Immigration: How British politics failed | BBC News

0:07 If I could link in the minds of the British people, immigration with membership of the European Union, then everything would change. We haven't got enough houses now as it is. So where you going to cut them? Just remember how many immigrants like my family, like a lot of the people in this audience's family have built this nation. The problem has been that immigrants, asylum seekers have all been confused in the popular mind. Anti-immigration groups were behind disturbances in several English towns and cities last night. One of the protesters told me the country was full and foreigners were a problem. The idea that we had some sort of open door immigration policy is just absolute nonsense. We wanted to see strict limits

0:55 at a scale that was not going to disturb the nature of our very historic and peaceful country. What I saw was the tabloid press becoming unhinged about this issue. British jobs for British workers. Net immigration in the tens of thousands. My promise to you to stop the boats. There is a a pervasive view that more immigration is better for the country. It was too high. It wasn't being controlled. It needed to be controlled. The fact is we're not in control of it. Uh and to say otherwise is is misleading the public.

1:41 [Music] Our [Music] [Applause] ambition for ourselves is matched by our sense of compassion and decency and duty towards other people. Simple values but the right ones. [Music] The problems caused by the recession have left building contractors with a severe skills shortage. It's already biting and it's likely to get worse. British businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to hire skilled computer specialists. The government's concerned about shortages of skilled

2:27 workers as unemployment falls. Back in 97, because I had employment as well as education, I was interested in what was happening with the labor market. And my input to that was to say yes there's a intermediate period in which we will need to accept quite large scale legal migration. Britain has a serious shortage of skilled workers. So much so that the government says it's in danger of holding back the economy. Could one solution be to relax immigration rules? [Music] Because our economy was strong and we were bringing a lot of people in to work

3:13 in sectors where we needed that workforce. It also had an economic benefit for the country. In these early days of new labor, there was still some nervousness about immigration and particularly as immigration is being seen as a key central part of economic policy. I first started working on migration um in the cabinet office. In so far as we could draw conclusions, migrants on the whole contribute more in terms of the taxes they pay and so on than than what they take out in terms of consumption of public services. Migrants helped sort of grease the wheels of the labor market by filling in areas where

3:59 there's particularly high demand or shortages. So migration had significant economic benefits for the UK. We produced a report called the economic and social impacts of migration. When the prime minister Tony Blair saw it, he actually said it would be quite beneficial to have this stuff informing the public debate. Well, there's no doubt that if you're attracting, for example, highly skilled migrants into the country, then it's got an economic benefit. I don't think at the time I was elected as an MEP I'd realized quite what the extent of the Labor Plan was, but it didn't take me long after I was elected to realize that we were entering into mass migration on a scale that had never been contemplated in British history.

4:49 Well, at least Tony Blair was honest. He said, "We're going to open the doors to the whole world." The idea that we had some sort of open door immigration policy is just absolute nonsense. We were constantly on it and legislating. And because you've got controls, you can then make the case as to why controlled immigration is actually a good thing. I saw a letter from Professor David Coleman of Oxford University about the whole immigration problem and I thought that it made a lot of sense. The scale of immigration had trebled in a matter of 2 or 3 years which over time we thought was going to make a big difference to the nature of our society.

5:36 As a result of that, we wanted to see strict limits on immigration confined to people. We really needed and at a scale that was not going to disturb the nature of our very historic and peaceful country. I first came across migration watch in the early 2000s when I was in the department of work and pensions and some of the analysis that they produced of the numbers um and projections of migration figures was actually quite useful and and reasonably rigorous. There was however a pretty uh um strongly xenophobic tone to a lot of their policy recommendations. It was all about migrants undermining British culture or whatever, which I thought was pretty uh obnoxious. Frankly,

6:22 the risk always if you're trying to talk about immigration from a logical and sensible point of view, someone will say, "Oh, he's a racist or whatever." And we just ignore that. They were a very important group. Andrew Green, you know, former British ambassador sets up migration watch. And I remember within 2 weeks talking to Andrew Green, he said, "Look, we're going to be apolitical. We're just going to do numbers. We're just going to do analysis." And I thought, "Hooray, because if I start to say this stuff without it being backed up by a rigorous academic source, you know, I'm going to get in trouble." Little did I realize uh what that relationship with Migration Watch back in 2001 would mean.

