Britain needs immigrants now

Speak up for asylum-seekers, Mr Blair

The recent successes of populist far-right parties in Europe, exploiting a potent mix of anti-immigration and anti-establishment views, has demanded a response. Sadly, the one that Tony Blair is developing with too many of his European counterparts, essentially that Fortress Europe must keep out all incomers, threatens to make matters worse.

What Europe needs is affirmation of the importance of immigration as being essential to its economic needs and cultural dynamism. Equally, it needs its political leaders to argue that host populations have nothing to fear from orderly immigration and plenty to gain. Europe should establish fair annual targets for the numbers of asylum-seekers it accepts and apportion a fair share between countries. This does not mean an unregulated flow of immigrants. But the basic policy should be liberal and generous, not least because Europe, with its birth rate plummeting, needs immigrant labour desperately and needs to be fair to those genuinely fleeing persecution and injustice.

That is how things should be. What we see instead is a repulsive race to be meanest and toughest towards migrants and asylum-seekers alike. And not just from Ministers. Iain Duncan Smith's kneejerk demand that Britain reject all the inmates of Sangatte, whatever their standing, is merely a variant of Pim Fortuyn's insistence that Holland was closed, too.

The Government could give a lead in Europe. After too many years of scrabbling for solutions, the Home Office is considering a proposal to double the permitted number of short-term economic migrants to 120,000 a year, because we need them. Britain is also at last trying to develop a fair policy on asylum-seekers, seeking to process applications quickly and then sending back those that are bogus while accepting the genuine.

Yet our government, like others in Europe, pursues it policy by stealth. It prefers to make grandstanding remarks about toughness rather than calmly explaining the advantages of immigration within a firm framework, the policy it is actually pursuing. This almost obliges mainstream parties of the European Right, such as the Tories, to dabble with anti-immigrant populism if they are to garner support.

On this issue, the political centre must hold. It will only do so if it argues its case firmly and explicitly. The Prime Minister's decent and deeply held convictions have never been in doubt. It is sad that, yet again, we have to press him to be brave enough to articulate them publicly.