LONDON, 8 March 2005 — Until only the other day, the conventional wisdom was that Prime Minister Tony Blair would win the forthcoming British general election with ease. Despite the contempt many feel toward him, not least on account of his high-handed decision to attack Iraq, the Conservative Party led by Michael Howard and the Liberal Party led by Charles Kennedy were reckoned to stand no chance of ousting the New Labour leader from power.
Blair’s resilience in the face of plunging personal opinion poll ratings, scares about his health and threats of a leadership challenge has indeed been remarkable.
The problem that has faced the Tories is that Blair has not only been presiding over a buoyant economy but that he has been leading the most reactionary Labour government ever. On issue after issue, the prime minister left Michael Howard, a former Tory home secretary of notoriously right-wing instincts, looking no more than averagely illiberal. Not even over immigration, an issue that they would normally be expected to turn to their advantage, did the Tories seem capable of taking a harder line.
Belatedly, however, the Tories have succeeded in seizing the initiative over immigration and the related issue of “bogus” asylum seeking — in the process sharply reducing Labour’s opinion poll lead. That they have managed this stems largely from the palpable gap between the Blair government’s pronouncements on these matters and the public perception that Britain is a country that has lost control of its borders. Twelve months ago, that perception was hugely strengthened when a group of illegal Chinese workers drowned while trying to gather cockles on the sands of Morcambe Bay. This melancholy episode highlighted the extraordinary degree to which Britain’s de-regulated and de-unionized economy has become a magnet for cheap foreign labor, with incalculable numbers of clandestine foreign workers evidently finding no great difficulty in eluding officialdom.
Mindful of the political benefit Australia’s John Howard has reaped by exploiting white xenophobia, Michael Howard is making immigration a key election issue — an especially malodorous strategy considering that Howard himself is of Jewish immigrant stock and boasts a grandfather who may have been an illicit entrant into Britain. Not that, with a general election in prospect, the Tory party has ever needed much encouragement to assume the offensive where immigration is concerned. Forty-odd years ago, the maverick Conservative ideologue, Enoch Powell, attracted fervent support when he foretold that Britain’s streets would flow with blood if immigration went unchecked. In the late 1970s, the then Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, similarly capitalized on public anxiety over immigration by confiding that she understood the worries of British people who felt they were being “swamped”. In both cases, the unmistakable implication was that the immigration threat to Britain took the form of dark-skinned aliens who were undermining the British way of life.
What makes the current crisis talk about immigration more than usually inflammatory is that the whole issue has become linked in the public mind with the menace of terrorism and the question of national security. Fears that blacks and Asians were destroying British civilization by their very presence have given way to a paranoid dread that Britain is being infiltrated by Muslim terrorists bent on wreaking havoc. In some quarters, it is even suggested that Europe as a whole is facing a threat from such terrorists akin to that once posed by the Nazis and that Westerners who preach tolerance are guilty of a latter-day version of appeasement.
In seeking to gain electoral advantage from all this, Michael Howard has discovered a powerful, if informal, ally in the person of the retired British diplomat, Sir Andrew Green. This sometime ambassador of Saudi Arabia has made a name for himself on the strength of his ostensibly apolitical think-tank, MigrationWatch UK. In a low-key way, Green has already done much to boost the Tory leader’s election prospects. For when this suave gentleman voices his belief that the government is no longer in control of Britain’s borders — thereby implying that God knows who may be on the loose in Britain — he is able to project himself not as a politician with an agenda but as a sober civil servant whose brief is simply to collate information and draw the authoritative conclusions.
In fact, Green is far from being what he seems. A genteel demagogue, he writes accusatory articles for right-wing papers like the Daily Mail and is apt to betray nostalgia for the predominantly white Britain of bygone days — as when he observes that “many people are concerned, and rightly so, that we are losing our own culture”. Revealingly, Green himself resides in an Oxfordshire village — the kind of idyllic retreat long beloved of retired empire-builders.
None of this means that everything Green says is misleading, even if some of his statistics are questionable. He is certainly right to say that Britain’s system of border controls is a shambles. What Britain desperately needs, though, are responsible commentators on immigration who are genuinely free from political bias and committed to disentangling the issues of immigration and “bogus” asylum-seeking from party politicking and crude electioneering. You would never guess from listening to Green that the London of 2005, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, is so dependent on foreign workers that it would be paralyzed without them. Even Green’s Oxfordshire village is reliant on labor from abroad.
Evading the question how far present immigration trends are bound up with the possibly temporary vibrancy of the British economy, Green also pays scant attention to the thousands who emigrate from Britain each year. His whole emphasis is on the hellish place Britain is doomed to become unless action is taken to keep out undesirable people. If Britain is being poisoned by suspicion and mistrust, it is thanks in no small measure to his unstinting efforts.