7:07 [Music] 26 days after the attacks on New York and Washington, America and Britain have begun the military campaign against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Thous Afghan refugees are still trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Caught up in a conflict they did not desire and can scarcely comprehend, these people no longer feel safe in their own country, the problem is that nobody else wants them. The life in Afghanistan is very bad. So we can't live there. So we heard that

7:57 in London it's a good life for Afghan people for for refugees. [Music] I worked most of my life in UK with migrants including asylum seekers and refugees. An asylum seeker is someone who come to a country to seek protection under international law. No one leaves a country easily. Especially if you're if you're seeking asylum, usually you are you're forced to leave. Uh you had to leave because you know you your life is in danger. [Applause]

8:46 [Music] The evidence was that the majority of asylum seekers were really economic migrants. They weren't genuinely seeking asylum. Now, let me be clear about this. These people who are economic migrants, they're not bad people. They're going in search of a better life. But you can't have people coming in and claiming asylum on the basis of political persecution when they're really economic migrants. Some have paid international traffickers, others simply taking a chance. Many are keen to be found so they can make a claim for asylum. The encampment known as Sangat on the

9:32 shores of France had become a magnet for people being smuggled by criminals by organized gangs across the continent. The Sunat refugee camp is two short kilometers from the Euro Tunnel terminal. The proximity is the problem. It's been called a departure lounge for illegal immigrants. people traveling without proper documentation. Their sole intention is to reach the UK. I wrote my first migration story when the Daily Mail asked me to go to Calala. [Applause] I had a VIP seat at the back of the

10:18 lorry and we proceeded to go through the security no checks into the ferry. After 4 hours, we entered the UK. As we were going up the motorway, we heard a knocking and it was a we had no idea who or how many people were in there. The doors were opened and the first thing that happened was the voice saying, "I'm so sorry." The person climbed out. He was mid30s. I questioned him on which country he came from. He said Iraq. He said his name was Adele. and he just ran.

11:06 That was my first experience of meeting a migrant. At the Euro Tunnel terminal, a nightly drama is played out. A mass of refugees, sometimes hundreds, charge for the trains. Their hope is that a handful may get through. I can't remember the issue of immigration coming up in the first two years of my editing of my time editing The Sun. But that changed. There was huge anger on the paper internally and from the readers about an issue that was being mismanaged by the Blair government. The legal bill for asylum seekers more than doubled to 138 million last year. In some cities in the UK, local authorities are struggling to cope with the extra strain the record

11:52 number of asylum seekers are putting on services. Firstly, I think they're milking the country to be honest with you. Another factor which very much changed everything which cannot be underestimated is 91. That changed the view of people coming from certain parts of the world. It's not that we're going to be overrun by people. It's that we don't know who's coming into the country. It became a security story and a security threat. Britain has agreed to take a thousand Iraqi Kurds on work visas and about 200

12:38 Afghans. The rest will be dealt with by the French. But when told their only option is to apply for asylum in France, they start to chant [Music] We legislated. We pulled them back down. I remember having meeting after meeting in Downing Street on this issue and in the end changing the personnel in order to get the result we wanted. If you reassure people that you know what you're doing, that we've got a grip of the problem, that will open their minds and their hearts to those who really

13:23 genuinely uh should be here in this country. [Music] There was this persistent sort of background noise from particularly Tory supporting papers who seem at times to find ways almost every day to contrive to make immigration and asylum seekers a front page issue whipping it up. I would spend a lot of time at focus groups. The Sun readership was white male. And if you had images on the front of the paper of people who were not white coming from parts of the world that our

14:10 readers would have no understanding of, the emotion that that would elicit from our readers was fear. That comes from racism. I don't know these people. They may harm me. They may harm my family. these uh tropes, they're manner from heaven because not only do they get everybody going, they sell. I had huge misgivings about the direction of our own coverage of this issue. What I saw was this tabloid press becoming unhinged about immigration. And there was this story that asylum seekers were eating swans.

