Ed Miliband and the end of things

Yesterday Mr Ed Miliband, the leader of the British Labour Party, purported to change Labour policy on immigration. He said:

“We too easily assumed those who worried about immigration were stuck in the past, unrealistic about how things could be different, even prejudiced.



“But Britain was experiencing the largest peacetime migration in recent history, and people’s concerns were genuine.



“Why didn’t we listen more? At least by the end of our time in office, we were too dazzled by globalisation and too ­sanguine about its price.”

Asked if immigration was too high, he said the number of low-skilled workers coming here was “probably still too high” but many were from the EU who could not be stopped. (I hope this is right. Why are low skilled workers from outside the EU admitted at all unless they marry British subjects?)

He wants to reduce employers’ demand for cheap foreign labour rather than making any “blanket promise” about numbers, which is an admission that the whole idea is a fraud on the voters. Sir Andrew Green, of Migrationwatch UK, commented:

“What was missing from his speech is an appreciation of the scale that immigration has reached, which is the reason for public concern. Net immigration has reached 250,000 a year. That’s going to add five million to our population in 15 years.”

Please think about these figures. Mrs. Thatcher, in her famous remarks about 'swamping' by immigrants, which so annoyed her colleagues in the shadow cabinet when she was Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, said that an annual intake of 50,000 immigrants amounted to two towns a year and made people think they were being swamped. 

In office, in the face of fierce opposition from Labour, her party passed legislation to reduce immigration yet every year thereafter while the Conservatives were in power about 50,000 immigrants continued to arrive, until the final year of the Major Government when the numbers suddenly rose, for reasons I do not understand, to 65,000. They were, we were told, so-called 'secondary immigrants' and were usually wives from the Sub-Continent who had entered arranged marriages with British subjects. This is the reason why there are now many more South Asians than West Indians in the U.K.

For how things proceeded under New Labour, scarcely reported in the press and undiscussed by clever people, click here. 

I living in Romania and reading the newspapers on-line had absolutely no idea of the huge transformation that was taking place back home. In 2005 I  invested in a 750 pp. biography of Tony Blair by Anthony Seldon which has one index reference to immigration which leads to a single sentence about attempts to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers. Other political biographies and contemporary histories are equally silent and yet in these thirteen years the United Kingdom changed utterly and irrevocably. Now after the change of government 250,000 more people entered the UK to live in 2010-2011 than left.

According to this article in the Guardian, based on figures from the Office for National Statistics. the non-white British population of England and Wales grew from 6.6 million in 2001, after four years of liberal immigration under Labour,  to 9.1 million in 2009 – nearly one in six of the population.

Sir Andrew said Mr ­Miliband was also wrong to talk mostly about migration from the EU, adding:

“In the Labour years, there was net foreign immigration of 3.5 million. Only one fifth was from the EU.”

Sir Andrew has done an absolutely wonderful job of informing the public in a clear way about immigration figures, often dealing with obfuscation and lies from civil servants and journalists and without becoming identified with the right or any political standpoint. But however he works out what proportion of net immigration is from the EU, net immigration is completely irrelevant - suggesting, as it does, that the departure of a hundred thousand indigenous Englishmen and women and the arrival of a hundred thousand Somalis represents no change. Talking about schools and hospitals is also largely beside the point. If the women of England suddenly started having an average of five children we would build the hospitals and schools with no objection. The point is identity, culture, national survival, the survival of Christendom, the survival of European civilisation.


Immigration is much, much worse by far than any other of the many terrible mistakes made by Labour, even the unnecessary wars, even devolution, because it is irrevocable and changes the nation herself. 

Assimilation is a red herring and can only be partial. Among middle class people it works better than with what used to be called the lower class but in the age of the Internet and relativism there is less and less to assimilate to. We should decide if we want Europe to remain mostly white and Christian or not and act accordingly. 

Yes I am an immigrant (from one member of the European Union living in another but I would enjoy living further afield too) and love being a foreigner, love living in Romania  and would not want to live in my own country again, but  people it is all a matter of numbers. Numbers, that is to say, of immigrants from alien cultures who will transform the host culture. In fact almost the only thing I don't really like about Bucharest is the very large number of foreigners like me who are here, though most are not here for good except those that marry Romanians. A few confirmed bachelors like me will die here.

And the reason I love it here so much is that it is such an un-pluralistic, homogeneous, old-fashioned place where almost everyone is Orthodox, everyone is patriotic and, despite or because of Communism,  the existence of God is taken for granted in the same way as the sun rising and falling each day.

In any case we are not talking about restricting movement of peoples within the European Union, whether or not that would be a good thing. In fact the existence of a large supply of well educated, conservative Christian immigrants from Eastern Europe, within and if necessary from beyond the EU, is a strong reason why, if it is decided that the West does need immigrants (and this is absolutely by no means clear), that immigration from outside Europe is not necessary. And I say this, of course, lest it be necessary to explain, not because there is anything in the least wrong with people from countries that are predominantly not Christian and not predominantly of European descent, but simply that their traditions are different from our traditions. We go to great lengths these days to preserve natural habitats and animal species and we should do the same with national traditions, for reasons that would require a book to explain, were explanation for some reason deemed necessary. 

The only hope of ending immigration is by persuading the intellectuals and especially the right-of-centre British establishment that this is urgently necessary but instead it is difficult even to have the courage to discuss the issue.

The most moving and saddest thing I have read on this subject is by the wonderful Charles Moore, former editor of The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph and official biographer of Margaret Thatcher. It is here.


If European countries decide they do not want to retain, in a century, a white Christian majority, they can carry on as now, but the decision I think should be a conscious one and decided democratically, not in secret but after long open debate. Opinion polls show that immigrants and their descendants would be mostly in favour of stopping immigration into England and possibly this holds true in other European countries. (All but one of my British Indian friends want to stop immigration but one does not - she wants more immigrants from the Sub-Continent but objects to East European immigrants.) 

If Europe prefers to retain a white and Christian majority, European states also have unfortunately to resile from international treaties on asylum seekers, very uncharitable though it may sound. At present English judges have ruled, to quote a single example, that every Iranian practising homosexual has the right to asylum in the U.K. There may be many of them and certainly there will be many more asylum seekers incommoded by revolutions and wars who can make their way to England or to Europe. One solution, if it is unacceptable to ignore asylum seekers, who are mostly in part would-be economic migrants (and would-be economic migrants are admirable people), is for developed countries to pay impoverished countries in Africa, such as Burkina Faso, to take them. I suspect many would decline asylum in Burkina Faso, but we can try the experiment and see.