Immigration: it’s not black and white.

Do you know what, or rather who, changed my mind about the immigration debate, or the lack of one?

It was Gillian Duffy.

Mrs Duffy, you may remember, was the woman from Rochdale who wanted to raise the subject with the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown whilst he was electioneering in the 2010 General Election. Brown, forgetting he was miked up, returned to his car and referred to her as “that bigoted woman.’ All hell was let loose because Brown had said, in an off guarded moment, that to even raise the subject of immigration was an act of bigotry and the insinuation was that it might also be racist. Only one word for that: bollocks.

I write as the product of immigrants. Very little of my bloodline is English and small bit was from my grandmother on my father’s side. Everyone else was either Norwegian or Dutch. My grandfather came here in the early 1900s and did his bit for King and country, my mother came here from the Netherlands in the 1950s to be with my father who later emigrated to Canada. But I am English by birth, I have never claimed a penny in benefits (I was turned down for Jobseekers Allowance recently, though, for being in receipt of a modest pension) and none of my parents or grandparents claimed benefits, always working, paying their own way.

And there are many families like mine, most of whom have come to a new country, settled, embraced the British way of life, contributed to the national psyche.

I’m afraid as a card-carrying member of the soft, cuddly left, I am not a multiculturalist. I am 100% in support of multi ethnicity because I am not interested in someone’s colour, creed or religion (so long as they keep it to themselves), but my interpretation of multiculturalism has usually meant allowing muslims to do what they like. I know that’s an horrendous simplification of a serious issue, but do we respect cultures who enslave people, traffic them, cut their genitals (boys and girls), slaughter animals in a cruel way and generally live separate lives from the rest of us. (These are not all islamic issues: they are there for illustration.) Multiculturalism is a worthless, vacuous term that covers anything and nothing. I have no issue with immigrants maintaining their traditions within the confines of a secular democracy but my experience tells me that this is not how it works in this country.

There are issues regarding immigration that we really should debate, as Gordon Brown didn’t want to do before the Election, but neither do I want to debate the subject in a crass, populist and ugly way like Farage’s increasingly right wing Ukip that Cameron’s Tories are edging towards.

I do not think the argument that ‘foreigners are taking our jobs’ is the right argument. I value a free and open Europe where I can visit and work wherever I want, without borders. But I cannot pretend that waves of foreign workers are making life any easier for us.

If you believe Chancellor Osborne’s narrative that the economy is booming, we’re all better off and there are loads of jobs, you live in a different world to me. There are jobs, all right, but they are not quality jobs. The quality jobs in manufacturing are simply not there anymore, the middle income jobs people aspire to are disappearing and in their place are low paid jobs. The economy is largely de-unionised and so many employers use the minimum wage as the basis for how much they pay people. When I was looking for part time work recently, all I could find was minimum wage work, even at the so called more ethical employers (nice Christmas advert though). It doesn’t affect me unduly because I am not looking for full time work but so many people I know and work with are certainly affected.

We are not being literally flooded with immigrants taking our jobs – the situation is more complex than that – but the simple fact is that there an awful lot of people on this small island, many millions more now than there were just a few years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that an expanding workforce from overseas is having a detrimental effect on the job prospects and salaries of many British workers. There. I said it. Gordon Brown would probably call me “that bigoted man” but I am not.

We certainly need some levels of immigrants, especially in specialist and top-end jobs. Our health service, for example, needs to attract the best in the world, so does much of our industry. I don’t think anyone will argue with that.

But there are areas of our country where ordinary low paid families, earning too little to pay tax, live alongside a house full of Eastern European workers, all earning the minimum wage and less in some cases (but that’s another story), working hard, absolutely no doubt, but is there not an argument that, in some areas, they are driving down wages of the indigenous population?

I loathe and detest the genuine bigots of Ukip and the right of the Tory Party who simply hate Johnny Foreigner. They will never be satisfied until we are an island cut off from the world, where outsiders are not allowed in.

To say we can’t debate it is just wrong.

The argument that some make that people come here just to claim benefits is rubbish. That may have been the case at one time but it isn’t now. And benefit levels are so low these days that they wouldn’t be able to live on them anyway, even if they could get them.

To me though, this is a small island country and some parts of it are already very full. The stresses and strains on schools, hospitals, social services and so on are evident.

We do need a proper open debate on the subject that runs between the extreme ‘ban all immigration’ on one side and just leave everything as it is on the other.

Immigration though should not just be the province of the right wing of politics. It can and will affect all of us one way or another.

Let’s have that debate now without the name-calling and sloganising because there are more Gillian Duffys out there than you might think and people like her, and us, deserve better than being referred to as bigots. It is not a black and white issue anymore than it is a black or white issue.