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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Migrants on benefits, mosquitoes, arts funding and other links you'll like

Spooky Bradford

"I didn't even know I could get benefits" - a reality check on migrants and the benefits system

“And actually it doesn’t bother me, all this immigration debate. I’m too busy. I work full time; I have three kids. But nobody I know came here for benefits and I don’t think not getting them will stop anyone coming. Maybe one or two. There’s always someone. But I know many, many more British people who live on benefits than east Europeans.”

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Kill all the mosquitoes

"Mosquitoes spread Malaria, Chikungunya, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, a variety of forms of encephalitis (Eastern Equine Encephalitis, St. Louis Encephalitis, LaCrosse Encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, Western Equine Encephalitis, and others), West Nile virus, Rift Valley Fever, Elephantiasis, Epidemic Polyarthritis, Ross River Fever, Bwamba fever, and dozens more."

So exterminate them - all of them

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So you don't do politics? Think again.

"Politics is omnipresent wherever humans negotiate over power and governance. We speak of “office politics” or “university politics,” and those phrases are not mere metaphors. Our negotiations with friends are a form of politics as well, as we figure out where to go out to eat or what show to see. Our romantic and familial relationships are full of similar negotiations about language, persuasion, power, and mutual consent. To say we “don’t do politics” is to have a narrow notion, in Ostrom’s view, of what constitutes being a citizen in a society where democracy is a feature of so many institutions."

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Virtue signalling as conspicuous consumption.

"Rather than trying to one-up one another by buying Bentleys, Rolexes and fur coats, the modern social climber is more likely to try and show their ‘authenticity’ with virtue signalling by having the correct opinions on music and politics and making sure their coffee is sourced ethically, the research says."

...interesting and challenging

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Nothing new about retailing as performance (ask any market trader) - and it's back...

One of the key themes emerging from the presentations was that creating face-to-face customer experiences is vital to retailers not only because of the value to audiences in-store but also because of the huge value of customers sharing their experience across social media platforms. Sophie Turton from eConsultancy, who spoke at one of the learning talks, noted that:

“Instead of creating content, retailers should be creating opportunities for content creation – instagrammable moments, inspiring experiences.”

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The Urbanophile on Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age'

"The creation of the buffered self had consequences, however. By disconnecting us from the world, and draining the world of meanings, the buffered self creates a sense of improverished existence. That is to say, it produces the pervasive modern sense of malaise long commented on by Freud and others. But whereas Freud saw malaise as the inevitable byproduct of the sense of guilt necessary to make civilization possible, for Taylor it is rooted specifically in Western modernity’s sense of the buffered self."

Fabulous stuff.

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And how all the arts funding still goes to London:

The report also highlights that Arts Council England’s decision to move an extra 5% of Lottery funds outside London amounts only to an “improvement outside London of 25p per head”.

Its Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital report in 2013 also claimed that ACE was allocating more than five times as much spending per resident to London organisations as those outside the capital in 2012/13.

Enjoy!!

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.

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The lesson we should take from Calais - prohibition doesn't work

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We have banned them from entering the country. We have built walls and fences. We have deployed cameras. And armed police abound. Yet still they come:

Around 4,000 people have stormed fences and desperately tried to clamber on trains bound for Kent in the past three days - a deadly gamble that has allowed at least 150 to get to Britain but also claimed the lives of nine people.

Migrants have said that watching their friends die will not stop them trying to get to the UK with one saying: 'It's England or death'.

We can make all sorts of assumptions about the situation, about why these (mostly) men are swarming around the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, clambering onto and into trucks, and taking the most extreme risks to get to England. What is abundantly clear is that building fences, throwing up walls and arming the cops is not enough to keep them out. Let's also get straight that sending in troops won't keep them out either.

It won't win me any friends saying this but so long as our strategy for preventing refugees and migrants from entering the UK is a barrier - our contribution to managing the wider problem of the world's population displacement - we will see repeated examples of what's going on in and around Calais. Just as we know from booze and drugs, prohibition is ineffective and difficult to enforce.

