Immigration, the taboo word that will cost Cameron dear

Canvassing in the Handsworth area of Birmingham back in 1983, I was flummoxed by one voter. She stood before her considerable house in an area that had once been firmly middle-class. Now the villas around her had been converted into bedsits, and the locality had become scruffy and run-down. She was, apparently, now the only white resident in the street. She asked me when she had ever been given the chance to vote for or against Britain’s becoming multiracial. Since I could not answer that, she wanted to know why she should vote at all.

She could be dismissed as a racist, and I do not deny that she may well have been. But that would not invalidate her point. The biggest single change in postwar Britain is the transformation in who the British are.

The new diversity of races and religions makes a big difference to life in the UK. Some places have changed their appearance and norms of behaviour entirely. Many people will applaud the transformation for the diversity and enrichment that it has brought. But if the alteration of Britain can be presented in such positive terms, then it is all the more remarkable that it has occurred without the British people’s consent being sought.

Gordon Brown claims to be concerned about the public’s cynical attitude to politics. If so, he needs to understand that it is not the result merely of Labour or Tory sleaze, nor even of politicians’ broken promises.

Many people feel that when they are asked every few years to vote, they are never presented with a real choice on something that truly matters to them. They may be offered options of more public spending or lower tax, pledges with fairly minor consequences, which they in any case take with a pinch of salt. More often the choice will be only between one party that has just about got its act together and one that has totally lost the plot, which for me describes all the elections since 1970.
Full article at Timesonline