If sex was invented by DH Lawrence, then Enoch Powell invented immigration. As Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, put it: “That speech has cast a 40-year shadow over Britain, with governments failing to provide articulate leadership on the issue.”

Political reluctance to air the issue is understandable – it’s supremely toxic, as many politicians have painfully discovered. Even just quoting Powell can cost you your job: step forward Nigel Hastilow, the former Conservative PPC for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, who resigned after writing in 2007 that Powell “was right and immigration has changed the face of Britain dramatically”. It must have been all the more galling when James Morris, his successor, secured a majority of 2,000 in 2010.

Both Powell and Phillips described the consequences of untrammelled immigration in negative terms. Phillips was widely criticised when he declared it had led to a “creeping resentment”, while Powell described the “rising peril” confronting the country. But behind the hysteria, what does the public actually think?

Despite Powell’s sacking as shadow defence secretary within a day of making the infamous speech, the public mood was rather different. Gallup found that three-quarters agreed with Powell, and 24 per cent supported him to replace Edward Heath as Tory leader (see graph A).

During the last decade, disquiet over immigration rose as EU accession state nationals poured into the UK, and the government admitted it did not know how many people had entered. Ipsos MORI’s monthly issues tracker shows immigration featuring briefly as the primary issue of public concern in 2006, before the economic crisis blasted everything out of its path.

While disquiet looks to be stirring again, it’s not on the scale of five years ago. Some patterns of opinion have not changed – older people are more likely to view it as a problem – but since the dawn of the economic crisis, 18 to 24-year-olds have started responding negatively. And less skilled workers are more likely than highly skilled ones to see immigration as a worry.

There’s also a big contrast between attitudes in metropolitan and rural areas, with the former taking a more positive view. London, for example, contains the lowest proportion of people who think immigration is a problem. This, however, hides pockets of tension, where lower-income earners often rub along painfully with a high ethnic mix. Thus, the West Midlands – Powell country – contains the largest percentage of those who see immigration as a drawback.

The roots of disquiet are clear. Unsurprisingly, pressure on jobs and public services feature most. However, immigration is viewed as a national problem rather than ‘in my neighbourhood’, suggesting it’s more about perception than reality. What people hate is the thought that government is impotent or unwilling to control it.

Looking across the Channel, we see the consequences of inaction. The Party for Freedom won nine seats in the Dutch House of Representatives in the 2006 general election, came second in the 2009 European parliamentary elections and increased its seat tally in the 2010 general election to 24 – just under one in six. That’s equivalent to winning more than 100 seats in the House of Commons.

The Dutch have done much soul-searching over why a country with such a strong liberal tradition has a socking great cuckoo in its political nest. It’s obviously important to understand what parallels, if any, exist with how immigration plays in Britain.

While there are some similarities between Britain’s squeamishness over immigration and pre-Freedom Party political correctness in the Netherlands, the UK’s historical immigration patterns have been vastly different. Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigration here has been characterised by integration in a way that North African immigration in the Netherlands has not (see graph B).

From the polling evidence, the British solution is probably not as scary as some think. For Powell, whose speech reads very badly today, one solution was assisted voluntary repatriation. Today, fewer than one in 10 wants to see immigration stopped altogether, while others – notably the business community – are lobbying hard for the cap to be relaxed to reflect Britain’s global economic needs. The most common view about immigration is not absolutist, but it is tougher than over recent years. The way to keep voters happy is not to stop immigration, but to genuinely persuade them that the government is firmly in control.

As for capping immigration, policy-makers face a conundrum: its practicalities look unappetising when you think through all the implications. As Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service put it: “You can’t cap foreign students – you would really damage the economy if you did. You can’t stop people marrying foreigners if they choose to do so, that’s their personal choice… The only way you can cap people coming in is on work permits… then you are going to sink the British economy, and that is a very short-sighted view indeed.”

Thankfully, Britain has come a long way since 1968, but unease remains, and it could well build up again if the economy fails to grow as pressures increase on public services. Let the Netherlands serve as an example of what happens if our government fails to show “articulate leadership”.

Andrew Hawkins is chairman of ComRes
 

Tags: Andrew Hawkins, Enoch Powell, European Union, Immigration