A Young Journalist in London writing about Immigration

How concerned is the public about immigration?
Posted by Amol Rajan

London Independent  -  Live Journal

* Friday, 27 February 2009 at 04:47 pm

The Telegraph reported this morning on a YouGov poll showing that "Immigration is top issue for both Labour and Tory voters".

This unremarkable finding conceals something more important.

I've just spoken to Ben Page, Managing Director of Ipsos MORI, to confirm a statistic that he told me about last year, and which has been revalidated by new research his organisation has conducted.

According to Ipsos MORI, 76% of people in Britain reckon that immigration is their 'top concern'.

But only 18% of people in Britain say it is the biggest problem, or even a major problem, in their area.

This is a finding that has stayed, Page said, "remarkably consistent over several years - it's one of our most consistent poll findings".

The discrepancy between the two statistics is very revealing. It shows that concerns about immigration tap into a generalised anxiety about the state of Britain - all that "broken society" stuff. Despondent voters, who feel the country is going to the dogs, pin the blame for a vast array of ills - crime, lack of teachers, nurses, hospital beds, increased teenage pregnancy etc - on Johnny Foreigner.

Yet less than a fifth think it's a major problem in their area.

Last year I heard the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Winterton, who was in the room when Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech to the Midland Hotel in 1968, give an appreciative speech about his hero.

Reaching a crescendo with his conclusion, he said, fixing his eye on me (who he realised was the only non-white person in the room): "And now we see what's happening with our schools, with our hospitals, with our streets... I'm immensely proud to have been in that room, and immensely grateful to Enoch for his contribution to this debate!"

The clear implication was that the problem with public services in this country is one of capacity: we're overwhelmed by numbers. This attempt to re-write the debate about immigration in terms of demographics is David Cameron's presently favoured method (though it wasn't when he wrote the Tories' 2005 manifesto).

Sir Nicholas was subscribing to precisely the scapegoating instinct that explains those Ipsos MORI findings. Immigrants are a blank canvas, onto which are projected the fears of an atomised society. They are a mechanism for re-writing internal problems as products of external forces.

People are worried, of course, but for more subtle reasons than the Telegraph thinks.

link to Live Journal post