Though Cowards Flinch

Melanie Phillips has been foaming at the mouth again over ‘Neathergate’:

A covert policy to subvert the makeup of the country and change its national identity, an abuse of democracy, a stupendous swindle of the British people — more, an act of collective treachery to the nation: an enormous story, you might think? You would be wrong. Other than in the Daily Mail, I cannot find any reference to this anywhere else.

Tabloid Watch has done already done a good job debunking the assertion that Migration Watch’s latest ’revelations’ are only being covered in the Daily Mail, by pointing out that they’ve been covered in The Sun, The Express and the Telegraph.  Even one of her commenters feels bound to the point out that s/he’s

just heard a programme on the BBC World Service which led with a recap of Neathergate with quotes from Neather’s article followed by a discussion between Sir Andrew Green [of Migration Watch] and Denis McShane with the presenter asking whether mass immigration was down to cock-up or conspiracy.

So I think we can safely say Phillips is wrong on that one.

And just in passing, she and Migration Watch are wrong about the substantive issue as well.

Green points to editing of draft reports co-written by Neather in 2000 as his evidence that:

there was indeed a Labour conspiracy to change the nature of our society by mass immigration.

This is, frankly, crap.  There are two infinitely better explanation to explain why the editing took place than the argument Green puts forward about the government seeking to conceal its ‘real’ intentions about ‘changing the nature of our society.

First, the report was too wordy and needed editing.  Green may not have noticed, but that’s what editors do.

Second, the writers of the report had drifted towards an explanation for the then new ‘managed migration’ policy which wasn’t in fact in keeping with anything the government had in mind, and so they were edited.  Again, that’s what editors do.

The second explanation is in fact totally in keeping with what Home Office Minister Barbara Roche said in 2000:

 In the past we have thought purely about immigration control … Now we need to think about immigration management … The evidence shows that economically driven migration can bring substantial overall benefits for both growth and the economy.

And as I’ve already pointed out (with further evidence here), this is what one academic researcher made of Barbara Roche:

She was very keen to differentiate the question of policy towards asylum seekers from a new policy of ‘managed migration’. This new policy focus would be open and responsive to evidence and expertise on migration in general, but the question this research was supposed to address was clearly formulated in purely economic terms.

That is, the government’s intentions around immigration were the opposite of what Green and Phillips are now conspiracy theorising.

Contrary to Phillips’ protestations, the right wing press are lapping it up, keen enough to continue fueling hatred of immigrants as a means of selling a few more copies of their bile.

And it doesn’t have to be like this.  Here’s the Economist on the reception of immigrants in Spain, which has seen around 2.5 million new entries since 2004:

Immigrants were big contributors to Spain’s economic success. As new workers poured in, Spain arrived at levels of immigration similar to other big European countries, but in a quarter of the time. Integration has been only a partial success. There are almost no immigrant police officers. Black Africans still find some nightclubs closed to them. But friction is minimal. Even in Vic, where an anti-immigrant party came second in local elections, a poll puts immigrants (who make up 23% of the population) below parks and car parking as matters of local concern.

The message?  Yes, there’s overt racism in Spain, but the right and the right wing press have not used it as a tool to divide and rule the working class; and without that malign influence, immigration and immigrants have not become a focus for the kind of national hysteria that Phillips and Green are so keen to foment.

Sadly, things may be changing in Spain.  As the Economist article concludes:

Some have tried and failed to make immigration a political issue before. But a sea-change in political attitudes may be coming. Joaquín Arango, of Madrid’s Complutense University, points out that the PP [a rightwing party] is an exception on the European right in that it has not turned immigration into a political battlefield. It would be natural for the right to behave more as it does elsewhere, he says. For the moment, Spaniards remember their own recent experience of emigration; they show no taste for big rows about immigration. But recession and the competition for jobs could alter that (my emphasis).

That – to requote Phillips – is ‘the kind of change to its national identity’  Spain could well do without, and why we’d be better off without Phillips.