similarly unpleasant and bigoted policy.

That was until UKIP arrived on the scene. Up to this point Labour had stuck to its guns on immigration - pointing out that, mostly and most of the time, it's good for the nation and good for the economy. Whatever we may have thought about the issue, Labour's approach and its policy while in government was very clear - even when confronted with popular concerns about too much immigration:

It is the duty of government to deal with the issues of both asylum and immigration. But they should not be exploited by a politics that, in desperation, seeks refuge in them.

There is a position around which this country can unify; that we continue to root out abuse of the asylum system, but give a place to genuine refugees; that we ensure immigration controls are effective so that the many who come, rightly and necessarily, for our economy, to work, study or visit here can do so; but that those who stay illegally are removed; but that we never use these issues as a political weapon, an instrument of division and discord.

This view - that people come here 'rightly and necessarily' - was widely supported across the country and especially welcomed by a business community struggling for skilled recruits. In simple terms Labour was pro-immigration but against the abuse of the system. Today this has changed - the Party's position (albeit a little vague) has shifted noticeably away from 'follow the rules, play by the system, and you're welcome' towards the point where control - for which we will always read reduce the numbers - outweighs and rational discussion of migration. Labour is in a panic about kippers.

Labour got things wrong on immigration in the past. But Ed Miliband has set out a new approach: controlling immigration and controlling its impacts on local communities. Britain needs immigration rules that are tough and fair.

The Tories have let people down on immigration. David Cameron promised to get immigration down to the tens of thousands, “no ifs, no buts”, but net migration is rising, not falling. It’s now at 260,000, higher than it was when David Cameron walked into Number Ten, and the Tories’ target is in tatters.

The position here is rather different - it is the Conservatives that have failed because of those (rather dumb) net migration targets and Labour will, by implication, stop the tide. But the real drive in the Labour Party for this dramatic shift in immigration policy hasn't been some sort of Damascene conversion - or maybe just a cynical one - but rather the threat perceived in some Labour heartlands from UKIP.

Ukip are not about to overturn dozens of Labour’s northern heartlands. But the result in Heywood is further evidence of the threat that Ukip poses Labour. It is one rooted in much more than the charisma of Mr Farage, but the disconnect between Labour (and all main parties) and the working-class. In 1979, there were 98 manual workers and 21 people who worked primarily in politics in Parliament. In 2010, 25 manual workers were elected to Westminster - and 90 people who had worked primarily in politics before becoming an MP. Average turnout was just 58 per cent in Labour’s 100 safest seats in 2010.

I say the threat is perceived because I see little prospect of UKIP winning any seats - they've an outside chance in Grimsby but it's a long shot - from Labour in May. But Labour activists feel the challenge - the local councillors in Bradford who saw their majorities in safe seats dwindle to a handful, the activists who get berated by ex-Labour UKIP supporters at the working man's club or the trade unionists reporting how many of their manual labour members are making UKIP sort of noises at work.

Last year in Rotherham UKIP won 10 seats in that classic Labour rotten borough of Rotherham. We know the reasons but we overlook the wider reality - across those rotten boroughs like Barnsley, Wakefield and Doncaster UKIP moved into second place and became the main challenger to Labour. And the traditional response to the "far right" (as Labour folk insist on calling nationalists) didn't work. People didn't think UKIP were racist - or at least no more racist than the Tories - and did think they had a point about immigrants, about political correctness and about local community.

The Labour people in these places had never been challenged. Or rather the challenge came from that nice bloke who owns a garage and always stands for the Conservatives. Now Labour felt threatened - branch meetings were dominated by people talking about what UKIP were doing. The poor quality (if shiny) leaflets from that party were give to councillors by folk with slightly shaking hands - "look, look - what are we going to do" exclaims the leaflet-finder. The MP is involved and, while reassuring local activists, heads off to London where he meets others with the same tales.

"We have to respond" these MPs say. "We can't be caught out on immigration. UKIP can win where the Tories never could". Party strategists (knowing full well that there's little or no chance of UKIP winning and that it's the Tories and SNP that Labour should worry about) sooth fretful MPs and dutifully inform higher-ups about their concerns. With the result that proper working-class policies are developed about 'controlling immigration' - local campaigners can point to the policy and persuade those disgruntled folk in Rawmarsh or Royton that they're best sticking with Labour.

Plus a mug. A mug that means people like me can point to Labour and say "you bunch of no good, low down hypocrites - after all those years of attacking Conservatives for wanting to control immigration, you come up with a policy important enough for you to emblazon it on a mug."

Or as someone called it - the racist mug.