14:56 [Music] I came to this country as a refugee and I've been working in this field of protection and migration justice for 30 years and it was it was the craziest thing that I've ever seen on a front page. But the Sun did not publish an apology. They published a correction buried somewhere in the back pages, like a tiny little correction. There was a front page a few months after I left the sun. The immigrants are killing and eating the Queen Swans,

15:44 which clearly was not the case. But if you hear that, you're going to go into conference and say, "Guess what, boss?" And nobody in that room is going to say, "Hang on a minute. Do you think we can just double check that?" Are the large number of asylum seekers in danger of causing social unrest? So, how should we deal with asylum seekers? Do you think asylum seekers are causing social unrest, social tension, racial tension? Elaine, I don't think it. I know it. I've experienced it. I know for a fact from a neighbor of mine, some of the asylum seekers have paid 2, three, four, £5,000 to come over here. Where did they get their money from in

16:29 the beginning? Is Britain a soft touch for asylum seekers, or are we turning away the poor and the desperate to face persecution, even death? You'll be able to vote by phone, text, or interactive TV. Then we'll compare your vote with the real home office decision. To this day, I don't know what the BBC was thinking that this would achieve, but it it was really scary time. If people are reading it on their front pages and they're seeing it on their television night after night, they're going to react. We seem to be a a very open country, whereas anybody is allowed to come here and do anything and get away with anything. How many people do you need to welcome? I mean, it could be a lot more done for elderly people and everything else, couldn't they? know people people of our own nationality.

17:16 The problem has been that immigrants, asylum seekers, illegal asylum seekers have all been confused in the popular mind. confusion which is whipped up by elements of the popular press and some politicians. [Music] I think my first television interview with certainly with the BBC that was a step forward. Recently, there's been a surge in asylum seekers. And today, Migration Watch UK claims that over the next decade, there'll be 2 million new arrivals. Clearly, migrants have uh

18:04 value. Some migrants have value to our economy. The balances between the value that some of them bring and the sheer cost in infrastructure of 2 million people every 10 years. The press was quite good on this island because you could take photographs of it, but it was very weak in other respects. And there was certainly very little understanding of what it might lead to. [Music] We were trying to say to the world at that time, it's immigration as a whole that matters, not just asylum seekers. In my view, there was a conspiracy that did lead to a substantial increase in immigration. There was clearly a big danger that the issues relating to the

18:50 growth in number of asylum seekers would just dominate the agenda and push out any rational discussion of the broader economic and social issues surrounding migration. [Music] I worked as an adviser to David Blunket in the home office. Everyone was focused on asylum. the view that was held by David and by Tony Blair and others that if you could sort out the problems in the asylum system, if people were fully reassured by that, then they would not be bothered about legal migration, people coming through the the economic routes to uh to work and and study here. So that was their settled view, but I was increasingly disagreeing with it.

19:36 And I did start to try and have the argument inside Labor that actually some of this is about the immigration system as a whole. Polling and focus groups consistently I think showed us that most voters don't really differentiate between different categories of people coming to our country. They tend not to differentiate between somebody who's coming here for argument sake as an asylum seeker or somebody who's coming here as an economic migrant. The question is are there too many people here My view was that, you know, we need to think about whether we need to change our policy on that and also the way that we talk about that. But that felt like a pretty lonely position to have within Labor and we felt that we were banging our heads against the wall a bit on that.

20:26 Michael Howard has been confirmed as the new leader of the Conservative Party. How will you actually change the Conservative Party under your leadership? More of that later. [Music] Well, when you become leader of the opposition, you obviously think about the issues which you think are important to people. Immigration was always one of those issues which I would have to raise um whether or not I was going to be accused of being racist um from the word go in the early 2000s we were still living with the memory of Enoch Powell and the things that he had said some of the things he said were right of course the

21:11 the thing was much too immigration was much too high and would have implications etc. But he overshot very seriously and shot himself in the foot really. So we had to be particularly careful not to appear to be part of any such movement. One of the key elements that we were stressing is what we call net migration. It's the number of people who come to the UK minus the number who leave. That is the key. I didn't like migration watch and it felt to me that these were people that were likely to cause problems not find

21:57 solutions to problems. They are assisting the sort of industry of fear. But nevertheless, they were very very important because they put numbers on the problem. And once you have numbers, you have an irresistible force in the newsroom. We are talking about a net increase of people coming into this country over those going out of about 200,000 people. That's a city the size of Milton Kees or Newcastle. Now, for how long is that sustainable? Well, it's it's it's permanently sustainable at that level. Jeremy Paxman talked about 200,000 a year for 10 years. Well, nobody else had

22:43 used those numbers before, but they were indeed our numbers. There is in your judgment no um notional maximum population of this country. No, I don't think there is. But I think we need to work on uh much more uh robust projections. It was changing the whole nature of the debate to make people aware that numbers are important, were growing and needed to be considered. So we can just carry on adding another million every 5 years more or less indefinite. No, I see no obvious limit. I see a balance. I was in the room actually when he gave the interview. This was not a a line that we had rehearsed before. Um, and even as he said it, I sort of winced cuz I knew it was going to be a problem.