Let's assume for a minute that all the migrants wanting to come to the UK are going to ask for asylum when they arrive. Do we not have a process for determining whether a claim for asylum is genuine? Complete with an appeal system, special courts and hostels? Wouldn't it be better to use that, now pretty well tested, approach to managing the process? After all we know it's working:

The man is the first individual confirmed to have been repatriated through a new removals programme that seeks to take advantage of recent legal judgments and changes to UK immigration policy, which mean that Somalis seeking asylum must successfully prove that they face a specific threat, rather than simply being at risk from indiscriminate violence.

There's a huge international problem that we are choosing to squeeze into one localised symptom of displacement created by a wrong-headed refusal to adopt a sensible approach when faced with ignorant, borderline racist nonsense in the tabloid newspapers. If we were looking to process migrants, establish those with a case and deport the rest - putting resource into a practical response rather than fences or guns - we might have a chance of getting a grip. So long as our response is prohibition the cost of containment will keep rising as migrants seek - and find - new ways round the barrier.

It isn't for reasons of humanitarianism that we need to change our policy around entry, it's for the simple and practical reason that the current approach - de facto prohibition - isn't working. We urgently need a system that allows the existing process dealing with migration and asylum to operate properly rather than spending ever larger sums grandstanding over camps around Calais.

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Thoughts on driving through Harehills....

There I was driving through Harehills and I realised what it was that makes it such an interesting place.

But first a little background.

I’d been to a neighbourhood forum in the village at which – as is common at these events – the subject of traffic had arisen. A debate about parking enforcement, traffic calming, speed limits and the evilness of the lorry took place. A largely inconclusive debate.

A day or two later I was recounting this meeting to Kathryn (we do talk about the sexiest things) and she commented along these lines:

Why do we spend money on all these things? Can’t people just look out, take care and act like grown ups.

My words were lost – I could think of little to justify Bradford Council spending thousands (bearing in mind that ‘a thousand’ is roughly speaking the average council tax in the City) on further ‘interventions’ aimed at managing the traffic and, just maybe, improving road safety. In a place where there’s been no injury accident in 20 years.

Fast forward to today when I’m driving through Harehills.

I used to get annoyed by the road environment in these inner city places. But now I see it as just people getting on with their busy lives (and, despite the poverty, there’s a load of business going on). I watch smiling as the young man parks right on the lights, on a double yellow line, helps his elderly mum out of the car and then walks into the shop with her. There’s an Asian lady clutching two small children by the hand hovering in the centre of this busy road. And there’s a complete disregard for yellow lines, one way signs and all the controls of modern traffic management.

Here we see cars double parked. A couple of young Iraqis or Kurds are having an animated conversation while blocking the traffic from a side road. And there’s a load of great shops to cast the eye over – including the wonderfully named Noshi Food Store.

This is a properly busy place where people know there are risks – after all plenty of them ran a few risks to get to Leeds in the first place. And the two kids hanging onto that Asian lady’s hands will grow up to double park, drive too fast and hold animated conversations while holding up the traffic. But those kids – and some of the migrant and refugee folk arriving in Harehills – will also take other risks. They’ll start businesses, risk their own time and capital on the possibility of success. And a few will succeed – will make millions and will contribute more to our economy than the meagre pittance we shell out for them in support when they arrive.

And this is a contrast to the kids in the village. Carefully protected, coddled even. Protected from risks and surrounded by adults who tell them something or other isn’t safe, is not allowed, might be dangerous, will make them ill or will be frowned on by the neighbours. These kids – or most of them – will be fine. They’ll avoid risks like they’re told – not smoking, drinking only moderately, eating a healthy diet, getting an education. And then they’ll do what I did – get a job where they don’t need to take risks, where they can earn a living safely. For many they’ll wonder one day – perhaps like I do at 50 – why they didn’t take risks. Didn’t start that business. Put off trekking through the Andes. Bought a Toyota rather than a great big pick up.

The kids in Harehills don’t have that luxury. For them it’s take risks and have a chance of getting out of poverty. Or else a life of poverty. And they’ve been educated in risks at their mother’s knee (in the middle of Roundhay Road as well), at school and in the life of the streets where their life is played out.

And one day the kids from the village will wonder why those Kurds, Iraqis, Persians, Zimbabweans, Bangladeshis and Congolese have BMWs, big electric gates and flash watches.

It will be because they took the risks.

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