In a letter to the Times some 4 years ago I proposed that a 5 year moratorium on all non-patrial immigration should be brought in without delay to reassure the British people that things were being brought under control and specifically to allow time for:
(1) removal of the huge (more than 500,000) backlog of people illegally resident in the UK
(2) a series of policy options to be formulated and put to the British people in a referendum at the end of the moratorium period, e.g. zero per year, 20,000 per year, 60,000 per year (the rate pertaining through most of the 70s and 80s, or 1 per 1,000 residents per annum).
(3) the establishment of a proper set of border controls recording all movements in and out including those on visas as every other country outside Europe manages to do, including the USA, and China which requires currency declarations as well.
As with so many areas of national life – e.g. junior doctors, the British political class have made a mess of border controls because of its confusion of motives and objectives, as in the original 1962 Act.
There is no inherent difficulty in recording ins and outs – a £400 lap-top per entry or exit gate hooked to a central register would easily handle the 200 million movements per annum – barely filling 20 hard discs. Air travellers anyway have to fill in boarding cards which are checked 3 times before boarding. Non-EU/EEA travellers have to fill in landing cards before entry – so what’s the problem?
For non-EU overstayers there is no problem, only a lack of will to tackle the problem with speed and determination ensuring that all our citizens including Church people see that breaking an undertaking to leave our country is a grave offence and not subject to a false equality either of need or entitlement between British citizens and foreign nationals.
However, the real problem, as I am sure everyone here realises, is with Britain’s membership of the EU, and the consequent inwards flow from the 10 new East European members. It is not against EU law to actually count people in and it is administratively easy to do – since as we have noted – every air traveller has to go through an immigration channel, and the requirement can simply be extended to sea travellers.
Our present government gratuitously inflicted on us the present huge uncontrollable flows from Eastern Europe, starting on May 1st 2004. Germany and France for instance have imposed a block on these flows until at least 2009 when they no doubt calculated that the primary surge westwards would have been absorbed by Britain (as is proving to be the case). Only the removal of the UK from the EU with allow us now to reinstate the controls we used to have.
So why did they do it?
As with the Kenya Asian passports nobody can give an answer. My guess is while the government pretended the flow would be small (remember their estimate of 13,000), they actually banked on a much larger number to boost economic growth claims and to counter pretended labour shortages.
In all the welter of claim and counter-claim about current immigration, two groups of figures stand out:
(1) Well over one million have been added by immigration to a labour force of 29 million in 2004, while 2.7 million of employment age are in receipt of long-term disability benefits and the unemployed claimant count is around a million.
(2) While one million new employees add to growth in the economy, of course – anybody doing anything would do that – the great majority – ¾ at least of newcomers earn way below the average wage, which is why they are given jobs by employers. This has a massive depressive effect on our national productivity – which as even Gordon Brown has noticed is already way down the list of OECD countries, our principal competitors.
At £6 per hour, significantly above the minimum wage, one million workers over 3 years nonetheless reduce average productivity by about 0.5% per annum. This is to be subtracted from growth in the indigenous economy of perhaps 1.5% per annum, a major reduction which pushes us still further down the OECD league table.
To sum up – in the two most vital, external, features of our national life, affecting our very existence – our membership of the European Union and mass immigration – all the major decisions have been taken by British governments without any democratic mandate whatsoever, with every attempt being made by spin to conceal the import of the decisions, and in my view consistently against the interests of the British people.
It is therefore a vital and a necessary first step in our path to governing ourselves again that both of these matters, immigration and our relationship with the European Union, be subject to the judgment of the British people in referendums – an objective which I am sure would be shared by the late Sir James Goldsmith. Once the referendum principle is embedded our political life, we can move on to even more fundamental reforms to bring the government of this country under its people’s control.
Thank you for your attention.