A Crowd of New People
One result of the long Iraqi agony was the arrival of many Iraqi asylum-seekers in Britain, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This was little commented on because they were only a small part of a large migration into the country which changed it during the Blair years. It was a multi-lingual, many-religioned migration which included Poles, Zimbabweans, Somalis, Nigerians, Russians and Afghans, Australians, white South Africans and Americans, as well as sizeable French and German inflows. In 2005, according to the Office for National Statistics, immigrants were arriving to live in Britain at the rate of 1,500 a day; and since Tony Blair had arrived in power, more than 1.3 million people had come. By the mid-2000s English was no longer the first language of half the primary school children in London, and the capital boasted 350 different separate language groups.
The poorer new migrant groups were almost entirely unrepresented in politics but radically changed the sights, sounds and scents of urban Britain. The veiled women of the Muslim world, or its more traditionalist and Arab quarters, became common sights even on the streets of many market towns, from Scotland to Kent. Polish tradesmen and factory workers were followed by shops stocking up with Polish food and selling Polish magazines, and even by Polish road signs. Chinese villagers were involved in a tragedy when nineteen were caught by the tide while cockle-picking at Morecambe Bay and drowned; but many more were working in grim conditions for rural ‘gang-masters’ or as the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, put it, ‘as slaves’. Russian voices began to be as common on the London Underground as Irish ones. Through most of its history Britain had been abnormally open to the world, mostly imposing herself elsewhere. Now she found herself a ‘world island’ in a new way.
Throughout the twentieth century, Britain’s foreign policy had been concerned to control the impact of outside forces on these busy, crowded islands. In its first half she had tried this by attempting to keep her imperial possessions while subduing her greatest rival, Germany. In its second half she had worked with America against the Soviet Union to preserve a system of democracy and the free market, hoping to avoid nuclear annihilation, determined to avoid European federalism. She was not a successful manufacturing country but became a popular place to do financial business. Compared to similar countries, she was unusually warlike, spending more on defence and fighting more, too. Britain had always gone out into the world. Now, increasingly, the world came to her, poor and migrant, rich and corporate, the people of Eastern Europe and the manufactures of China. As in Victorian times, she was on the edge of newness, at the global bow-wave of change, but now it was change experienced near at hand.
Immigration had been a constant of British life. What was new was the scale and variety. Earlier modern migrations had, as we have seen, provoked a racialist backlash, riots, the rise of the National Front and a series of new laws. These later migrations were controversial in different ways. The early arrivals from the Caribbean or India were people who looked different but spoke the same language and in many cases had had a similar education to native British people. Many of the later migrants looked similar to the white British but shared no linguistic or imperial history. There were other differences. Young educated Polish or Czech people had come to Britain to earn money before going home again to acquire good homes, marry and have children in their rapidly growing countries. The economic growth of the early 2000s was fuelled by the influx of energetic and talented people, often denuding their own countries of skills, making their way in Britain as quickly as the East African Asians had before.
But there are always two sides to such changes. Criminal gangs of Albanians, Kosovars and Turks appeared as novel and threatening as Jamaican criminality had thirty years earlier. The social service bill for the new migrants was a serious burden to local authorities; towns such as Slough protested to national government about the extra cost in housing, education and other services. Above everything else, there was the sheer scale of the new migrations and the inability of the machinery of government to regulate what was happening. The Home Office’s immigration and nationality department (IND) seemed unable to prevent illegal migrants entering Britain, to spot those abusing the asylum system in order to settle here, or to apprehend and deport people. An illegal and sometimes lethal trade in ‘people smuggling’ made it particularly hard. Even after airlines were made responsible for the status of those they carried, large articulated lorries filled with human beings who had paid over their life savings to be taken to Britain, rumbled through the Channel Tunnel.