23:31 That was gold dust for us. So, it was very controversial and we felt that we were we were getting places. It's going to become a very crowded island, isn't it? It is a crowded island. We've always been a crowded, vigorous island. Parts of it are much less crowded than others. And there is a balance to be struck. I got on extremely well with Jeremy, but that was an occasion when I could have thumped him and I still can't answer the question, what is the upper limit that is acceptable in our country? [Music] What David Blanket said was absolutely consistent with the whole attitude of that Labor government. They didn't think there was an upper limit of immigration. they were encouraging it and it took

24:16 place in very large numbers came at a time when people felt that we didn't care about overall numbers and it is true that we didn't we weren't caring enough about overall numbers what David said was completely misinterpreted what he was saying was that provided it's a decision as to who comes in and who doesn't there's not some arbitrary number that you put in place you don't choose a magic number. There are times in life when pressure groups are really important. They display a widespread commitment and feeling and there are other times when you have an organization, if I could use the expression one man and a dog, but they get enormous attention.

25:04 And it's a real worry when that happens because it changes the nature of the debate. Numbers are a polite way of expressing hostility to migration as a whole. Under the proposals announced by the home secretary on Monday, will net immigration rise or fall. The abusers will be weeded out and as a result of an end to chain migration, the numbers probably will fall. Yes. Isn't the difference between us that we will impose an annual limit on immigration? He refuses to do that. And isn't that why only a conservative government can be relied on to bring immigration under control? I did meet Andrew Green and I

25:51 think that the information they've provided has been quite useful. The conservatives were interested I think because they could see public didn't like the scale of immigration that was developing and they could see that this was leading to difficulties. [Music] [Applause] We've seen immigration triple under Mr. Blair. We believe that immigration has to be limited and brought under control. All these people seem to come in and before you know it, they sort of got loads of money. So, but yeah, I do think that we let too many people in. There were very real concerns in large sections of the public about this issue and I was responding to those concerns

26:37 in a practical and entirely responsible way. The slogan are you thinking what we're thinking. He was saying some things which we the silent rightthinking majority think but which they the sort of fashionable people in Westminster don't don't think we should say. I thought Michael How was right to highlight the importance of uh immigration. It had grown hugely in recent years. It wasn't properly being uh discussed and debated by politicians. Indeed, I was involved in in writing that 2005 manifesto. In the 2001 national campaign, it was regarded as untouchable. Now it's mainstream, and lots of candidates right around the country will tell you how effective it's been for them. on the doorstep. We've got Michael Howard and he's beginning to

27:24 get hopefully get the country back together, our heritage, what really belongs to us. The people that are coming in, I think it should be like limited and if he can do something to help that then fine. And I talked about policing and health and education, but I did also talk about immigration. I was frustrated by the extent to which the media um focused almost well very largely on uh on immigration. Tony Blair has accused the conservatives of playing politics with asylum and immigration out of desperation. I think that our work poured during that election achieved a great deal in terms of immigration being understood as as a problem. Tony Blair has won an historic third

28:09 term in office, but Labour's majority in the House of Commons has been sharply reduced. I've listened and I've learned, and I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect. Ironically enough, I was told by one senior Labour figure after the election that the mistake I made was not going hard enough on immigration. it was too high. It wasn't being controlled. It needed to be controlled. I thought that was essential and I think Andrew Green was helpful in that regard. I met him after 2005. Uh he actually lived near my constituency and uh I went to go and see him. He said, "Come and see me. I'm a former diplomat, but also

28:55 I've got this project on migration." And actually the Andrew Green brought some rigor to the different categories, the different policies, the different potential approaches. 10 new countries have been formally welcomed into the European Union. The historic expansion creates the world's largest trading block, bringing the population of the EU to 455 million and has been greeted with celebrations across the continent. [Music] We had 600,000 vacancies in the system. That's huge. How are we going to fill those jobs? The economy was doing well. It needed

29:40 more people than we had in the UK. And there was a very strong sense from number 10 and in the treasury and the business departments of Whiteall that it was good for the economy to encourage legal migration. We were big champions of European enlargement. Britain both under the previous government and under my government particularly were staunch advocates of these Eastern European countries, the former Soviet Union countries coming into the European Union and joining NATO. We face a clear choice. Use the opportunities of accession to help fill those gaps with legal migrants able to pay taxes and pay their way or deny ourselves that chance, hold our economy back, and in all likelihood see a significant increase in

