Rudd: I’m not being racist by talking about immigration

A DEFIANT Amber Rudd yesterday fought off criticism over her migrant workers crackdown, saying: ‘Don’t call me a racist for talking about immigration.’

Businesses were enraged over the Home Secretary’s proposals, which included a plan to force them to reveal how many foreign workers they employ. One industry group said having a ‘global workforce’ shouldn’t be a ‘badge of shame’.

In a BBC interview yesterday, Miss Rudd was asked whether the proposals amounted to ‘sanctioning a form of racism’, while Labour accused her of ‘xenophobia’. But she stood firm and insisted the country ‘should be able to have a conversation about immigration’ without being accused of racism.

She defended the plan to force firms to reveal their percentage of foreign workers, saying it could be used to ‘flush out’ companies that do not take a ‘constructive’ approach to hiring and training British staff. And she suggested she would only press ahead if business failed to take action.

She was backed by Theresa May, who said in her Tory conference address that British workers who lost jobs to migrants felt their ‘dreams have been sacrificed in the service of others’.

The row erupted yesterday after more details of Miss Rudd’s immigration

‘We must not shy away from this’

control plans were made public, including tougher recruitment tests for cheaper foreign workers, new entry rules for overseas students and harsher penalties for landlords who let to illegal migrants.

But Adam Marshall, acting head of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: ‘A lot of businesses would be saddened if they felt having a global workforce was somehow seen as a badge of shame.’

He said companies ‘of course’ try to hire locally before looking overseas ‘so I don’t think they should be penalised for having to do so when they have specific skills needs’.

On the Radio 4 Today programme, host Nick Robinson put to Miss Rudd the claim she was ‘sanctioning a form of racism’ and that the plans were ‘borrowed from the BNP’. She replied: ‘The fact is we should be able to have a conversation about immigration, about what skills we want to have in the UK ... in order to boost the economy.’

She insisted she was careful about the language she used but said ‘we mustn’t shy away from having this sort of conversation because we know if we do it just pops up later in a more difficult way.’

She said firms should ‘foster a pool’ of British candidates for jobs, adding: ‘We set policy to encourage businesses obviously to be successful, but also to have a responsibility to local employ- ment.’ She added: ‘I fear there may be some [businesses] who aren’t quite as constructive, and they’re the ones we want to flush out here.’

Miss Rudd was asked if ‘people don’t like your language are they guilty of liberal elite sneering?’

She replied: ‘I’ll let other people be the judge of that, but what it does seem to highlight is that we mustn’t ignore the fact that people want to talk about immigration. If we do talk about immigration, don’t call me a racist.’

Miss Rudd also said she visited a factory of sofa-maker Collins and Hayes in her Hastings constituency where more than eight in ten workers were from Romania and Poland. She said she was told these recruits ‘had experience in factories building these sofas’. But she claimed: ‘They didn’t even consider training locally.’

But the firm’s boss Matt O’Flynn hit back. He said he invited Miss Rudd to the factory to show how heavily the company was investing in the area.

‘It’s a shame to see the boomerang come around and hit you,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘We’ve got nothing that we are trying to hide and we will just continue working with the local community.’ He added that they use an agency to bring in skilled labour from abroad.

Labour attacked Miss Rudd’s plans. Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham said the idea ‘runs counter to everything that this country has ever stood for’, adding: ‘It would be divisive, discriminatory and risks creating real hostility in workplaces and communities. The tone of the Conservative conference has become increasingly xenophobic.’

But Labour was humiliated when it emerged Ed Miliband made similar proposals as party leader, suggesting forcing firms to say if more than a quarter of their workers were foreign.

ACROSS parts of Germany, running battles between immigrants and neo- Nazis are becoming so frequent that they no longer lead the news.

In France and Belgium, Jewish schools and synagogues require armed guards. In Toulouse, a mosque has been burned to the ground. In Sweden, neo-Nazi thugs warned of a ‘ year of violence’ against immigrants.

Racist violence across much of Europe is now becoming almost routine.

So which country has the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe decided to accuse of ‘anti-foreigner sentiment’? You guessed it. The European Commission on Racism and Intolerance, which reports to the Council, says it is alarmed at the ‘intolerant political discourse in the UK, particularly focusing on immigration’.

Seriously? Political discourse in the UK? Let’s compare how politicians talk here with what passes unremarked in other EU states. Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka says: ‘To be honest, we don’t want a large Muslim population here.’ His Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, is just as blunt: ‘Islam has no place in Slovakia.’

Bigots

In France, Nicolas Sarkozy calls Islamic dress ‘a provocation’, and promises laws against it. (And, of course, a ban on the wearing of burkas on French beaches sparked huge rows over the summer.)

In Britain, by contrast, Theresa May was cheered by her party members yesterday when she said: ‘I want us to be a country where it doesn’t matter where you were born.’

By what measure is ours an intolerant country? To be sure, we have our bigots, as every nation does. But against whom are we being so harshly judged?

Look at the strength of authoritarian, anti-immigrant parties across Europe.

In Austria, the Far-Right candidate got half the vote at the last presidential election, which is now being re-run after irregularities in the poll. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National leads in some national polls. In Greece, an unashamedly neo-Nazi party came third at the last election.