The odd thing is that Labour know the numbers. They know they're not threatened by UKIP - indeed that in some places that Party's support holding up increases the chances of Labour winning. But because lots of ill-informed and panicky local councillors and activists are on about it, the Party has placed immigration controls at the heart of its election campaign. And of course on that mug.

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We know what happens when a developed nation has no immigration

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We know the answer to this because of Japan - here's a report in New Geography:

Japan’s working-age population (15-64) peaked in 1995, while the United States’ has grown 21% since then. The projections for Japan are alarming: its working-age population will drop from 79 million today to less than 52 million in 2050, according to the Stanford Institute on Longevity.

Since hitting a peak of 128 million in 2010, Japan’s overall population has dropped three years in a row. These trends all but guarantee the long-term decline of the Japanese economy and its society.

Bear in mind that Japan's population is 127 million today - it will fall but the precise figures are hard to predict because of longevity. The New Geography article sets out some of the consequences:

...by 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will have more people over 80 than under 15, according to U.N. projections. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of whom almost 40% will be 65 or older.

Put simply Japan can't afford to do this. It can barely afford the cost of health and care today. And this is the reason why Japan's economy is struggling. Moreover, it points to the reason why the UK, Germany and the USA stand an outside chance of affording health and social care costs at least for the time being. We have had relatively open borders allowing us to maintain the size of our working age populations - without this immigration we would be facing the same time bomb as Japan faces.

It's not just a fiscal time bomb it's a social one too:

Japan’s grim demography is also leading to tragic ends for some elderly. With fewer children to take care of elderly parents, there has been a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi, or “lonely deaths” among the aged, unmarried, and childless. Given the current trends, this can only become more commonplace over time.

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Simon Danczuk has a point about immigration and wages - just not a very good one

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Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale and a rare working-class voice in the Labour Party has written a passionate - almost emotional - piece about the effect of immigration on working-class communities:

That many of these job opportunities have all but disappeared to some working class Britons in parts of the country worries me greatly. As a Labour MP, I strongly believe my party should be forever beating a loud drum about the value of work, about instilling a strong work ethic into people and about how character and achievement comes from hard work. My fear is that an increased reliance on cheap migrant labour to drive some sectors in our economy is chipping away at a bedrock of working class pride, allowing a once strong work ethic to drain away and it’s being done with a comfortable and badly misinformed political consensus. 

I understand this - I've asked on many occasions why all of the 400+ jobs killing chickens in my ward are held by immigrants when the rates of unemployment in Bradford remain stubbornly high. How is it that someone will come all the way from Slovakia or Romania to do a minimum wage job in Bradford but that city's home grown unemployed can't or won't take those jobs?

But we do need to recognise the fact that, across the whole economy, immigration has a positive effect on wage levels:

The research looks at the period from 1997 to 2005 and finds evidence of an overall positive impact of immigration on the wages of native born workers, although the magnitude of the effect is modest. Immigration during these years contributed about one twentieth of the average three percent annual growth in real wages.

So we get economic benefit from immigration - every study finds this to be true - but, as with every aspect of economic development, while the economy may benefit there are some losers within that economy:

“Economic theory shows us that immigration can provide a net boost to wages if there is a difference in the skills offered by native and immigrant workers. However, across the whole spectrum of wages it is impossible for everybody to benefit. Some workers will see a gain, others a loss.” 

Danczuk recognises this fact when he comments on the electricians and bar managers undercut by competition from immigrant. And it's important that we recognise how this can effect those working-class communities Danczuk is writing about. However, we have to ask some tricky questions here, with the biggest question being whether we want to forgo the positive economic benefits of immigration for the whole economy because there are some losers? We might also consider those broader societal issues of cohesion and social capital in answering these questions.

We could introduce an essentially protectionist policy - keeping out immigrants that compete with those working-class folk. I say protectionist because it's not really any different from excluding the goods that the cheap labour could make if it stayed in Romania or India. But protectionism produces losers too - we just replace one set for another.

Or we could find a way - some of that much vaunted redistribution - to ensure that the working-class communities in places like Rochdale don't suffer lower wages because of immigration. Partly this is about the level of minimum wages but it's also about taxation and about creating new opportunities for work that lift those communities out from low skill, low wage work.

Simon Danczuk's complaint also reflects a changing world. Those traditional working-class communities get fewer and smaller with each generation, the new jobs aren't unskilled labouring but a service sector jobs. For sure, working in a call centre is probably a pretty soul-destroying job but is it really any different from the dangerous, dirty drudgery that typified the work of past generations? The truth is that native-born folk don't take those bar jobs, labouring jobs and jobs killing chickens because they don't have to. This isn't the demise of the work ethic but simply that there are jobs that pay just as well in warm offices and shops. The decline of traditional working-class jobs can't be laid at the door of the immigrant.