30:26 illegal working and the black economy. We described that as unforgivable because we could see that the numbers were already high and rising. This was a decision that was completely unnecessary and we were strongly opposed to it. I remember the three UKIP MEPs were in the chamber in Strasburg voting on EU enlargement and I remember that day we were the only British MEPs that voted against former communist countries joining. As we left the chamber, I turned to my two colleagues and said that is the best day's work we will ever do as MEPs. The Nigel Farage narrative goes back a

31:11 long way. That's a consistent rhetoric in British politics and Nigel Farraj just picked it up and ran with it. The point about the anti-European narrative was that underlying it was a fear and concern about foreigners generally. At London's Victoria Coach Station, another coach arrives from Poland. It's a common sight. 18 out of the 30 companies that operate from here are from the new EU accession states. The flow of people they brought has been profound. I was overwhelmed by the numbers coming in. I did interview people as they came off the buses and it became clear to me

31:56 that, you know, this was actually out of control. And I know we hate the word control because it sounds as though you're anti- migrant, but you know, a country without any borders isn't really a country at all. [Music] I think my career and UKIP's propulsion was directly down to the increasing size of the population as a result of opening the door unconditionally to a lot of people from former communist countries. I think EU enlargement was our biggest

32:42 mistake. Given that we understood what a potent political force immigration could be, it was a mistake not to allow a transition period. It was understandable we did what we did which is prioritize the economy. But part of the problem on immigration was that it would always be the economy first and immigration second or it would be foreign policy first and immigration second. And actually sometimes immigration needed to come first. After EU enlargement, when we started to get quite significant numbers of people coming to the UK, we started to find in the opinion research this growing sense that actually our public services are already under pressure. It meant that

33:28 immigration went from being, you know, issue number five or six in the opinion polls to often being issue number one or two. They come in this country. No wonder we've got no hospital beds. I myself am not racist. I just want to see an end to all this immigration over here. The language people started to use in focus groups is one of fairness and it doesn't feel fair that someone could come to our country from a different country and draw on our public services to draw on our benefit system, social housing. I think they're letting too many immigrants in. They're taking all their jobs. You know, I've been looking for work for a long time now. there's nothing about I remember having some conversations with treasury officials it was their view that migration was positive for the

34:14 economy as a whole in terms of taxes you know less the use of public service and benefits but what they missed was a lot of the concern it characterized us in the way that our political enemies had been trying desperately to characterize us for the previous seven years in This will be a new government with new priorities. Let the work of change begin. [Music] Figures for the last 10 years show the net number of migrants have trebled. We're now receiving very nearly a migrant a minute and that simply can't continue. It means more homes are needed

35:00 and to go with them more schools, shops, offices and hospitals. And some think these kind of increases are simply unsustainable. And there's the real concern. Whatever economic benefits there might be from immigration, there are social consequences, too. If worries over resources aren't dealt with, resentment might become explosive. I moved to number 10 in 2007 with Gordon Brown. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that immigration was a a major issue because we did have bigger numbers coming from Eastern Europe than we're expected. Also, you started to hear about the pressure that new migrants were putting on public services and on housing. While some of this was exaggerated, actually some of it was

35:46 real. On the one hand, the government wants to talk up the economic benefits of immigration. Yesterday, it was telling us that foreign workers added6 billion pounds to the economy last year. On the other hand, feedback from official bodies around the UK now shows us something of the downside. With pressure on public services and concerns about the impact on crime, health, housing, and education, the government's critics say action is long overdue. This is our vision. Britain leading the global economy by our skills and creativity, by our enterprise and

36:32 flexibility, drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers. [Music] He famously used the phrase, the slogan British jobs for British workers talking at the party conference and at the TUC. And if we make the right decisions, we can advance even further and faster to full employment than ever before with a British job on offer for every British worker. I don't like to band around words like lie, but I think, you know, there is something a little bit misleading about the claim that you can set up a category of jobs simply intended for British people as a member state of the European Union because that would fall foul of European Union law. There goes my Christmas card from

37:18 Gordon. We were going to have migrants coming here and taking jobs. Gordon never thought that wasn't going to happen. So, in some sense, he was just setting himself up for failure. I thought it implicitly appeared to adopt some of the rhetoric of the far right. And I have to say, Mr. Speaker, I did a bit more research to find out where he got his slogans from. Here's one he borrowed off the National Front. Here's another one he borrowed off the British National Party. Yes. Where was his moral compass when he was doing that? The strap line, British Jobs for British Workers, was just a gift. Suddenly you could see a union jack on it and you could see the the far right in particular going into spasms of joy over

