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Should we limit immigrants to Europeans?
For years the baleful shade of Enoch Powell silenced debate about immigration numbers, however rational. Playing the numbers game, as it was called, was always associated with the even more shameful misdemeanour of playing the race card.
As recently as November 2003, David Blunkett as home secretary blithely announced that he could not see the need for a limit on immigrants, nor did he think there was a maximum number of people that could be housed in this country.
This astonishingly silly comment passed almost without protest; it was expressing the unthinking orthodoxy of the day. It was fortunate perhaps that Blunkett and the government believed that numbers didn’t matter, since they hadn’t the slightest idea what the numbers were.
The director of enforcement and removals at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate admitted last year that he had not “the faintest idea” how many illegal immigrants were living here. Not only has the government lost control of this country’s boundaries; until recently it didn’t think that mattered.
How quickly things change in politics. Now even the most right-on Labour figures are playing the numbers game, with the race card up their sleeves. Last month Margaret “Enver” Hodge appeared to be doing just that with her announcement that indigenous people in her constituency of Barking felt justly aggrieved that they could not get council housing, while recent immigrants could. They had indeed “a legitimate sense of entitlement” that should not be overridden by new immigrants. The wind was clearly changing.
Sure enough, last week numbers became mentionable again, officially. Ruth Kelly, the minister for communities and local government, issued a startling report by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion. Integration indeed. Until recently integration was a dirty word, almost as sinister as assimilation.
This report announced findings that must be startling to anyone who has tried hard to toe the multi-culti line. It says that black and Asian Britons - nearly half of them - think we have let in too many immigrants.
Almost 70% of everyone questioned by a Mori poll for the commission thought so, including 47% of Asian and 45% of black respondents. The poll also showed that 56% of respondents believed some groups - mainly immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees - received unfair priority in the allocation of housing, health services and education. Respondents were “very sensitive about freeloading by other groups”. At the same time only 36% believe immigration is good for the economy.
It is hard to know what to make of the idiocy of this government, discovering so late in the day the consequences of its wilfully ignorant and undemocratic immigration policies. Nevertheless one should be thankful for small blessings. There are a few. For one thing, because it’s now official that so many ethnic minority Britons are worried about immigration, the race card has in effect been torn up and thrown away. One can hardly accuse ethnic minorities of playing it.
Another blessing is that multiculturalism has suddenly and rather sneakily been dumped. Late in the day ministers are discovering what should have been blindingly obvious. The dogma of multiculturalism has made immigration and race relations much more painful and difficult than they need have been. The social policies based on it have kept people in ghettos and bred mistrust and suspicion.
So it’s as you were, then, with multiculturalism. Now at long last we have integration and cohesion. Let’s hope it’s not too late to undo some of the damage.
Kelly’s report makes some sensible suggestions, none the worse for being ridiculous U-turns. The policy of providing masses of translators and translations for countless languages is to be dumped. It has meant that newcomers are not obliged to learn English, and frequently don’t, which means they are unable to integrate even if they wanted to; they can live here deaf and dumb to the rest of us. Good riddance to it.
However, changes such as this, no matter how sensible, fail to address the central question of numbers. It ought always to have been self-evident that numbers matter; to think otherwise is to believe that a raft will never sink no matter how many people clamber onto it.
Of course immigration is to be welcomed, or at least tolerated. Of course immigrants have done great things for this country. Of course there is a moral argument for rich people in favour of taking in poorer foreigners. And of course asylum seekers deserve asylum. All the same, this small and populous country cannot possibly accept the many millions who would like to come here.
This government, or its successor, ought to be bold enough to consider openly what might be the optimum number of people living here - or at least the number beyond which more would be intolerable. Some think we have already reached it, to judge from letters to this paper last week about housing. Most do not, but some day we certainly will, unless immigration is brought under civilised and thoughtful control.
No one would wish to turn away genuine asylum seekers. No one can turn away migrants from the European Union, whether we wish to or not. The result is that we already have far more prospective immigrants than we could hope to accommodate.
The number of genuine asylum seekers is limitless and the number of EU migrants, with incontestable rights to settle here, is as good as limitless. Surely it follows that the group that morally or legally has less right to come here is therefore the immigrants who are neither EU nationals nor spouses of Britons. So, no immigrants except asylum seekers and Europeans?
There is nothing racist about this suggestion; plenty of Europeans, and most asylum seekers, are of non-European ethnic antecedents. There are Moroccan Frenchwomen or Indonesian Dutchmen; Europe has become a melting pot. Certain exceptions could be made, as ever, for immigrants who would bring exceptional wealth or skills with them. It is, at the very least, time for the government to talk openly and fearlessly about numbers.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 17, 2007 | Comments (0)
Build on the green belt, and build now
It is only with great restraint or great affection that our children stop themselves from telling us to sell up.
