Immigration, so the pollsters tell us, tops voters’ concerns in the run-up to the general election. Moreover, there is only one position to take if you want to stay on their better side, as a recent poll by YouGov for the Economist found. It showed a whopping 74 per cent of Britons agreeing that there were too many immigrants coming into the country. But scratch beneath the surface, which the Economist duly did, and a rather more complex picture emerges.
It turns out that voters were not in the least bit bothered about migrants who were coming into the country to work. Their ire was instead reserved for ‘asylum seekers’ who were perceived to be scrounging from the state and overloading public services. Britons, it appears, aren’t so much concerned that people are coming from abroad to ‘take our jobs’ as that they’re not working when they get here.
This, of course, is a somewhat different position from that adopted by the Tories, who’ve taken to claiming that Britain needs to cap the number of people coming into the country full stop. How then to change the headline figures which give such a misleading impression of public attitudes towards immigration? There are, surely, two killer facts. First, in 2003, the number of economic migrants to asylum seekers coming into the country was around two to one. Second, asylum seekers are not a breed apart: many of them would dearly love to work when they arrive in Britain. The reason they don’t? Government regulations barring them from doing so while their claims are being processed.
Finally, for a party supposedly committed to the principle of free market economics, the Tories’ immigration stance has more than a touch of opportunism about it. As the Economist noted, to reduce the overall level of immigration, the Tories will have no choice but to accept fewer overseas workers and, as they promise, institute a points system to allocate work permits. This, the magazine suggests, ‘would look remarkably like 1970s-style manpower planning,’ before sniffily continuing: ‘the Conservatives are supposed to believe that governments should avoid meddling with the labour supply.’
Platell’s platitudes
There is, of course, nothing wrong with newspapers and magazines employing columnists whose opinions fly in the face of much of the rest of what it stands for. We can expect, for instance, that the excellent Simon Jenkins will depart substantially from the Guardian leader line when he joins the newspaper shortly. That said, just what is the point of Amanda Platell’s ‘watching brief’ column in the New Statesman? The former Sunday Express editor and Tory spin doctor does little to elevate the level of debate in the august centre-left publication.
Take, for instance, her recent comments about education secretary Ruth Kelly. ‘We did not need to know,’ said Platell, ‘that Kelly was a devotee of weirdo cult Opus Dei to realise that she is odd. It’s not because she talks like a bloke (and in an unflattering light looks like one, too) or because she eschews the eyebrow tweezers; it’s just that she’s a bit creepy.’ It’s unsurprising that with Platell adding this level of political insight and acumen to the Tory campaign in 2001, William Hague managed to lead the Tories to their second-worst electoral defeat in nearly 100 years.
Don’t mention it
One of New Labour’s simplest but most effective political insights was the belief that blithely dismissing voters’ concerns about issues the left didn’t feel entirely comfortable discussing – like crime or defence, for instance – was never going to be a sure route to electoral success. It is also still relevant to the debate on both crime and antisocial behaviour to note that the victims are more often than not those who Labour claims to care most about: the poor and those consigned to depressing ‘sink estates’ in urban areas.
That does not mean, however, that we should confuse public concern with the obsessions of the media, or fail to recognise that sometimes the latter feeds the former. As the Economist recently showed, the number of mentions of antisocial behaviour in the British press each year has risen from virtually none in 1997 to nearly 1,500 a year in 2003. At the same time, however, vandalism (the closest proxy for it in the statistics) has been steadily dropping since the mid-1990s.
A hero of our time
At around the same moment last month that Tony Blair became Labour’s longest-serving prime minister, Jim Callaghan became the country’s longest-living prime minister. Nowadays, Callaghan’s time in office is usually associated with grainy images of the winter of discontent and the subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher the following spring. As a politician, ‘Sunny Jim’ was not without fault. Many believe he miscalculated by not calling a general election in the autumn of 1978 when Labour edged ahead of the Tories in the polls. More grievously, as home secretary under Harold Wilson in the late 1960s, he helped scupper Barbara Castle’s attempt to reform the trade unions: a stance which came back to bite him a decade later as prime minister.
However, as his biographer Kenneth Morgan showed in an excellent portrait in the Guardian to mark the former prime minister’s milestone, Callaghan is a remarkable man. After his father’s death, the Callaghans endured extreme deprivation – local Baptists helped out with margarine and sugar. Aged twelve, Callaghan ran around the playground during the 1924 general election proclaiming: ‘We’ll soak the rich, you Tories, just wait’.
Twenty-one years later, thanks to his position as a union official, Callaghan won a seat in parliament, which he held for the next 42 years. During that time, he became the only person ever to hold each of the four great offices of state. Unlike America, Britain has no tale which corresponds to Abraham Lincoln’s journey from the log cabin to the White House with which to instil in our children the belief that anyone can – and should – aspire to the highest office in the land if they wish. Perhaps Callaghan’s voyage from a rented terrace house in Portsmouth to Downing Street could play such a role.
George the Cutter
Little noticed (apart from by the zealots of the Republican right) was President Bush’s comments a week before his inauguration that ‘nothing much will happen’ on the proposed constitutional bar on gay marriage. Bush’s support for the amendment was, of course, one of the famed ‘values’ issues said to have secured his re-election.
It should come as little surprise that the president, having engaged in a little gay-bashing to fire up the Republican base in an election year, should have now dropped the issue and turned his attention to the real business of his presidency. After all, Bush’s tactics come straight out of his father’s playbook. His 1988 presidential campaign – characterised by one observer at the time as one of ‘low blows and big lies’ – was marked by a series of attacks and slurs which blended issues of race, crime, patriotism and ethnicity into a similarly vicious cocktail. The day after winning the election, Bush Snr declared that ‘George the Ripper’ was going into retirement as if campaigning and governing bore no relation to one another.
And Dubya’s real priorities? They were starkly revealed by the budget he sent to Congress for approval last month, which proposes deep cuts in domestic spending. Unsurprisingly, top targets include the Medicaid programme – which pays the costs of poor people’s healthcare – while one-third of the 65 government programmes Bush has proposed for elimination are in the Education Department. As USA Today blandly noted: ‘They include federal grants for local schools in such areas as literacy, vocational education and drug-free schools.’ Still, those Americans who voted for Bush can rest assured that the president, at least, shares their moral values.