Finally the work ethic (not a concept I'm a special fan of) isn't defined by a litany of pain or suffering but by that thing Danczuk has proved - if you put the effort in, learn and take the opportunities life throws at you, you've more chance of succeeding economically. And that's what that twenty-something Slovakia shows by being prepared to cross a continent to get a shot at a better future.

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Why everyone is right about immigration...

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City-AM published a piece of mapping showing - or purporting to show - the lack of relationship between high levels of immigration and UKIP voting habits.

The results are similar across England and Wales, with Ukip's key messages on Europe and immigration hitting hardest in the areas with the fewest immigrants. 

Now I could quibble with the conclusions made about the map since the Boston area clearly shows some of the highest proportions of residents with a non-British nationality and UKIP is pretty strong there - it's one of the places where they've a better than evens chance of winning in next year's general election.

But this isn't the point I want to make. Rather I want to argue that only relatively small numbers of immigrants are needed to alter people's perceptions of immigration. So we'll start with this statement from the article accompanying the maps:

Ukip's first elected MP, Douglas Carswell, represents the coastal seat of Clacton, where residents with a non-British nationality make up between one and three per cent of the population.

Clacton's electorate is 67,447 - is 1-3% of these people are not UK citizens that's 1349 adults, Add in children and we've between two and three thousand immigrants in Clacton. I'm going to guess that these immigrants are concentrated in the parts of the constituency with low cost housing, often (and this is especially true of seaside towns) close to the centre of town. There'll be a shop saying 'Polski Sklep' or similar that caters for the community. One of the pubs in town will become a gathering place and there'll be a collection of lurid and overblown stories about crime or violence. Someone, somewhere will say the town is being 'swamped' by 'these people'.

So while folk like me who say that immigration is far less of a problem than people make out are right, it's also true that these perceptions - the impact of immigrants on how people see a place - are true. People do see that their town has changed, and don't always see that change as being for the best. And we shouldn't dismiss such botheration as 'xenophobia' or 'racism' or those who express concerns as narrow-minded little Englanders (or whatever chosen pejorative us who know better have selected).

If there is a solution then it lies in getting to know the immigrant, in breaking out from the 'Parallel Lives' situation that described Bradford after the riots of 2001. Now I think a good deal of the onus here is on the immigrant to respect local culture, mores and rules - it is completely unreasonable for us to be expected to change the way we talk, act or otherwise behave so as to accommodate immigrants. But this also means that one of those old customs - being a good and welcoming host - applies. And this is down to us who already live here.

Three years ago I wrote about the village where I live:

Friday night, Cullingworth Conservative Club and it's quite busy. There are a few blokes who've chosen to watch the rugby here rather than at home as well as the usual Friday night collection. Some people are playing dominoes in the corner, others are playing snooker and the rest are sitting or standing to talk and drink.

All very typical of that English culture which presents such a barrier to those from different cultures we might say. But let me invite you to take a little closer look - and to discover why the separate development theory of multiculturalism was wrong.

Stood, pint in hand, with the rugby watchers is Manu - newsagent, Parish Councillor, avid Bradford City fan. Across the lounge sits another middle-aged Asian lady with her friend - her white, bottle-blonde friend. Occasional side conversations are held between her and others passing by - some older, some younger. Friendly exchanges about shared experiences in village, mutual acquaintances and other such matters of moment.

Among the domino players is Pete - Chinese takeaway owner and former ping-pong player. Pete's also on the club committee and, while his accent's a bit impenetrable after a few lager & blackcurrants, he's as much part of the Club and the village as anyone else.

I'm pretty sure that, if I put my head round the corner past the one-armed bandit, there'll be a selection of the Brown clan - mostly third or fourth generation in the village and varying in colour from dark brown to a good sun tan. And sitting with them will be friends and neighbours, girlfriends and boyfriends - also native to the village but with a paler hue.

And there will be others less noticeable among the crowd. People whose parents arrived after the war from Eastern Europe, for example. Beyond the Club, there's a Muslim lady who's our GP, there's 'Smiler' who owns the general store and many others who - like me - aren't from the village. Yet we seem to get along alright. There aren't all that many fights - and these won't usually result from racism.

This is the sort of world we should aspire to and it isn't served by wanting to stop all immigration now nor is it helped by telling anyone who expresses worries about immigration that they're thick xenophobic racists.

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