Our children used to have to wait until we died to get their hands on our assets, if any. Now it seems they can’t wait. They beadily eye our ridiculously overvalued homes and it is only with great restraint or great affection that they stop themselves telling us to sell immediately and hand over some capital. Surely you would be happier in something smaller, they suggest. Get out, grandma, is the message and often well before we are a grandmother.
It’s not that they are greedy. It’s that they are beginning to be desperate. Property prices have risen to such dizzying heights that most cannot hope to buy a first home without help.
The average home in England costs seven times the buyer’s earnings; as recently as 1998 it was about five times earnings, but by 2026 it will be 10 times, even if the government succeeds in its plans to promote more house building. Most young people will be unable to afford to buy their own homes at all.
This was the warning last week – if we needed a warning – of the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, a new government think tank. At the same time the Council of Mortgage Lenders reported that nearly half of first-time buyers under 30 were getting help from their families.
That leaves the other half, of course – of first-time buyers whose families can’t help them and an increasing number of hardworking and capable young men and women who realise that they may never own their own homes.
That has been true for generations; countless people didn’t even dream of being property owners. What is different now is that the successful and well educated middle classes are feeling the frustration and powerlessness that used to be confined to the lower orders. This has always been socially divisive. With prosperity and higher expectations it has got worse and it is compounded by the way that house prices are inflated near the best schools. This is the beginning of a crisis.
Everybody knows why property is so expensive. There aren’t enough houses and flats. Everybody knows that the answer is to relax the Soviet-style planning restrictions and build lots more, fast. But many people, including some of the most powerful and vociferous, have resisted the explosion of building that is needed, both to provide housing and to bring down prices.
I have myself, if only mentally. The blue remembered hills of my childhood in Dorset have been disappearing; the empty valleys, deserted beaches and forgotten woods are now noisy and crowded and, to me, spoilt, although not for those who now enjoy them and never knew them as they were. None of it is my back yard, except in my mind, but I have always had great sympathy with nimbyism.
However, the time has come to accept that there will have to be a great deal of building in places like that, particularly in the south of England, and probably in your back yard. The inflated cost of housing is a terrible social evil and to do nothing about it would simply be wrong. We are short of about 800,000 homes in England alone, maybe more. With increasing immigration and rising birth rates that number will grow fast: 1m immigrants have arrived here in the past decade and about 223,000 new households are formed every year.
We will have to accept a lot of building on greenfield sites and green belts and it will have to be low rise and low density. People overwhelmingly hate flats and long for houses with gardens. We will have to accept the suburbanisation of whole swathes of the country. However, it may not be quite as bad as we imagine.
The person who forced me to change my mind is Dr Oliver Hartwich who, with Professor Alan Evans of Reading University, has written three housing pamphlets for the think tank Policy Exchange. They argue that our attitude to planning is distorted by some powerful myths.
One is the idea that building on brownfield sites is the answer. It sounds good but the problem is that there aren’t enough of them to make much of a dent in the problem. Only about 14% of the houses we need could be built on them, according to the Rogers report. Besides, they tend to be in the wrong places where people don’t want to live and work.
Another myth, according to Evans and Hartwich, is the argument that Britain is a small and overpopulated country with little green space left. I’ve always assumed this myself; for one thing, a satellite photograph of Europe by night shows that the south of England is hugely more ablaze with light than anywhere else in Europe.
However, Evans and Hartwich argue that only about 8% of land in Britain as a whole is urban, a much lower proportion than in the Netherlands, Belgium or west Germany. In England about three-quarters of the population live in cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants and use only 7.2% of the land. The assumption that the southeast is the most urban is wrong, too; the northeast is the most urbanised region, with 22% of the area under urban land as against 17% in the southeast. The southwest and East Anglia have a much smaller proportion – between 6% and 7%.
As for the disappearance of rustic vistas, the authors quote research claiming that the proportion of UK land used for agriculture – 78% – is the highest in the old (preenlargement) European Union bloc, which has an average of 64.2% – again, the opposite of what people generally think.
The idea that concreting over green fields is bad for the environment is something they also call a myth. They argue that towns with plenty of garden space are better for biodiversity than some farmland, where pests and birds and weeds are eliminated. Urban and suburban gardens are full of interesting and unthreatened species.
