On both the left and the right, voters say they feel powerless. And in many ways they are The turnout in the coming election could be very low. In 2005 it was 61.4% and this time the number threatens to be even smaller, depending on the weather on polling day and if, between now and then, more people can be persuaded that the outcome will have any effect on their futures. The boom years of British electoral democracy are 60 years in the past. Nearly 84% of the electorate went to the polls in 1950, to return Clement Attlee, and nearly 83% a year later, to replace him with Winston Churchill. This year the figure might be somewhere between 50% and 60% – a desultory level of participation suggesting a widespread disenchantment with politics that's unlikely to be cured by changing first-past-the-post to the system known as the Alternative Vote. Non-voters can be castigated for their ignorance, apathy and cynicism. Parliamentarians can be blamed for souring public opinion by fiddling their expenses. The media can take the rap for its portrayal of politics as an endless series of schoolboy confrontations and personal crises. But beyond these explanations is a quite rational disbelief in the power of the state itself. Could the state save Cadbury from takeover by Kraft? Could it save Kilmarnock's whisky plant from closure by Diageo? Can it moderate the pay of bankers and chief executives? In these and dozens of other popular causes, signed up to by big political figures, the answer is no, or not much. By surrendering so much of its economic power to private enterprise and the global market, the state has done itself out of a large part of its job. To a steelworker on the dole in Redcar, made redundant by a company headquartered in Mumbai, "big government" isn't so much a wicked bully as a beautiful ghost. People say they feel powerless. Wars are an area where the state remains vigorous, and on the left (though not just on the left) the Iraq invasion did more than any other event to promote the sensation of helplessness. No matter how many people protested, the war was sanctioned by parliament and went ahead. On the right (though not just on the right), the electorate feels impotent for a different reason. Over the past dozen years Britain's demography has changed significantly and promises to change even further. As a fact, this is beyond dispute. Countable immigration rates more than tripled during the Blair epoch; since 1997, about 1.6 million people have been granted permanent right of residence and in 2008 nearly a quarter of all births in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers (in London the figure is nearly a half). Add to these figures EU migrants who stay for long periods and it becomes clear that Britain has been socially transformed at a speed and on a scale unprecedented in its written history. The Windrush generation and Idi Amin's refugees were sideshows by comparison. Because "immigration" was once the codeword for "race", and because race led to racism and the British National party, slavery and Auschwitz, most public discussion of the subject has been awkward. When the economy was good and the unemployment rate low, only the bravest of liberals questioned the notion that mass immigration led to greater prosperity and a stimulating cultural diversity, and disadvantaged nobody. Then came Gordon Brown's "British jobs for British workers" as a symptom of the concealed unease. Questions are now being asked: did the state in the shape of the Labour government actively promote immigration as a considered policy, or did it simply accept it as an inevitable and, for a time, economically convenient fact of globalised life? This week the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph have been filled with their version of the answer. The government had encouraged immigration not just because the country's existing pool of labour was too small or insufficiently skilled or unwilling, but also to promote certain "social objectives". These included the creation of new Labour-inclined populations that would help keep the party in power. In fact, the charge is pure speculation, though the phrase "social objectives" does occur several times in the early draft of an immigration paper prepared for the cabinet, the revised version of which was published in 2001. Using a freedom of information order, Sir Andrew Green, chair of MigrationWatch, recently obtained this draft – hence the coverage – after a former Blair adviser, Andrew Neather, disclosed its existence in a piece published last year by Neather's new employer, the London Evening Standard. The piece was ostensibly a celebration of multicultural London, though history may remember it as among the reasons for the collapse of the traditional Labour vote. Neath wrote that his Labour colleagues had wanted "to rub the right's nose in diversity". His family's nannies were "model migrants" from eastern Europe: "Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley – fascist au pair, anyone?" In a thousand words, Neather sealed the case for recent immigration as a blessing to the rich and a curse for the poor. He can be heard being slightly more circumspect on a BBC documentary on immigration policy in the Analysis slot, which is repeated tomorrow at 9.30pm on Radio 4. Its narrator and interviewer, David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, takes us calmly and lucidly through a story that mixes intention with happenstance. Neather says that "diversity" appealed to the Labour leadership as a substitute for class struggle: "I mean crudely seeing ethnic minorities as essentially the standard bearers of … social justice rather than … the white working class." David Blunkett says this is nonsense. The economic imperative was what drove government policy: "The idea [that, per se] it would be a very good idea to have a multicultural Britain was never debated in my presence or in cabinet; and if it had been, I would have poured cold water on it very strongly.' So far as Goodhart can discover, the cabinet has never debated what the country's immigration strategy should be. Some rules were tightened, others made more liberal. When Britain opened its labour market to the EU's new member states in eastern Europe – several years before it had to – more than a million people arrived rather than the tens of thousands expected; the decision, it seems, was taken by a few officials and advisers before a council of ministers' meeting in Brussels. Could it have been otherwise? Possibly not. Jobs of all kinds needed filling, the potential for economic growth seemed infinite, and the business lobby was powerful. And yet, as Goodhart says, politicians made policy (if that's not too strong a word) with "a nervous glance over their shoulder, aware that their instincts were not shared by the majority of British citizens." As a result, the fabric of Britain is very different to 1997: its changed demography may well turn out to be Labour's most enduring legacy. "Nobody consulted us about any of this," will be the objection that meets many canvassers on doorsteps in a few weeks time. And the truth is that, for better or worse, nobody did.
Thursday, 18 February 2010
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