« June 2006 | Home | August 2006 »
We need to talk numbers on immigration
To those who prefer to laugh whenever possible, news on the immigration front last week provided an opportunity for a grim little snigger. The day after the home secretary brought forth his much-heralded cunning plan for Rebuilding Confidence in our Immigration System, The Sun accused a senior immigration officer at the Home Office of running an asylum racket.
Joseph Dzumbira, the official, allegedly boasted to an undercover reporter that he could get anyone refugee status here for up to £2,000, and that he has done so “a couple of hundred times”. If correct, then the last laugh is on us — we gave Dzumbira himself asylum in the first place.
Dzumbira has, reportedly, many ways of beating the byzantine immigration system, but allegedly his biggest scam is helping bogus asylum seekers of quite different nationalities to pretend they are “Zims” — Zimbabweans threatened with arrest in their home country. If successful these immigrants can rely on the humanity of British courts, which refuse to send Zimbabweans back to Robert Mugabe’s police state. Dzumbira is Zimbabwean-born and can allegedly arrange fake arrest warrants directly from Zimbabwe.
Apparently his best efforts are not always needed: he reportedly told The Sun that Zimbabwean asylum seekers here do not get subjected to proper security checks. What’s more, he says our border controls are so lax anyone could arrive in Britain and then post their passport home for a relation to use to come here as well. This man appears to know what he is talking about; he is in charge of vetting thousands of asylum claims a year.
Rebuilding Confidence in our Immigration System? You can only laugh. That will take a great deal more than John Reid’s sweeping promises of last week. We cannot really be said to have an immigration system at all or any coherent policy. Such as it is, it’s overwhelmed by inefficiency, bad faith, muddled thinking, corruption and incompetence. The government has no concept of an ideal number of immigrants (asylum seekers or others).
The last comment on the matter came from David Blunkett who said, when home secretary, that he could not really see the need for any particular limit. It is only recently that people have stopped throwing about indignant accusations of “playing the numbers game”, as if discussing the optimum number of newcomers to this crowded country was in itself a clear sign of vicious racism. Meanwhile our economy, everyone says, needs immigrants regardless of housing pressures and the public services.
We know that the head of enforcement and removals at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) admitted in May that he had not the “faintest idea” how many illegal immigrants there were. Reid claimed last week that the government had made progress towards its goals of increasing the removal of failed asylum seekers and cutting illegal immigration. But this was quite obviously absurd since, just a few days earlier, his own department had had to admit that there could be as many as 450,000 failed asylum seekers, although only months previously it had denied there were as many as 250,000.
One is left wondering how on earth it happened that almost by stealth, by corruption or by incompetence such enormous numbers of people have been let into this country without any policy and without any democratic debate. If Reid wants to persuade the public that he intends to do something about this shameful mess, he has a great deal of explaining to do first.
Why, for instance, does he promise to impose full passport checks on people entering and leaving Britain each year, but not until 2014? That is perhaps the single most important thing he could do to control immigration (and to check terrorism) and it can hardly be complicated. I went to a Third World country last month where passports are checked in and out of the borders, every time, by being scanned onto a computer. State-of-the-art bioscans are not essential.
Why does the home secretary promise that the asylum backlog will be cleared in five years when the Home Office doesn’t know the size of the backlog? It doesn’t know how many foreign nationals are here, even legally. It does, however, know that more than 10,265 foreign nationals are in jail in England and Wales (as of February this year); that is more than a tenth of all prisoners (76,717).
Why can’t we get rid of them? Most Britons agree that they should be deported — the prime minister got carried away recently and promised to do just that, to general consternation. It might prove a powerful deterrent to crime; perhaps the Zimbabwe immigration scam might be less popular if it carried a risk of deportation to Zimbabwe. As the law stands, it’s not possible.
Then there is the further problem, pointed out by a chief immigration officer in The Daily Telegraph last week: “To a greater or lesser extent, IND staff shy away from dealing with removals of failed asylum seekers to China, Iran, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Turkey and Nigeria . . . because the authorities of those countries refuse to accept their nationals back without a travel document — which their British representatives won’t issue within an acceptable time scale.” Why is that difficult?
It may perhaps have something to do with the general culture of the Home Office and the IND. Steve Moxon, the immigration whistleblower, paints a depressing picture on his website of IND caseworking — bedevilled by inefficiency, ignorance and low morale, with politically correct distractions from the work. Other sources have told me that the standard of candidates in the Home Office has declined seriously.