38:05 this. British jobs for British workers. I still feel uncomfortable with it now. [Music] For the first time in Britain, a council has the BNP as its second biggest party. I get on the bus here and I'm the only white man sat sitting on the bus sometimes. I 100% agree with this man. Give us back our country. When I was first elected onto the London Assembly 2008, I sat next to an elected member of the BNP because over 5% of London voters voted for what was basically a neofascist party in frustration about immigration policy. David Cameron was aware that immigration

38:52 was a huge issue and he wanted us to have a tough policy that bore down on the numbers. Well, at the moment the net figure it's about 200,000. So that's 2 million over 10 years. It's a it's a large number. We think it should be substantially lower than that. It's about 200,000 net now. It was about 50,000 net uh when Labour came to power. Is that substantially lower? Is that the sort of Well, that is substantially lower. Obviously, it's a numerical fact and I think that the sorts of numbers that you've talked about in the past is actually at a time when Britain found it easier to integrate new migrants. I think that sort of figure, but I will we when we get closer to election, we may be able to say more. [Music]

39:38 We had been trying to get policy focused for some time that there needs to be a a cap and it needs to be 100,000. We're full of people. We really do not need many more. The trains are absolutely packed with people as you can see. The motorways are stuffed with cars. There's housing, schools, hospitals. It's just getting very difficult to live. and we had been saying there must be an actual target for government departments to work to. I'd say the discussion about numbers is entirely shallow and there were various pressure groups in this country who thought it was all a numbers game. There's a Britain is full approach to things and I thought it in a pernitious way actually sought to poison

40:23 public debate. Financial markets worldwide fall following the emergency rescue of a major American bank. Was the biggest crash on the London stock market for more than 20 years. Over 90 billion pounds were wiped off shares today. [Music] The longunning crisis in financial markets is having a bigger and bigger impact on the real economy. It's been another day of losses in the job market. Unemployment looks set to rise to 2.2 million by the end of 2009. Economic insecurity is always a good breeding ground for anti-immigrant

41:10 feeling. If you have high levels of unemployment and high levels of immigration, that narrative about people coming and stealing our jobs is more powerful. I just feel that the government are giving more support to the immigrants rather than British people. Well, I feel very betrayed to be honest. [Music] Wave of wildcat strike sweeping parts of Britain in support of protesters at the Lindseay oil refinery in Lingardshire. There's anger at the use of foreign labor while British workers are unemployed. We will take action. But these men are dismayed and angry, especially because the government has made public statements about British

41:55 jobs for British workers. You don't have to go across to Europe to bring people in to do skilled jobs when the skilled men are here and they've been doing it for years. In the middle of the strike, the BNP activist hands out leaflets and pledges support. We don't want the British National Party on this protest. But later he's asked to leave by the men. A union source said their aims didn't match those of the workers. I was the minister of state for borders and immigration despite the fact that we had the global financial crisis. Immigration actually as a policy area increased in its salency uh with the British public. the instability and the uncertainty

42:42 uh the fear uh that people had about their economic prospects. It was certainly very very tough time. Nicholas John Griffin from the British National. Someone has to stand up for the majority indigenous population of this country just to get a level playing field because racism in this country overwhelmingly is directed against people who look like me. the lead of the BNP, Nick Griffin. This

43:27 was the night he'd long dreamed of. The night Nick Griffin walked on stage to be treated like any other politician to debate with opponents who used to refuse even to share a platform with him. There were huge crowds of very, very angry people who thought it was utterly inappropriate that somebody like Nick Griffin, who is a far-right racist, was being given the oxygen of publicity. The immigration invasion, an act of deliberate, calculated genocide against our ancient race and nation. So, successive governments are committing genocide against their own people. Is that your theory? I'm afraid that's the case. Yeah, that's certainly how it looks from from from the ordinary grassroots position when all the political elite celebrate all the multicultural diversity and everything. Do you know the definition of genocide?

