Article by Michael Portillo on immigration, for The Sunday Times,
2 September 2007.

Canvassing in the Handsworth area of Birmingham back in 1983, I was flummoxed by one voter. She stood before her considerable house in an area that had once been firmly middle-class. Now the villas around her had been converted into bedsits, and the locality had become scruffy and rundown. She was, apparently, now the only white resident in the street. She asked me when she had ever been given the chance to vote for or against Britain’s becoming multiracial. Since I could not answer that, she wanted to know why she should vote at all.

She could be dismissed as a racist, and I do not deny that she may well have been. But that would not invalidate her point. The biggest single change in post-war Britain is the transformation in who the British are. The new diversity of races and religions makes a big difference to life in the UK. Some places have changed their appearance and norms of behaviour entirely. Many people will applaud the transformation for the diversity and enrichment that it has brought. But if the alteration of Britain can be presented in such positive terms, then it is all the more remarkable that it has occurred without the British people’s consent being sought.

Gordon Brown claims to be concerned about the public’s cynical attitude to politics. If so, he needs to understand that it is not the result merely of Labour or Tory sleaze, nor even of politicians’ broken promises. Many people feel that when they are asked every few years to vote they are never presented with a real choice on something that truly matters to them. They may be offered options of more public spending or lower tax, pledges with fairly minor consequences, which they in any case take with a pinch of salt. More often the choice will be only between one party that has just about got its act together and one that has totally lost the plot, which for me describes all the elections since 1970.

The change of government in 1945, 1979 and 1997 provided new directions, but even such radical switches in economic policy did not transform Britain the way that immigration has. Anyway, nationalisation, Thatcherism and Blairism can be reversed. But immigration cannot. For Brown to make people less cynical about politics, he would need to allow elections or referendums to settle big issues, such as whether immigration should be more firmly controlled or Britain remain in the European Union or the death penalty be restored. That would represent a genuine transfer of power from politician to citizen, and so is not on offer.

To add to the public’s sense of frustration, immigration is a subject rarely even mentioned by politicians. It is not just that there is never an opportunity to vote on it, there is rarely a chance even to discuss it. Most politicians loftily ignore the fact that for many voters it is a top, maybe the top, priority.

Of course, Enoch Powell, then in the Tory shadow cabinet, mentioned it in 1968. His choice of language was explosive. His foreboding, which he likened to the ancient Roman seeing the Tiber foaming with blood, was apocalyptic. With a single speech, he made himself a national figure and the hero of the East End dockers. But his outspokenness ended his front bench career and converted one of politics’ outstanding intellectuals into a populist demagogue.

In nearly four decades since then no mainstream politician has chosen to follow Powell’s path, even if the bombs in London in July 2005 made us think again about the Tiber. Only Frank Field, a former Labour minister, has pursued the immigration issue tenaciously, whilst avoiding any racist slant.

The constraints on the immigration debate today are objectively absurd. Anyone, it seems, is free to advocate immigration, but to advocate ending it, which is no less arguable, could terminate your career. The government simultaneously sets out the virtues of immigration and seeks credit for restraining it. That in itself demonstrates that the proper level of immigration should be a fit issue for political debate.

There are many things in life that are commendable in small quantities, but pernicious in large ones. Why should immigration be any less debatable than tax? If one quarter of the UK’s new babies now have a foreign parent, is it fine to argue that it would be preferable if it were one in two, but disgraceful to suggest that one in eight would be better?

In recent years it has become permissible to deplore multiculturalism as a wrong turn, if only because the Chairman of the Commission on Equality and Human Rights, Sir Trevor Phillips, has done so. To advocate integration has become almost de rigueur and a frequent theme for the prime minister and Jack Straw. But even now to argue against immigration remains, illogically, taboo.

Perhaps such thoughts were in David Cameron’s mind when last week he commented that there had been too much immigration over the last ten years. But then he must also be familiar with this paradox: that however many of our citizens lament being denied either choice or debate, politicians who raise immigration do not prosper.

Powell is not the only example. Admittedly, Margaret Thatcher won power after talking of people’s fears of being “swamped”. But she regretted having spoken in those terms and never did so again. William Hague brought immigration to the fore in 2001 and Michael Howard in 2005. In each case the Tories were flagging in the polls, and their advisers urged them to shore up the core vote. But their move looked merely desperate, and they went down to thumping defeats.

Had Cameron a few months back, when he was ten points ahead in the polls, adopted the tough tone on immigration that he used last week he might have looked more like a man playing an ace (although I doubt it). But raising it now that he too is trailing, just looks like Tory despair once more.

It seems, anyway, to hinge on a misreading of his problem. He is not behind in the polls because he has lost Tory support. He has lost Tory support because he is behind in the polls. He fell behind because he failed to hold onto the new supporters that, with his freshness and his shift to the centre, he had won over from the other parties.

Those are the voters who will be most put off by Cameron’s mentioning immigration. They think it grubby Tory politics. They may be middle class and other-worldly types who can afford to be liberal because they never encounter an immigrant other than their cleaner or plumber, but they have the votes that Cameron needs. By raising immigration in an attempt to shore up his core support, he has put those new votes beyond reach.

In fact, the core vote will not be mollified either. Over many decades, it has repeatedly heard promises to tighten up on immigration. But new arrivals have gone on arriving. First came West Indians to meet the shortage of labour, then New Commonwealth immigrants, then Kenyan Asians, then the families of all the above, then asylum seekers and lately European Union migrants (again to top up the labour market). For all the Tory party’s Euroscepticism, it was at least as keen as Labour on enlarging the European Union and allowing the free movement of people, so there was no choice there either.

The public expects now no change from either party. It knows that government predictions of future flows will be hopelessly too low. If one source of growth is tackled, as for example asylum seeking has been, another will be neglected. For all the recent focus on Polish plumbers, the large increase in immigration since the early 1990s is mainly accounted for by arrivals from outside Europe.

So when Cameron raised immigration last week it seems highly unlikely that anyone will have thought: “At last, a politician determined to make a difference”. They will probably have greeted his pronouncement as something wearisomely familiar, commonly associated with Tories around election time. It is hard to see what Cameron could have gained with it, but easy to see what he may have lost.