Lastly, or rather firstly, the home secretary must talk openly and accurately about numbers. Of course immigrants are good for a society, up to a point. New Labour has offered no serious consideration of that point. Nor has it demonstrated that an open door is good for the economy; the real argument is the other way. What we need is rational and controlled immigration; until we have rational and controlled politicians and civil servants, we are hardly likely to get it. It isn’t really funny.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 30, 2006 | Comments (1)
The state is waging class war on the poor
In a country as rich as ours, which has recently spent vast sums on education, is it not a shame and a disgrace that nearly half of all 16-year-olds are functionally innumerate and illiterate? According to the Department for Education itself, 300,000 (47%) of 16-years-olds leave school without having achieved level 2 in functional maths, and 265,000 (42%) of them fail to achieve level 2 in functional English. In other terms, 42% of school leavers finish 11 years of compulsory education without achieving at least a grade C in GCSE, debased though that standard is. It is even said, with justice, that the Poles and Russians and Hungarians who come here write better English than the natives.
In England, Scotland and Wales the proportion of pupils from state schools gaining university places has been falling for two years, according to figures announced on Friday by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. So is the proportion of students from low-income families. What’s more, the proportion of students from state schools getting places at 14 of the country’s leading 19 universities was actually lower last year than in the past two years. Education, education, education? I don’t think so.
University drop-out figures are also up, particularly among students from poor homes. In the worst universities about a third of undergraduates fail to finish their courses, The students most likely to drop out, unsurprisingly, are those with “vocational” qualifications or low exam grades or — astonishingly — with no qualifications whatsoever.
You might well ask what a student with no qualifications is doing on a degree course in the first place. The government aspires to “excellence for all” and therefore everyone has a right to a degree — or, according to government targets, at least 50% of the 18 to 30-year-old population have that right. When you consider that almost 50% of school leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate this seems quixotic at best.
At the same time it has emerged in a study by Harrow school that pupils with very poor spelling and grammar are still able to gain top GCSE grades in English. The school introduced a basic literacy test after teachers noticed that even children who had achieved As and A*s were making glaring mistakes — confirmation, if any were needed, of the debasement of standards in GCSEs.
Meanwhile the government is anxious to abolish grammar schools in Northern Ireland. It has emerged that the three universities there have by far exceeded their targets for recruitment of students from the lowest socio-economic classes. Whatever the rights and wrongs of grammar schools, they did provide opportunities for bright children from the least privileged backgrounds. In fact, recent research from the London School of Economics shows that the abolition of grammar schools here has reduced the opportunities for society’s poorest to work their way up. Yet grammar schools are to be abolished regardless — personal opportunity sacrificed to egalitarian orthodoxy.
In comprehensives in England, by contrast, bright children are being failed again and again; only half of our cleverest 11-year-olds go on to get three As at A-level, and some do not even attempt to go to university.
Partly because of ideological objections to the very idea of “gifted” children, about a third of schools never send very bright (or indeed any) pupils to the annual sessions run by the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at Warwick University — a clear sign, according to Sir Cyril Taylor, one of the government’s senior education advisers, that “some very able children are being badly let down . . . We are talking about 10,000 to
15,000 of our most able children in each age cohort who do not fulfil their potential”. It is hardly surprising in such a culture that social mobility has actually decreased under this government and is lower than in comparable western countries.
Need one say more? A-levels have been debased. Previous O-level papers are now used at A-level. Course work can be and is abused by parents and even by teachers. Science courses and even music exams are being dropped. Employers are appalled by the low educational standard of school leavers and of graduates. Degrees have been debased and no longer offer the promise of good jobs and good salaries, but simply years of debt. Universities have to do a great deal of remedial teaching. Soon we will have Poles and Russians teaching British children remedial English. What is going on? The simple truth is that all too many state school teachers can’t teach or don’t teach, so their pupils can’t or don’t learn. The reasons are legion but one big reason is that the educational establishment still clings to the blindly egalitarian educational theory of the 1960s and its determined social engineering, which still pervades schools and teacher training colleges. It is a theory which despite all the facts refuses to accept that children’s innate abilities vary.
A second reason is the demoralisation of teachers by Whitehall micromanagement. Another, perhaps, is the quality of women going into teaching — and most teachers are women. Before they got (nearly) equal opportunities, one of the few careers open to very bright women was teaching. Now they are able to look elsewhere, very much to the detriment of teaching in the state sector.
What state sector reformers should do is to analyse the success of private schools. Rich parents can have dim as well as bright children, and many private schools have developed to educate non-academic or more average children; they get excellent “value added” reports from the Office for Standards in Education, meaning that they have made the most of each child, irrespective of ability.
Like high-flying private schools they believe that children do best when taught with those of similar ability and they are not afraid to impose reasonable discipline. They accept ideas of competition, difference, success and failure, which all children must soon enough encounter in real life, but in a civilised and protected atmosphere.