44:13 How appalling, Mr. Griffin, that you use that word in that way. What Nick Griffith said was so frightening and unpleasant for those of us from a migrant background. was definitely a moment you expose a far-right racist. The protesters see him as being a man with a national front past and a political inheritance that goes right back to the Nazis. For every person who watched the whole of the program, there are at least 10 others who thought, "Well, that's interesting. They must be part of mainstream politics now. They're being invited on to question time. [Music] The Queen has kindly agreed to the

45:01 dissolution of Parliament and a general election will take place on May the 6th. And this election is about big choices. Five more years of Gordon Brown or change with the Conservatives. Our manifesto will hardwire fairness into British society. Controlling how many people come to this island is right up there in the list of voters concerns according to the polls. [Music] I think what we should aim to do is to go for a number that doesn't in the long term doesn't add still further to our population. Now roughly 100,000 Brits uh

45:48 leave every year. Now, we should be able roughly within that to get immigration down to a similar level. Um, I I do think we need uh controls and we need limits. Um, I limit 100,000. No, no. Well, I I think what what what I disagree with Andrew is to say you can fix a limit and say that's the limit. I have to be careful to respect people's confidences in in this. Um, so, um, I think what I'll say is, um, in the run-up to the next election, we were in touch with the Conservative Party in in many forms, both their officials and, uh, and more senior people in the party. We would like to see net immigration in the tens of thousands rather than the

46:33 hundreds of thousands. I don't think that's unrealistic. That's the sort of figure it was in the 1990s. We were delighted. That's exactly what we wanted to see. I don't think it'd be fair to say the conservatives pinched our idea, but it would be fair to say that it was originally our idea. I wasn't talking about it in terms of race or culture so much. It was about numbers and pressure. It's about turning up at primary school and finding you've got lots of new kids in your class and it's overcrowded. It's about going to the doctor's surgery and finding there are many, many more people trying to get on the doctor's surgery list. And if you talk about numbers and pressure, you need to have some idea about the sort of number you're aiming for. I was surprised when the conservative opposition committed to it. You know,

47:19 it's a hostage to fortune, but but actually on a on an issue as emotive as this that was clearly driving not just public concern, but public anger, that that was a not just a a foolish thing to do, but a a reckless thing to do. [Music] Early that morning, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown had come to my constituency, a marginal constituency. We'd held a debate in front of the cameras. It had gone very well. We were celebrating over a cup of tea when the prime minister's car left saying that went really well. We got back to the office after canvasing, turned the news on to see just down the road in Rodale,

48:06 5 miles away, the the the Julian Duffy. It's you can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're you're but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in where are they flocking from? So I was editing um the 6 and 10:00 news when Gordon Brown was hot miked. It's a disaster. What did she say? Everything. She's just a s bigoted woman. There was a very quick decision at the BBC um to use the material. Gordon Brown calls a voter a bigoted woman. A major embarrassment on the campaign trail. You're joking. Because I mean, how do you feel about that? Where was I a bigot?

48:53 Why has he come out with it with words like that? He he's going to lead this country and he's calling an honorary woman who's just come up and asked him questions what most people had asked him. For the person who is leading the country to say that a person who was raising issues about immigration was a bigot just exploded. Prime Minister, do you still think Mr. Scott is a bigot? I wanted to come here and say to Jillian I was sorry h to say that I'd made a mistake but to also say I understood the concerns that she was bringing to me and I had simply misunderstood some of the words that she used to vote was so important because it did reveal a reality that the Labor government uh had wanted hidden that

49:39 that's what they really thought about people who were concerned about immigration and I others had spent 5 years in opposition arguing that this is a real issue. This is a real issue for real people. Stop saying it's just Tory rhetoric. It's not. It is packed with them on all the other council estates. This is where the only one in Rodale that isn't packed with the immigrants. There's rafts and rafts of them. It's packed Rodale. And it's not a point of being bigots. Everybody should have their the fair share of them. In the 27th general election, we knew that immigration was going to be a big issue, but you know, we'd had eight eight or nine years of very negative headlines, uh, perceptions that

50:26 the Home Office was not run well. So against that backdrop, the changes we made, even though I felt we had a better narrative, it was too little too late. Uh and we knew we were we lost the public's trust on on immigration. It's going to be a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party. Within the past hour, Gordon Brown has said he intends to stand down as Labour leader and prime minister. I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. [Applause] We have the chance of a 5year government where we really can grapple with the problems the country faces.

