'Vast' EU immigration was a 'MISTAKE', admits multiculturalism expert

I don't usually read the Express, though my grandmother read it, but this article was posted on Facebook by a Romanian who was incensed by it. She was angry that a British Muslim was suggesting that too many Eastern European migrants had come to the UK.

This is a very common complaint from Romanians. Why do we British accept Pakistanis but do not like Romanians?

Dr Uberoi, the 'expert in multiculturalism', thinks the UK voted to leave the EU because we were going through 'darker times' and were in the grip of morbid emotions. It sounds like a collective psychosis of some sort. Clearly he is in some ways an ass. But he also says something interesting, that what is remarkable is that after 43 years no emotional arguments were deployed in the referendum campaign for staying in the EU. The arguments on the Remain side 

“ weren’t about ‘we want to be with these people, we are part of Europe, we cannot sever this connection’ – those types of arguments… despite 40 years of union, didn’t exist.”

He is right - the arguments adduced by Remain were mostly economic, as they were in the 1975 referendum.  He might have added that even the economic arguments were pretty well purely negative. 

He might also have added that the reason why those arguments were not made is because politicians thought that they would not have found an echo in the hearts of voters.

The one non-economic argument occasionally heard was that being in the EU helped maintain peace in Europe. But this was clearly not true.

The reasons why we are leaving and other countries are not are complex, but the biggest reason is that we had a referendum and they didn't.

The comments to the Express article are interesting, as comments on articles about immigration always are. This caught my attention.

CHRISTIANS should be encouraged to marry Muslims as a way of tackling Islamophobia, a senior peer claimed today. Lord Scott, a former Supreme Court Judge, cited his own family - in which two of his four children married Muslims - as an example of how interfaith families can thrive. The peer, who sits as a crossbencher in the Lords, made the comments during a debate on how to improve relations between the Muslim community and other faith groups in the UK. He said: "Of my two sons one has become a Muslim and of my two daughters one of those has become a Muslim, and I have 12 lovely grandchildren, seven of whom are little Muslims..."I do just wonder that if an improvement is needed between the faith groups, one way of promoting that might be to encourage interfaith marriages."

Although polls suggest that immigration was not the primary reason for the Brexit vote immigration is an issue that naturally people feel intensely about - more so than even their standard of living. 25% of people asked in a survey in 2014 said that they would like ALL immigrants to be deported. 23% didn't answer the question. See p 17 of the survey here.