Nativist parties — that is, ones that argue for the rights of established inhabitants of a nation over immigrants — are polling solidly in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and many post- Communist states. Here, though, the British National Party barely registers. It has never come close to winning an MP, and currently has just two councillors.

We keep being told, usually by Remainers, that our EU referendum was ‘ all about immigration’. In fact, the polls showed throughout that the top issue for Leave voters was democracy and the supremacy of the British Parliament.

If you want a referendum that really was ‘all about immigration’, look at Hungary, where 98 per cent of those who went to the polls have just voted against an EU plan to settle 1,200 refugees on their territory. The prime minister, Viktor Orban, said migrants were ‘over-running’ Hungary. In Britain, 1,200 immigrants enter the country every 30 hours!

Of course, to say that other places have a worse record than ours is hardly a knockout defence. Any racial abuse is shameful, and Britain has its share of dunderheads, just like anywhere else.

Still, be honest: does the Council of Europe’s report match your experience? Do you, in your daily life, see evidence of what the BBC has taken to calling an ‘epidemic’ of racism?

If you’re old enough to remember the Seventies or Eighties, you must have noticed the improvement in race relations.

You can measure it in any way you like: the decline in violence, the increased approval of mixedrace marriages, the rising number of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, the success of ethnic minorities in our professions.

Ours is a tolerant, comfortable, multi-racial society, which is one of many reasons that migrants prefer to come here.

What is it based on, this idea that we are in the grip of some new xenophobia unleashed by the referendum? Much of it comes from people’s determination to see what they want. A minority of Remain supporters spent the campaign dismissing all anti-EU sentiment as ‘racist’.

By the end, they had convinced themselves, and were determined to pounce on any news item as evidence of what they took to calling on social media ‘# PostRefRacism’. Three incidents were widely reported straight after the vote as evidence of an ugly new mood: an attack on a tapas bar in South London; a demonstration in Newcastle calling for foreigners to be repatriated; and graffiti outside a Polish community centre.

It emerged that the attack on the tapas bar had, in fact, been a burglary, and that the idiots in Newcastle had been holding the same demonstration every weekend since long before the vote. As for the graffiti, no one yet knows whether it had anything to do with the referendum.

That, though, hasn’t stopped some irreconcilables from continuing to use all three episodes as evidence of what they want to believe. They are thrown at me several times a day by pro- EU campaigners who accuse me of complicity in violence for playing a leading role in the Leave campaign.

It’s nothing new. Two years ago, an Italian constituent of mine, a waiter, was horribly murdered in Kent. Immediately, his death was blamed on Eurosceptics. The leader of the Socialist MEPs’ group said that he was a victim of David Cameron’s anti- EU rhetoric. Not long afterwards, it emerged that the killers were a Lithuanian gang.

Misleading

Did the Socialist leader apologise to David Cameron? Did he admit that, now he had the full facts, he could see that the incident made a case for stronger controls on who entered the country from the EU, rather than blaming racist Britons?

Of course not. People are very good at fitting facts into their existing prejudices.

One such ‘ fact’, endlessly quoted, is that hate crimes have ‘risen by 57 per cent’ since the referendum. A moment’s reflection tells us that this figure is implausible and, sure enough, it turns out to be ludicrously misleading.

The police have a website that encourages people to report hate crimes. In the first four days after the vote, 85 people logged such incidents, up from 54 people in the corresponding period the previous month. The numbers had been rising for some time, because the website was more widely advertised. As yet, there has been no increase in the number of incidents that have triggered prosecutions.

Some of the ‘reports’ appear to have been people letting off steam after the vote, including some complaining about Nigel Farage. Yet, under police guidelines, all such reports have to be recorded as ‘ hate crime’ incidents.

The police press release from which the 57 per cent figure was taken was, in fairness, quite clear about what it meant: ‘This should not be read as a national increase in hate crime of 57 per cent but an increase in reporting through one mechanism.’

In other words, an extra 28 people during the 96 hours after the vote complained to police, triggering no extra prosecutions. And yet that 57 per cent figure has assumed almost canonical force among Remoaners. Simply to question it is taken as evidence that you are a racist yourself.

Nasty

People of every background campaigned on both sides in the referendum. There were several Leave organisations run by Brits of Commonwealth background: Bangladeshis for Britain, Africans for Britain, Sikhs for Britain and so on. We also had support from people of Continental European origins who had come to see the EU as a racket.

Such people don’t fit the antiBrexit, pro-Brussels narrative. Many broadcasters, in particular, are determined to tell us that we are a narrow, nasty, prejudiced nation — and won’t be distracted by inconvenient facts.

Here, though, is the most inconvenient fact of all. The rise of actual bigotry in Europe is being exacerbated by two EU policies: the euro, which has caused needless poverty and unemployment, especially among southern European nations who have found themselves growing ever closer to the breadline; and the Schengen agreement on open borders, which has left countries unable to regulate migratory flows.

This has meant that the hundreds of thousands arriving in Europe from Africa and the Middle East have to a large degree been able to travel northwards and westwards unhindered.

So, far from soothing national antagonisms, it is Brussels that is stoking them. When we leave, we shall be a more global, more outward-looking and, yes, more tolerant country.