LONDON, 21 February 2004 — With the British labor market soon to open itself to the European Union’s 10 new “accession” states, the nation’s tabloid newspapers are busy whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria. One in particular, the Daily Express, seems determined to corner the market in rabid xenophobia. Day after day the paper conjures up the specter of Britain being swamped by immigrants and “asylum-seekers”, people whose goal is to strip the country’s welfare system bare. Much has been made by the Express and its like of the threat posed to Britain by Islamic terrorists. Now, they warn, Britain is about to fall prey to hordes of rapacious gypsies from Eastern Europe.
The appalling recent news that 20 Chinese cockle-gatherers had drowned in the treacherous waters of Morecambe Bay, off the northwest coast of Britain, seemed to chime only too well with this tabloid-fueled paranoia about aliens: Here, apparently, was concrete evidence that Britain is indeed being infiltrated by incalculable numbers of opportunistic foreigners. Considering British ill-feeling about immigration, widespread rejoicing over the cockle-gatherers’ fate might have been anticipated. Perhaps some Britons did rejoice, but the predominant reaction to this terrible episode appeared to be one of shock and sorrow, mingled with an awareness that the deceased were not parasites but desperate individuals who were being monstrously exploited by British “gang-masters”.
It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that public compassion for the hapless cockle-gatherers heralds any general softening of British attitudes toward immigrants. That Britain is placing fewer restrictions in the path of migrant workers from the new accession states than most other EU countries means that immigration will continue to inspire lurid headlines. Nor is it just tabloid newspapers that have been getting worked up about the extent to which Britain is admitting too many foreigners. The British current affairs magazine Prospect has provoked furious controversy with a polemical essay by its editor, David Goodhart, which raised the question: “Has Britain become too diverse?” Hailed as one of Britain’s “leading liberal intellectuals”, Goodhart outlines in his article what he calls the “progressive’s dilemma”: How can Britain sustain its welfare state in the face of a populace made ever more heterogeneous by endless immigration? His argument, in essence, is that British taxpayers are unlikely to carry on being charitably disposed toward people with whom they feel no sense of national kinship. There is, he believes, a great danger Britain could end up a mini-USA, an ethnically multiform, ruggedly individualistic culture with scant welfare provision.
Goodhart writes in measured terms: He is no racist demagogue, for all that his reservations about diversity could be said to betray racist sentiment. But this is a time when it is customary to question where, in a moral and intellectual sense, people are coming from and to scrutinize their pronouncements for indications of hidden agendas. It is especially worth raising this question in relation to David Goodhart. For the key fact about Prospect is that it came into being as the house magazine of New Labour. Prime Minister Tony Blair once figured among its contributors, and it has drawn for financial backing on precisely the same big business interests that underwrote the New Labour project. Goodhart, in short, is the conductor of a post-Thatcherite, post-Cold War policy journal which from the outset broadly endorsed the triumph in Britain of the free market and which helped to project Tony Blair and his colleagues as a “progressive” government — even as they presided over Britain’s emergence as Western Europe’s most de-regulated and de-unionized economy.
Goodhart’s magazine has not been entirely uncritical of New Labour. But the chasm that has opened up in Britain between the rich and the poor since the 1980s has hardly been among its leading preoccupations. Indeed, Prospect could be said to have played its part in encouraging the view that there is no alternative to the free market, despite the mounting evidence of its malign consequences — not the least of which, it now seems, has been the transformation of Britain into a magnet for cheap foreign labor. It says much about Goodhart’s cast of mind that at the very time when the corpses in Morecambe Bay were underlining just how savage Britain’s de-regulated economy has become, this concerned intellectual was loftily pontificating on the dangers of a too ethnically diverse Britain losing all sense of the commonweal and turning into a place where the affluent are indifferent to the welfare of strangers. Either, one may suspect, the editor of Prospect is blind to the nature of the country he inhabits, or his misgivings about its increasingly multiracial character comprise an elaborate attempt to distract attention from the background to the social disintegration Britain is already experiencing.
The truth is that many among the indigenous population are unwilling to work for the slave wages that have become commonplace in Tony Blair’s globalized, free market-fixated Britain. This is why London, a booming city that abounds in low-paid employment, is teeming with immigrant workers. And — thanks to the disproportionate concentration of economic activity in the capital and its hinterland — there are increasing job opportunities for such workers in many other parts of Britain. Mindful of this, Britain’s Home Secretary David Blunkett has been extolling the contribution immigrants can make to Britain. Reviled by many for his illiberal attitudes, Blunkett periodically emerges as a politician with a commitment to multiracialism and an abhorrence of intolerance. In the midst of the current anti-immigration hysteria, it is that David Blunkett from whom Britain sorely needs to hear.