51:20 So we were landed with this objective which the conservatives had put in their manifesto uh and which they then treated as hard government policy which the Liberal Democrats fundamentally disagreed with. It was uninforcable because there were certain things we couldn't control migration from Europe and also if British people chose to stay here this actually pushed up net immigration. And it was absurd and it's not something we can could control. I mean, we're not North Korea. There were officials in the home office, I discovered, were quite tough- minded um about immigration, but economists around the place weren't. Uh they subscribed to the the view that, you know, immigration was good for the economy.

52:08 I was chief economist at the cabinet office and in number 10 and I wrote a memorandum to David Cameron saying um you will not hit the tens of thousands target um unless you impose severe restrictions on either or both people coming as skilled workers or as students both of whom of course we know are very significantly economically beneficial to the UK. So you are either setting yourself up to fail or you're going to be forced in taking economically damaging decisions. They tried to argue against it, but were seen off by David Cameron, George Osborne, who said, "Look, we've made this pledge. We are going to stick to it." Jonathan Porter is a very intelligent man, but he didn't really agree with anything the government was

52:54 doing. So he wasn't the first person I was going to listen to, frankly. I did get a note back from the prime minister's private office, his chief political adviser, saying actually uh um Damian Green has advised the prime minister that this is perfectly doable. Here is how the numbers add up. And he got these numbers from Migration Watch. I looked at the numbers and I immediately said, "No, these don't add up. You've done them wrong. You don't understand how the visa system or the immigration system really works." No, I'm not going to comment on Port. I have a very low opinion on him and um I'm not prepared to talk about him. I essentially got another note back from the prime minister saying that he didn't want to know.

53:39 That is one of the reasons why I left the cabinet office not long after. Well, migration watch undoubtedly had a very significant influence on certainly thinking in the home office and with the prime minister and with core ministers they were very influential. I thought migration watch were worth listening to because they brought a lot of data and a lot of rigor and some policy proposals. We were in close contact with the office at every level. Actually, we thought it was doable. We had expected it to be done as they did too. I remember in meetings in the cabinet room where Green and his organization which were constantly warning of the

54:25 dangers of high immigration levels were effectively treated as um advisers to the government. Ultimately government policy was all decided by the government by me and the deputy prime minister and the team. But actually having a group of people saying here's some ideas for how you can control immigration better. That was a good thing. And I believe that that will mean net migration to this country will be in the order of tens of thousands each year, not the hundreds of thousands every year that we've seen over the last decade. One of the aims of my government was to make sure our economy became less dependent on um immigration. you know, while you've got 5 million British people on of working age on out of work

55:12 benefits, you're never going to have successful immigration control. So, we did have a welfare reform policy to get those people back to work. We had a training and skills policy. So, I don't accept that getting net migration to below 100,000 was impossible. [Music] I think where it uh ran into difficulty was with other government departments every government department had some group of people that they said were vital and they must have them. We helped where we could on that. Many of the conservative sectors of the state were in principle in agreement with this idea of reducing net migration but in practice they were looking for ways to exempt their own departments.

55:59 you know the impact on um social care for example on uh medical professionals on business you know there were people right across governments who were arguing for exemptions any government is desperate for economic growth a lot of that is going to come from migration so you can see that tension that argument playing out sometimes in cabinet [Music] David Cameron would not talk to me of course about his relationships with other ministers. Um but he clearly was disappointed that progress was not being made as he wished it should be and as he was committed to. David Cameron famously remarked once that the only people in government who

56:45 actually wanted to bring immigration down were him, Theresa and me because that was our job. They'd invested very heavily in getting net immigration below 100,000. They were way way off target. I think there was a an element of panic. I don't think there's an issue on which public trust has broken down more between two so-called major parties in the great British public than immigration, both legal and illegal. Neither the Labour nor the Conservative parties want the truth to get out, which is that as part of a European Union, we have a complete open door to the whole of Eastern Europe. And we cannot limit the numbers that come here. And my sole

57:31 purpose was if I could link in the minds of the British people immigration with membership of the European Union, then everything would change. [Music] For years, politicians have promised the public an Australian style pointsbased system, and today I will actually deliver on those promises. The immigration policy put in place after Brexit, in my view, uh, was not the right one. It was more about rhetoric than it was about reality. It was all about telling the British public what they wanted to hear. We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed. We didn't need to be pushed

58:18 into this position. We were taking it seriously. But as long as the prime minister refused to support me, my hands were tied. This was a crisis and a political catastrophe. What are the impacts of recent changes to UK citizenship? Explore the Open University stories of two fictional families by scanning the QR code on screen now or visiting bbc.co.uk/immigration links to the Open University.