A Red Cross camp at Sangatte, near its French entrance, was blamed by Britain for exacerbating the problem. By the end of 2002, when Blunkett finally managed to get a deal with the French to close it, an estimated 67,000 had passed through Sangatte into Britain. Many African, Asian and Balkan migrants, believing the British immigration and benefits systems to be easier than those of other EU countries, simply moved across the continent and waited patiently for their journey into the UK. Thermal-imaging devices, increased border staff and unwelcoming asylum centres were all deployed. Unknown numbers of migrants died through thirst, asphyxiation or cold; some were murdered en route. Successive home secretaries – Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid – tried to gapple with the trade, introducing legislation which was criticized by civil liberties campaigners and challenged in the courts. None was much applauded for their efforts and the last of them eventually confessed that he believed his department was ‘not fit for purpose’. He hived off the struggling IND as a separate agency and promised to clear a backlog of around 280,000 failed asylum-seekers still in the country within five years. Uniformed border security staff were promised, and the historic Home Office was to be split up.
Meanwhile, many straightforwardly illegal immigrants had bypassed the asylum system entirely. In July 2005 the Home Office produced its own estimate of what the illegal population of the UK had been four years earlier, reckoning it between 310,000 and 570,000 souls, or between 0.5 and 1 per cent of the total population. A year later unofficial estimates pushed the possible total higher, to 800,000. The truth was, with boxes of cardboard files still being uncovered and no national recording system, nobody had a clue. Even the Bank of England complained, asking how it could set interest rates without knowing roughly how many people were working in the country. Official figures showed the number applying for asylum falling, perhaps as former Yugoslavia returned to relative peace. Controversially, thousands were being sent back to Iraq. But there were always new desperate groups, in the Middle East or war-torn and hungry Africa: projections about the impact of global warming suggested there always would be.
The arrival of workers from the ten countries which joined the EU in 2004 was a different issue, though it involved an influx of roughly the same size. When the European Union expanded Britain decided that, unlike France or Germany, she would not try to delay opening the country to migrant workers. Ministers suggested that the likely number arriving would be around 26,000 over the first two years. This was wildly wrong. In 2006 a Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, announced that since 2004 when the European Union expanded 427,000 people from Poland and seven other new EU nations had applied to work in Britain. If the self-employed were included, he added, the real figure would be nearer 600,000. There were at least 36,000 spouses and children who had arrived too and 27,000 child benefit applications had been received. These were very large numbers indeed. The Ugandan Asian migration which caused such a storm in 1971 had, for instance, amounted to some 28,000 people. It was hardly surprising that Britain now faced an acute housing shortage and that government officials began scouring the South of England looking for new places where councils would be ordered to let the developers start building.
By the government’s own 2006 figures, annual net migration for the previous year was 185,000 and had averaged 166,000 over the previous seven years. This compares to the 50,000 net inflow which Enoch Powell had criticized in his notorious 1968 speech as ‘mad, literally mad’. Projections based on many different assumptions suggested the UK population would grow by more than seven million by 2031. Of that, 80 per cent would be due to immigration. The organization Migration Watch UK, set up by a former diplomat to campaign for less immigration, said this was equivalent to requiring the building of two new towns the size of Cambridge each year, or five new Birminghams over the quarter century. But was there a mood of unnecessary hysteria? As has been noted, many of the Eastern European migrants, like those from Australia, France or the United States, could be expected to return home eventually. Immigration was partially offset by the outward flow of around 60,000 British people moving abroad each year, mainly to Australia, the United States, France and Spain. By the winter of 2006-7 one policy institute, the IPPR, reckoned there were 5.5 million British people living permanently overseas – nearly one in ten of us, or more than the population of Scotland – and another half million living there for some of the year. Aside from the obvious destinations, the Middle East and Asia were seeing rising colonies of expatriate British. Who were they? A worrying proportion seemed to be graduates; Britain is believed to lose one in six graduates to emigration. Many were retired or better-off people looking for a life of sunlit ease, just as many immigrants to Britain were young, ambitious and keen to work. Government ministers tended to emphasize the benign economic effects of immigration. Their critics looked around and asked where all the extra people would go, and what spare road space, hospital beds or schools they would find to use.