There is, we are reliably informed, more rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance. In the same spirit, political movements are often urged to welcome converts, or semi-converts, without too much recrimination about their years of failing to see the light. Right-wingers in particular often repeat a self-congratulatory line to this effect, something like “we seek converts; the left hunts for heretics”.
It’s a decent axiom. Having gone through the considerable psychological and intellectual upheaval of changing their mind, no-one wants to endure additional harangues about why it took them so long. As a parent, you learn that once a child has given a sincere apology, it doesn’t help to lay it on too thick about the gravity of their offence, lest they draw the lesson that saying sorry doesn’t seem to improve matters, and decide not to bother next time.
Nevertheless, when it comes to the political volte face, there are cases where a concession to reality comes so late, and after such long resistance to the glaringly obvious, and is hedged around with so many qualifications, that a certain amount of eyebrow-raising is perfectly reasonable. Last week the Times columnist Lord Finkelstein, once a prominent Tory moderniser in those long forgotten far-off days of late Blairism, the credit crunch, and the Coalition, conceded that the mass immigration of the last quarter century had not perhaps been an especially good idea, particularly with regard to the speed at which British society is being transformed. In his piece, he states that he has always been uncomfortable with the rate of demographic change, despite his own family background as the child of post-war refugees (his mother was a Holocaust survivor, a childhood friend of Anne Frank, and he has written movingly about her love of Britain).
The problem is that whatever his private thoughts and reservations, in his public statements and political allegiances, Finkelstein has been a reliable member of the centrist bloc who take a “not in front of the servants” attitude to debating immigration. Even those in this group who are not entirely on board with the prevailing liberal approach to borders tend to avoid the subject, as it is considered gauche or “populist” or liable to “inflame community tensions”. Better to simply ignore concerns wherever possible, and hope for the best from the British people’s forbearance, and the nebulous idea of integration. Finkelstein’s column contains the assertion that “people’s failure to live and let live baffles me”. This is a creditable sentiment, if rather self-congratulatory, but it is hardly relevant, because anyone with eyes to see will have observed that many communities are not willing to live and let live, or will take advantage of others’ tolerance. A genuinely cosmopolitan person would know enough about the world to not be at all blasé about the future of functional liberal democracy in a multi-ethnic country.
In the centrists’ desire to keep the immigration debate subdued, there are echoes of the strategy advocated by the polymath and grand old liberal Jonathan Miller in a 1971 debate with Enoch Powell. In that debate, Miller argued with magnificent patrician complacency that ordinary people would only have negative feelings about demographic change if wicked politicians like Brigadier Powell told them to. More than half a century later, it is possible to judge whether shutting up anyone in public life who sought to seriously discuss immigration and its discontents has worked in suppressing public disquiet; it has not. All the many sacrifices of reputation and career laid on the altar of community cohesion, all the official blind eyes turned to — for example — mass child rape, have been in vain on their own terms.
Commentators, writers and theorists on the right have been warning about all this for decades
Finkelstein warns us portentously about the “politics of victimhood” and the rise of a self-conscious native British identity, but that ship has already sailed. At least ten million people have settled permanently in this country just since the turn of the century. What on earth did the Tory wets expect to happen? It is absolutely preposterous for nominally conservative Sensibles to suddenly turn round and say they’ve always been a bit uncertain about this mass immigration lark, but we’d better try to make the best of it, and how dare anyone complain too much or too vociferously. It is notable that Finkelstein’s article nowhere expresses any principled concern about the very real, and indeed fairly imminent, possibility of white British people becoming a minority in their own homeland by the second half of this century. This would not only be an injustice in itself, but would store up all sorts of troubles in terms of civil unrest, national cohesion and the functioning of the political system.
Commentators, writers and theorists on the right have been warning about all this for decades. It is forty years since Bradford headteacher Ray Honeyford was forced into early retirement by a sectarian campaign when he questioned aspects of local Islamic culture. David Goodhart’s mild but enormously controversial Prospect essay on the tension between solidarity and diversity was published in early 2004. Ed West’s The Diversity Delusion came out in 2013 and Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death Of Europe celebrates its tenth birthday this year. More recently, data analysis has cast doubt on the once widely accepted cliché that we need mass low-skilled immigration for economic growth, and has exposed the sheer amount of British social housing occupied by newcomers to the country who have never been, and will never be, net contributors. Revelations about Pakistani rape gangs, and horrific crimes committed by men who arrived illegally on small boats, have highlighted the deep cultural incompatibility of many recent and not-so-recent arrivals, and their hostility to us.
In other words, mass immigration sceptics have, as the woke activists say, done the work. Finkelstein and Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil and much of the rest of the old right-wing establishment are out of ideas. They can only tut from the sidelines, tone-policing and scolding as the intellectually vibrant insurgent right actually moves the ball down the pitch.