In the state sector today countless children — about half — are having their prospects blasted and their youth blighted. As I think John Stuart Mill said, an education ought to be very good to justify a child’s loss of liberty. British education isn’t; I wouldn’t object to my children playing truant from a bog standard comprehensive.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 23, 2006 | Comments (2)
No, minister, keep it clean
Oh, foreign secretary! Oh, Mrs Beckett! Can you not see that you are letting your country down? I am not referring to your dress sense. On the contrary, you clearly dress as you do deliberately out of a proper sense of political modesty. A second-rate power, you obviously feel, is rightly represented by high street rather than haute couture.
No. I am referring, minister, to your language. Last Wednesday it emerged that on hearing from Tony Blair that you were to become foreign secretary, the first word you used, in your surprise and delight, was “F***”. Anyone can have a little lapse, of course. What made it truly, comically awful was that you appear to be proud of it, recounting the story happily last week to a journalist and posing with gravitas for a photograph. What, one wonders, would you say if the United States signed up to Kyoto: “Well, b****r me!”?
I am not for one moment suggesting that a foreign secretary should never use the F-word or the B-word, good solid English words that they are, in private. What’s startling is that she feels no embarrassment in confessing to it in public. On the contrary she must have had a reason; nobody asked her, after all.
Beckett must be aware that not so long ago top politicians wouldn’t have dreamt of using such words in public, and not so long before that most women wouldn’t have used them in private either. She must have thought that these days it would do her no harm, and maybe some good, to publicise the fact she uses slaggy prolespeak, even to the prime minister.
That may of course be because he sometimes uses it himself. He once notoriously referred to the effing Welsh. Last year in an interview with his unusual wife Cherie he saw fit to reveal to a gaggle of journalists that he is a five-times-a-night man. “At least,” he said, having affectionately warned his wife to keep her hands to herself. “I can do it more, depending how I feel.” This was corroborated by his wife, who then hinted that “size matters”. Astute politicians like Blair don’t make mistakes. They clearly think this kind of talk pays. So do the hangers-on.
So does Jonathan Ross, the BBC television presenter; it makes him £6m a year in salary. Nine days ago he interviewed David Cameron and cunningly turned the conversation about Cameron’s adolescent admiration of the Iron Lady into what Ross presumably knows is a crowd-pleasing question.
“But did you,” said Wossy “or did you not have a w*** thinking ‘Margaret Thatcher’?” Mindful of its duty, no doubt, to be inclusive in its broadcasting, the BBC did not cut out this question before transmission. Mindful, no doubt, of the temper of the times, Cameron did not object to it; he just laughed. It would not have been cool to protest.
There were a few predictable cries of outrage but surprisingly few; not many people seemed to mind about it. I think that’s because something seems to have changed radically in public discourse recently.
In a few years culture has become so hyper-sexualised that in order to speak demotic you need to talk dirty — or at least politicians and celebrities think you do. They feel the way to appeal to the voter or the punter is to pepper what you say with sexy words and sexy allusions, because that’s what most voters and punters increasingly do themselves. A touch of Tourette’s gives you street cred. Like the taboo against invading privacy, the taboo against using sexual words and talking freely about sex will soon have disappeared; it won’t be long before an archbishop starts sounding fruity in public.
I am not sure it’s an entirely bad thing. I love the freedom of English, and a lot of its richness is in its vulgarity and rawness just as much as in its subtlety. I like supposedly low humour. Manners tend to go in fashions, and spoken English has not always been restrained. But it is a remarkable phenomenon. It is also remarkably British; I cannot imagine European foreign secretaries, in the diplomatic drawing rooms of Paris, Bonn and Madrid, exclaiming “f***!” to each other.
There was a time in this country when only the working classes and the upper classes went in for effing and blinding and swearing like troopers, and not all of them. The respectable middle classes didn’t swear or talk dirty at all. Something changed in the 1960s; would-be left-wing intellectuals felt that to show solidarity with the masses they should talk like them. Hence student mockney, hence a fashion for swearing and talking dirty. Middle-class guilt made students feel they shouldn’t talk in the mannerly tones of middle-class privilege. This has persisted and spread.
Now young people of all backgrounds talk with what would once have been seen as astonishing vulgarity. As commerce has fanned the flames of sexuality into a profitable blaze, it was perhaps inevitable that at the end of this short road, we should find demure Beckett saying “f***”. However, I think she’s misguided to do it. It’s not necessary, it’s not inspirational, and it’s obliquely patronising. Cameron could do himself and his party and perhaps his country a favour by avoiding it.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 02, 2006 | Comments (0)
