How I became the story and why the Right is wrong

12 April 2012

There's an old maxim among journalists that you shouldn't let yourself become the story.

As the Evening Standard's long-serving comment editor, I'm mostly happy to commission others to write on these pages and let them take both plaudits and flak.

But when I find that not only have I become the story, in the row over Labour's immigration policy, but that my views have been twisted out of all recognition, I have to respond.

I wrote here last Friday that, in the wake of the Nick Griffin row, we had to be honest about immigration and the benefits it has brought.

I also wrote of my disappointment that ministers have shied away from this debate, a point I illustrated with an account of the shift in immigration policy almost a decade a go.

As a ministerial speechwriter in a former career, in 2000 I penned a key speech for the then immigration minister Barbara Roche, which mooted changes to make it easier for skilled workers to come to the UK.

That was based on a sensitive report on migration by the Prime Minister's Performance and Innovation Unit.

Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when - hard as it is to imagine now - the booming economy was running up against skills shortages.

But my sense from several discussions was there was also a subsidiary political purpose to it - boosting diversity and undermining the Right's opposition to multiculturalism.

I was not comfortable with that. But it wasn't the main point at issue.

Somehow this has become distorted by excitable Right-wing newspaper columnists into being a "plot" to make Britain multicultural.

There was no plot. I've worked closely with Ms Roche and Jack Straw and they are both decent, honourable people whom I respect (not something I'd say for many politicians).

What's more, both were robust on immigration when they needed to be: Straw had driven through a tough Immigration and Asylum Act in 1999 and Roche had braved particularly cruel flak from the Left over asylum seekers.

Rather, my sense was that the nervousness came primarily from No 10.

According to my notes of one meeting in mid-July 2000, held at the PIU's offices in Admiralty Arch, there was a debate about whether the report should be published by the PIU or by the Home Office: the PIU didn't think the Prime Minister wanted his "prints" on it.

From Tony Blair, the man who took us to war in Iraq on a lie - and who later fired the faithful Roche on a whim, months before she lost her seat thanks to the war - I don't find that particularly surprising.

Perhaps the lesson of this row is just how hard it still is to have any sensible debate about immigration.

The Right see plots everywhere and will hyperventilate at the drop of a chapati: to judge by some of the rubbish published in the past few days, it's frankly not hard to see why ministers were nervous.

The Left, however, will immediately accuse anyone who raises immigration as an issue as "playing the race card" - as the Government has on several occasions over the past decade.

Both sides need to grow up. A diverse society that welcomes immigrants works.

We've got one right here in London. Why is that so hard to discuss?