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The Tory policy that Mr Major won't support
Why did the Prime Minister fail to support his own proposals on immigration in the Commons, and why did he deliver instead an obvious snub to a colleague? It can only have been cowardice
IT IS easy to forget, and there are those too young to know, that before the Thatcher-Tebbit revolution there were all kinds of things that could not be said. All sorts of ideas that are now central not just to Conservative but to New Labour party thinking were unmentionable. Privatisation, competition, market forces, the moral bankruptcy of socialism, the disaster of progressive education, the stranglehold of the unions, the importance of duties and nature as well as nurture and rights - all these ideas marked out anyone who wanted to discuss them, in the cliche of the time, as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. All that has changed, even to the point where the Labour Party has been trying to think the unthinkable. That may have seemed faintly comic at times, with a few freetalking flowers such as Clare Short cut down before they could bloom. But none the less, there has been a real sense of free thinking, if not always - in the Labour Party - of free speech. Yet I am afraid that this period of intellectual freedom may be coming to an end. For some reason the repressive tendency is back, and not only within Labour. What clearer sign of this could there be than the Prime Minister's lily-livered answer in the House of Commons to a backbencher's question on immigration policy? Nicholas Budgen, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South-West, asked the Prime Minister last week in the Commons to condemn two new Labour proposals on immigration - their plan to abolish the primary purpose rule, which aims to stop marriages made mainly to acquire British nationality, and their plan to grant immigration rights to the extended families of recent immigrants. Mr Budgen's request was perfectly reasonable, since the Conservative Party's own campaign guide for candidates explains that these Labour proposals would "undoubtedly lead to increased immigration and fresh abuse of the system". And Mr Major himself is reported to believe that relaxing the immigration rules, as Labour proposes, "would endanger good race relations". So why did the Prime Minister fail to stand up at the despatch box for his own policies and his own views, and why did he deliver instead an obvious snub to Mr Budgen? It can only have been cowardice. The Prime Minister seems to think his own views on the subject will sound unmentionable so, despite holding them, he doesn't mention them. This sounds and feels very like the bad old days, when there was a heavy Utopian censoriousness in the air, and when reasonable people were afraid to speak out on important matters, or - like Nicholas Budgen - had moral and social pressures put on them to shut up. It is true that there is a case for special discretion on matters of race and immigration. Even the slightest reference in print, I have found, to St George's Day, or the smallest celebration of English ethnicity, brings all kinds of racists out of the woodwork, who write me mad letters of welcome to the Aryan cause, or whatever. But bad arguments from bad people should not be allowed to drive out good. There are all kinds of muddles surrounding the question of immigration and race relations and it is surely far better to argue about them than to adopt the traditional ostrich position. One of the muddles is to think that it is wrong to make warning noises about race relations, or say anything at all, because they have improved so much. So they have, up to a point, partly owing to Conservative efforts to hold hack immigration. But they have not improved anywhere near enough for anyone to feel complacent. There is still racial harassment and resentment on all sides, particularly in poor areas. Young black people suffer particularly severely from unemployment, young black men are over-represented in crime, and most of their victims are black. The first people to suffer, if immigration controls were to be loosened, would not be the white middle classes, but blacks and Asians, who would face yet more competition for jobs and housing, and yet more resentment from indigenous whites also competing for these things. It is quite astonishing to me that the Labour Party proposes measures which will let many more people in. Already, one way and another, this country accepts a net total of more than 100,000 people per year. Of these about 90,000 are non-British and non-European Union. That is already too many. Britain is a small and densely populated country. Already the NHS is stretched to breaking point. All parties, already, are committed to holding down welfare spending. All parties lament the erosion of the countryside, and (contrariwise) lament the acute shortage of housing. We are also committed to the interests of any EU migrants we may receive. Under these circumstances it seems to me to be very odd that it should somehow be morally repellent to question Labour's wish to allow in more people. This is not "playing the race card". It is true to say that it is more difficult, and often more expensive, to accommodate people from very different cultures; but to say that is not to "play the race card" either. It is merely true. It also seems to me very odd that both parties claim to want to keep immigration out of election debates. Why? It is a subject on which the electorate has strong views. Fifty six per cent of Britons believe there are already too many immigrants. And among British Asians (according to a Mori poll), 43 per cent think existing refugee and immigration rules are "about right" (and so presumably should not be laxer) and 18 per cent say they are "not strict enough". In the general atmosphere of censorship on this subject, it has also become impossible to say anything critical about multi-culturalism. We are told again and again that we live in a multi-cultural society, as if this were necessarily a good thing. Actually it is not entirely true; we are multicultural only in some parts of some cities. But even if it were true, is it really a ground for self-congratulation? Inevitably, when many cultures live together, each one begins to lose confidence in itself; if, after all, we are taught to show equal respect for all cultures, and that all are equally valid, we must infer that our own culture is no better, and therefore no more binding, than anyone else's. Multiculturalism is bound to bring cultural and ethical relativism, and ethical relativism is what we constantly hear bewailed on all sides, not least by Labour's moralists. John Major, assuming that current Tory pessimism about the forthcoming election is well founded, therefore has the great freedom of a man with very little to lose. Like Milton's Lucifer on losing Paradise, he might find that, failing hope, he could draw resolution from despair. For once, he should say the unsayable, or allow others to do so, on immigration and on any subject: he is a man who has nothing to fall back on but his principles.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, March 13, 1997
