VOTERS WILL NEVER FORGIVE LABOUR FOR MASS IMMIGRATION

Labour’s own poll research indicates that millions of voters – even within the party’s own heartlands – remain deeply angry at the mass influx of newcomers to Britain allowed over the past decade.

In a sign of his concern, the Prime Minister tried playing the statesman yesterday, making a weighty speech about British citizenship that was full of such noble phrases as “shared values” and “rights matched with responsibilities”.

But nowhere in his lecture did Brown make any mention of the size of the population flood looming over our increasingly crowded island. It seems a careless omission given the stark warnings that the PM has received from his advisers.

Earlier this month, a little-noticed document published by Brown’s strategy unit made clear that the record numbers of arrivals seen in recent years is just the beginning.

“Over the next decade and beyond the population is projected to continue to grow at a faster rate than in the Eighties and early Nineties,” it said.

And it forecasts that the country’s population will rise by an extra seven million to 67 million, by 2020, driven largely by “people living longer and net migration”.

This population explosion is the chilling context for the Govern­ment’s latest vow to “crack down” on border controls and ensure “managed migration”. And in the light of the expected influx, these measures to tighten up the process of applying for British citizenship seem woefully ­inadequate.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith yesterday told MPs of her desire to set out “a clear journey to British citizenship”. Critics of Labour’s immigration boom may feel the path is already far too clear. Her latest wheezes include a year-long period of “probationary citizenship” for new migrants, which seems bound to unravel in practice.

Migrants can hardly be “probationary ex-citizens” of their former home for a year, reverting back to their previous nationality if they fail the test. In her Commons statement, the Home Secretary promised to address “transitional impacts of immigration on communities”.

Behind the spin and ghastly Home Office verbiage, that means looking at the acute strain on hospital beds, housing shortages, jam-packed classrooms, congested roads and already over-stretched public transport in parts of the country experiencing high levels of immigration. It also means tackling surges in crime reported by police forces as directly linked to mass immigration in some areas.

Smith’s answer to those worsening crises is a new cash fund to “alleviate some of the short-term pressures resulting from migration”. She plans to raise the cash by increasing fees for immigration applications. Yet even the Home Office admits the scheme will only raise “tens of millions of pounds”, small change in terms of the multi-billion-pound
budgets of the NHS, schools system, police and other desperately overstretched and under-funded public services.

And for the Home Secretary to suggest the impact of immigration is “transitional” is absurd. Surely if the population is to continue rising at the rate official statistics suggest, an ever-tightening squeeze on public services is a certainty.

The bitter truth is that the Government has never made the case for mass immigration. Yet ministers live in fear of the electoral backlash threatened by the years of simmering resentment among voters at Labour’s open-door policy.

Its limp response is another burst of staged hyperactivity with more gimmicky initiatives.

The Government has already pushed through seven immigration Acts since coming to power in 1997. There is no
evidence that any of these pieces of legislation has curbed overall numbers.

Even more disturbing is Brown’s fanatical urge to re-define British citizenship in terms of his own ideo­logy. For the Prime Minister, citizenship of our nation has nothing to do with birthright, loyalty to institutions or shared history and heritage but concerns what he calls “values”.

His speech yesterday argued that patriotism “defines a nation not by race or ethnicity but by seeing us all as part of a collective project from which we all gain and to which we all contribute”. In this warped view, gaining UK citizenship is just a matter of signing up to Labour’s collectivist crusade.

That is why Brown’s attempt to confront voter fury over immigration is bound to fail. He remains obsessed with driving up tax revenue to shore up his bloated state with scant regard to the increasing damage to the fabric of the nation.

As Shadow Home Secretary David Davis pointed out in the Commons yesterday, British citizenship for foreign-born migrants is a privilege not a right. With more than 150,000 new British citizenships ­handed out every year, the Government appears shamefully to have forgotten that fact.

Ministers must realise voters are seeing through the charade of their immigration crackdowns. At least senior Labour figures no longer have the gall to accuse critics of mass immigration of being racist. And they openly admit that decades of multicultural policies have failed, breeding only separation between different ethnic groups.

But those concessions are not enough to assuage the growing fury bred by Labour’s soft-touch approach to border control. As long as the Prime Minister and his Cabinet refuse to face up to the question of curbing the numbers of immigrants settling in Britain, they cannot hope to neutralise Labour’s single most toxic issue. Brown will reap the ­consequences whenever he finally has the guts to face the electorate.