With mass immigration no one feels at home
Gordon Brown now says he wants "British jobs for British workers".
Over the past 10 years he worked flat out to ensure that one particular British job would go to one particular Scottish worker, and he has at last succeeded. But in other respects, his recently declared ambition is failing.
The Government Mr Brown now leads has presided over by far the largest immigration in our history.
In 1996, the last full year of Conservative government, the official projection for net immigration was 65,000 a year.
This September, the Office of National Statistics revised its projection from 145,000 a year to 190,000.
Gross immigration since 1997 has been 4.4 million, net immigration 1.6 million.
In May 2004, as Frank Field remembers below, the Government predicted that between 5,000 and 13,000 immigrants from the Eastern European countries newly admitted to the European Union would arrive.
More than 600,000 came. This week, the Government confessed that it was 300,000 out in its figures for foreign workers: 1.1 million have arrived since 1997, not 800,000.
It also admitted that 52 per cent of the new jobs in this period have gone to immigrants and that the number of British citizens in work is falling.
Although the Government has lost control, people should not conclude that it did not intend what has happened.
It does not know the figures because it did not really want to know them: it got rid of the system of counting people in and counting people out and noting the difference between the two. Its only current means of knowing is something called the International Passenger Survey, which is a mere random questionnaire.
As soon as Labour came into office in 1997, in deference to its voters of Indian and Pakistani origin, it relaxed the rules of immigration on grounds of marriage.
It passed the Human Rights Act, which gives immigrants an effective automatic right to welfare benefits and makes it much harder to deport them, even when they are criminal.
Labour then accepted asylum-seekers, self-defined, in unprecedentedly large numbers.
When the outcry against this became too great, the Government hugely increased the annual number of work permits instead. As David Cameron pointed out this week, fewer than 10 per cent of those applying for work permit extensions are refused, and grants of permanent settlement in this country have trebled since 1996.
So it would be fair to say, despite Mr Brown's recent almost BNP rhetoric about British workers, that what has happened is what the Government wanted.
You can tell this is the case, also, by the propaganda.
Our entire social, charitable, cultural and educational policy has had built into it the idea that "diversity" is "vibrant" and to be "celebrated", and that ethnic minority status takes you to the top of the queue for public money. If you want a grant, make sure that black and brown faces smile out of your literature.
Greg Dyke, the New-Labour-supporting (yes, once upon a time) Director-General of the BBC, described his corporation as "horribly white".
The main New Labour think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, chose this week to publish a report which said that Christmas should be removed from all public notice because of its divisive effect upon other faith groups.
The accumulated weight of this propaganda crushed opposition.
The Conservative Party was put beyond the pale whenever it mentioned immigration unfavourably.
For 10 years now, the police have been branded "institutionally racist". The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, got his job and held it, even in the face of the worst terrorism ever seen in the capital, by repeating the pieties of multiculturalism. Only now is he on the verge of being brought down – by Health and Safety. At last the New Labour cultural revolution is starting to eat its own.
Just as we look back on the Seventies as a time when politicians got everything wrong about industrial relations, so, I think, we shall look back on the past 10 years as a time of craziness about immigration.
It was certainly not crazy to argue that immigration can bring benefit. There is no serious country in the Western world which does not have quite large numbers of immigrants. Immigration is an inevitable feature of the exchange of ideas, goods, services and people which goes with modern life. Stop it absolutely, and you damage freedom, trade, tourism, university education, the arts, restaurants, and large parts of the National Health Service.
And when the boot is on the other foot, and we British, as we now do in large numbers, want to go abroad to work or to retire, we think that this is perfectly compatible both with Britishness and with respect for the country in which we settle. We would be rightly angry if other countries shut their doors against us.
It is also true that immigration can broaden the mind of the host.
The recent Polish influx has made Britain a more Catholic country than at any time since the Reformation. A century ago, this would have caused riots in the streets. Today, few would see it as a serious problem.
The craziness consists in thinking that we can accept any number of new people without demanding anything of them, and yet leave the idea of "we" undamaged. To anyone who is not an extreme economic liberal, or a Western-hating Marxist, or a euro-fanatic, the idea of a nation is intrinsic to other ideas we care about – culture, identity, neighbourliness, community.
If we are decent people, we do not hate the idea that newcomers can join us. But we want the place we live in to be more than a populated space, especially an over-populated space. We want it to be home.
How can it easily be home – for us, or for them – when, as is now the case, 450,000 children in British primary schools do not have English as a first language? How can it, emotionally or even physically, be home for the indigenous poor if the newcomers move ahead of them in the council housing queue?
The craziness also damages immigrants, when they come too fast and, in the case of some minorities, furious. Far from integrating, they close in on themselves. Far from wanting to be British, they seek salvation in the assertion of ethnic or religious identity.
This week, Policy Exchange, the think tank of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, The Hijacking of British Islam, of the literature to be found on the premises of more than 100 mosques and Islamic institutions in this country. In 25 per cent, extremist literature was found. One of its great themes is the absolute wickedness of Western society. In the King Fahad Academy in Acton, our researchers picked up a school book produced by our "allies", the Saudis. Divine Unity explains to pupils the "great requirements for hating the unbelievers". They must shun local celebrations such as Christmas.
They must not sing or dance or go to films or observe the Western calendar. The book emphasises the "impermissibility of congratulating them [unbelievers] or offering them condolences" because, if that happens, the "love towards them will become firm".
When we published, the Muslim Council of Britain defended such books by saying that it was not illegal to print anti-Western material. No, but if people preach "Hate thy neighbour", and if they are defended when they do so by the body that says it speaks for a community of perhaps two million people, who can say that our national cohesion, even our basic security, is assured?
And if we cannot say that, how can we feel at home with Labour's mass immigration?