The Centre For Social Cohesion

What the Lords Committee has joined Sir Andrew in pointing out is that, contrary to the Government’s much vaunted claim about how much economic benefit the country has gained from the huge influx in immigration over which it has presided this last decade, the vast majority of the country’s indigenous population has not enjoyed one iota of benefit from it. Indeed, many of the poorest groups have suffered economically as a result of it.

As Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Committee, put its central finding :

“The argument put forward by he government that large-scale net immigration brings significant economic benefits for the UK is unconvincing. We have found no evidence to support their position.”

Sure, the extra workers may have added £6 billion a year to the country’s GNP. And some indigenous Brits, mostly the better off ones, may have benefited from their cheap labour. However, since immigrants consume most of the extra wealth they have helped produce, none of it has spread to the vast majority of the country’s population.

Indeed, many may actually have suffered economic loss because of the extra competition from these immigrants. Those hit hardest economically by their competition include the country’s poorest groups of whom many themselves are of only comparatively recent settlement.

As the Lords Committee put it in their report published today:

“Resident workers whose wages have been adversely affected by immigration are likely to include a significant proportion of previous immigrants and workers from ethnic minority groups.”

The economic balance sheet tells only half the story, if that, about the costs of the last decade’s enormous wave of net immigration. For it fails to include social costs: the extra strain on the country’s infrastructure -- the overcrowded schools, roads, trains and surgeries and hospitals; the massive short-fall in housing, particularly social housing on which the country’s poorest groups have for long been traditionally reliant; and the sheer extra strain on all that hyper-diversity brings.

One can have too much of a good thing. However beneficial in some degree added social diversity might be, beyond a certain tipping point, it does nothing to improve the quality of social life but only worsens it.

The Government’s community cohesion agenda has been devised to deal with some of the worst effects of excessive diversity. But in some ways it is fighting a losing battle. This is because cohesion-creating processes require time before they can work, and all present initiatives are constantly being undermined by additional new immigration.

The Government will surely be punished at the polls for its folly come election-time. One can only hope that the tolerance, moderation, and patience of the British, for which they have for so long been well known internationally, prevails over more extremist tendencies the Government’s misguided immigration policies have done so much to enflame among some of the country’s most embittered groups whom it has given most cause to feel betrayed by it.