In other words, a massive boom in house building will not necessarily be quite as destructive as one might fear. However, even if it were, it would still be right to bite the bullet. As things stand, government planning controls are distorting the property market with disastrous social consequences. They are promoting inequality, resentment and nasty, crowded housing of the wrong kind. Even the most recalcitrant nimby must see how unjust and dangerous that is.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 10, 2007 | Comments (0)
We need more than jail for child abuse
Incredible though it may seem, there are hundreds of thousands of paedophiles living among us, perhaps next door or on the next floor. That, at least, is the estimate of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and nobody has seriously questioned its research. According to the NSPCC, 16% of all women and 7% of all men interviewed said they had been physically sexually abused before they were 12. That would amount to one in nine children.
Although I find this hard to believe, I cannot dispute it. What I find even more incredible, and do dispute, are the comments on Friday of Jim Gamble, a senior policeman in charge of child protection. He said on the BBC’s Today programme that “the scale of paedophilia means that we need to look beyond the criminal justice system for answers. Judges should consider [police] cautions rather than jail”.
That was startling enough but perhaps there is a case, given that there are only 80,000 prison places (occupied by more than 81,000 prisoners), for not jailing people whose only offences are to look at child porn on the internet. I do not think it is a good case but these are, at least, people who have not directly harmed a child in person. But what Gamble went on to say was truly astonishing.
“Some predatory paedophiles,” he continued, “should be offered treatment instead of being locked up.” He explained that he meant “where there is evidence that a person may benefit from a caution and can be managed”. All the assumptions in this are wrong. First is the assumption, with a predatory paedophile, that there is any “treatment” that works - and indeed that paedophilia of any degree can be treated.
Second is the assumption that dangerous offenders can be efficiently “managed” in the community, whether treated or not. Third is the assumption that there is “evidence” in such situations, which can inform decisions. And lastly there is an unspoken assumption that a person given to perverse pleasures “of the viewing kind” will stop at that.
Finally there was Gamble’s astonishing recommendation that people who found themselves gripped by paedophile urges should come forward, ’fess up and ask for “help”. Would-be kiddy fiddlers will step forward about as soon as pigs get wings.
Consider the figures. According to Home Office research into sex and violent offenders, astonishing numbers are driven to reoffend. More than 90% of those considered at very high risk will reoffend, as will about half of all at high risk and about a third of medium risk offenders. Clearly treatments to prevent paedophiles reoffending - talking therapies, antiandrogen drugs and antidepressants - are at best extremely unreliable.
What’s left is containment in jail or supervision in the community. Locking someone up has at least the benefit of removing him from temptation. But consider what community supervision amounts to. Under present minimum standards, registered sex offenders considered low risk are visited by a police officer once a year, and those at medium risk are seen every six to nine months. If that seems inadequate, the minimum for those much likelier to offend seems quite unacceptable - a visit only every three to six months for a high risk offender. Those at very high risk get looked in on just once a quarter.
It would take immense care to monitor such a person and stay wise to their notorious deceptions. The mentoring buddy schemes in North America suggest spending at least three hours a day with an offender. Then you have only to think of the disastrous failures in this country of probation orders and tagging in general. You might almost as well skip it altogether.
It’s true that agencies have discretion to visit people more often, which they use. But to keep a close eye on known offenders, let alone those who’ve merely received cautions, is clearly quite impossible. The point of multi-agency public protection agreements, set up in 2001, was to get different agencies to talk to each other without demarcation disputes. Perhaps they do so more than previously, though I can’t help feeling sceptical, given the inefficiencies of police, probation and welfare agencies.
Given all this, police cautions and community supervision seem inadequate. The question is what, if anything, could be done instead. With serious and persistent offenders - the men who are addicted to the most disgusting abuse - the only answer is segregation. Prison sentences come to an end but their tragic tendencies don’t. Some bloggers have been suggesting dumping them on offshore islands, rather like leper colonies, for their own protection as well as ours. That seems extreme; gated communities might be more humane but they would have to be slightly involuntary.
At the other end of the paedophile spectrum, with those who are obsessed with internet images of children, there are some practical steps that could be taken without horrifying civil libertarians. I don’t know whether this obsession is necessarily a precursor to something worse but it is an evil in itself, since it involves harm to the children in the porn trade.
Perhaps something could be done about it without putting brakes on that great engine of universal freedom, the internet. It might be possible to persuade those of us who aren’t paedophiles to demand internet security software that blocks paedophile websites and material. Market leaders would build such blocks into their software, shaming other producers who did not do so. Internet cafes and offices would use it.
As a result a person of perverted tastes would have to make a conscious effort to buy unusual software to get access to paedophile people or material. If he were under suspicion or trying to argue that he accessed some porn group by “mistake”, he would have to explain why he hadn’t protected himself against such embarrassing and indeed illegal accidents.
Alternatively the government could insist that all internet service providers block this stuff. That can’t be difficult to do - the Chinese government manages to screen out most references to Tiananmen Square and democracy.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 03, 2007 | Comments (1)
