I have little time for the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, or for that matter any of the other frock-wearing clerics who wield such a disproportionate level of influence in our society. Despite the fact that the number of church-goers has plunged well below a million people and it’s still falling, the God squad are still able to command media time on just about every issue imaginable. But I do agree with him about one thing: it is not racist for people to fear immigration.
In my experience, it is unusual to have ‘a man of the cloth’ seemingly in touch with public opinion but when he says there is “genuine fear” over the impact on housing, jobs and the NHS, he’s right.
On this humble website, I have said often enough that we, in this country, do not debate the subject of immigration. We are told by one side that immigration is good and by the other that immigration is bad. And that’s the sum of it. But what about some people who welcome hardworking migrants and desperate refugees, but who are concerned about economic migrants and, God forbid, the import of terrorists? I could be horribly wrong here, but my feeling is that the majority of people fall within these categories.
I was at an event a few weeks ago when a woman told me that the area where she lived in London was being ruined because of excess immigration. She was what you would describe as an educated person and not without some degree of wealth. So far so bad? Well, she was Indian and told me that whilst she, her family and the rest of the Indian migrants had integrated with the local community, the vast majority of recent immigrants, of whom there were a lot, did not integrate at all. And she firmly believed that immigration was driving down wages, especially for less skilled jobs. I am not saying she was right or wrong. I am saying – yet again! – that we need to debate the subject of immigration. All of us.
I am not going to lie to you and pretend I do not have my own concerns about immigration into my own city and country. Some of the cultures and attitudes date back to medieval times and many of the religious aspects leave me cold. But I do not want, say, Jeremy Corbyn to tell me that everything’s fine and this is a happy multicultural country (in other words, shut up) any more than I want Nigel Farage to tell me that we need to raise the drawbridge and cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.
In saying that Welby was right to speak honestly about the concerns – fears – some people have, beneath the lurid headlines, he also adds that the UK has not done enough assisting Syrian refugees compared to Germany, though he stops short of saying we should take more refugees, which is odd.
The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, a fanatical Roman Catholic, by the way, says this about Welby’s intervention and naturally he has a dig:
“These are rational comments from the archbishop – they’re to be welcomed – but you wonder just how late they’ve come from various people in institutions, so I congratulate him. If you think back, for far too many years what’s happened is that in a sense the elites have all said ‘It’s terrible to talk about immigration and if you do you’re racist’, so they’ve shut down the debate for many, many years.”
I do not know who these ‘elites’ to whom he refers actually are. If Duncan Smith himself, an integral part of the wealthy establishment that runs and indeed owns this country, is not one of these ‘elites’, then who is? But, I’m afraid, he does have a point. The chattering classes of the left are his unsaid target, the Islington types, the Corbynistas. A Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) spokesman said on Radio Five Live this morning that Welby said was racist and because of Corbyn’s close links to the SWP (The Stop the War coalition is a front organisation for the SWP, just like the Anti Nazi League used to be) you cannot brush away his comments because the fact is he is another middle class Trot. The middle class Trots are the new establishment in Corbyn’s Labour.
The excellent Nicky Campbell on his Radio Five Live phone in today chaired a debate on Welby’s comments and, at last, ordinary people had a say. I did not look upon those expressing concerns and fears about immigration as racists. Whilst they did not necessarily have cast iron evidence backing their views, many of their anecdotes chimed with those I hear in everyday life. I have worked for a supermarket where the entire night shift, give one or two token locals, was Eastern European or Asian, all working for rock bottom wages. Were they to pack up and go home tomorrow, would that supermarket have to increase wages to attract British workers? I don’t know the answer to that, but instead of just guessing the answer, we need a proper debate.
I do not know how the mass exodus from Syria and elsewhere will play out. Most of us have seen nothing like it in our lifetimes. There is an enormous gulf between one view that says all immigration is fine and the one that is greatly concerned about it. As I said, I feel that most of us are somewhere in between these polarised positions and at the moment no one is asking us what we think.
