In an historic keynote speech last month, Home Secretary David Blunkett acknowledged what we have all known but politicians, including those of his own party, have persistently denied. This Labour Government has no policy for controlling immigration; on the contrary, it is bent on promoting it.

Addressing the Royal Institute of International Affairs on the 12th November, Mr. Blunkett said that "effectively managed" legal immigration was vital for the economy and society as a whole. No successful country, he maintained, could afford to adopt an anti-immigration policy in these times.

The main thrust of the Home Secretary's speech seemed to be that the problem of dealing with immigrants coming in by the back door had become so acute, and the process so out of control, that the whole matter would be solved by making immigration legal, open and welcome. That would, of course, be denied by the Government but it is what its policy amounts to.

'Low birth-rate' argument

The argument about immigrants being vital to the economy rests on the claim that in Britain, as with most of the rest of Europe, the birth-rate of the indigenous population is so low that more young people (which most immigrants are) are urgently needed to redress the imbalance between young and old, working and non-working.

What the argument ignores is the fact that this low birth-rate, and the generation imbalance in which it results, is the direct result of policies that the politicians - those of Labour in particular - have been pursuing for the past half-century. Successive governments have done everything they could to discourage Britons from having large families. This has been done by inadequate encouragement to family life, excessive taxation of the hard-working and the constant promotion of a culture glorifying feminism and down-grading the status of women as wives and mothers.

The real solution to this problem of the British birth-rate is to change these policies, change the culture and give proper encouragement to our own people to bear and raise healthy British sons and daughters.

More immigrants, more votes!

But let us not imagine that the birth-rate argument is the real reason why Labour wants more immigrants. That is just a facade.

Labour knows that immigrants and their descendants are more likely to vote for the party than for its rivals. The immigrants know that Labour will give them more than will the other parties. It's a cosy little two-way deal!