How the Mail got it right on Romanian and Bulgarian migration and the BBC got it so wrong – and deceived Britain

People say history doesn’t repeat itself. Sometimes that’s true. But it certainly isn’t the case so far as immigration to Britain from other eU countries is concerned. We all know how, in 2004, the labour government opened the door to immigration from poland and seven other eastern european states, while other countries such as Germany and France imposed restrictions. The Blair government forecast a relatively small annual influx — of between 5,000 and 13,000. Within five years, nearly a million had arrived.

Following that gigantic miscalculation, one might have expected a little more caution would be shown at the beginning of 2014 when immigration restrictions from Romania and Bulgaria were lifted by the Coalition government. With an eye on the cock-up over poland, prime minister Cameron refused to release official projections.

The Mail warned that history would repeat itself. So did a small number of other organisations such as Migration Watch, a think-tank run by a respected former British ambassador.

This did not prevent many — most notably the BBC — from predicting that anxieties over the number of migrants would turn out to be misplaced. In fact, they were utterly justified. Yesterday, the office for National Statistics estimated there are 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in the United Kingdom, equivalent to the population of Bristol.

of these, roughly 150,000 were already living in the country before 2014. But since then, more than a quarter of a million more migrants from Romania and Bulgaria have settled here.

How misguided the BBC has been. In January 2014, it carried an uncritical interview with the then Romanian ambassador in london, Dr Ion Jinga. He said the number of citizens coming from his country to the UK would be ‘fewer than in recent years’. It wasn’t.

But the Beeb was adamant that those expressing concern about a new wave of migration were guilty of scare tactics. even before the gates were opened, BBC2’s Newsnight carried a report in April 2013 which suggested that only 1 per cent of Romanians and 4 per cent of Bulgarians were ‘actively considering work in the UK’.

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are all the Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants, asked an item on the BBC’s website at the end of January 2014. It claimed ‘some parts of the UK have reported very few arrivals so far’.

This echoed a visit to luton airport on January 1, 2014, by the publicity- seeking labour Mp Keith Vaz, which was celebrated by the BBC. He found a single Romanian immigrant — the inference being that there wasn’t going to be anything resembling a stampede.

In May 2014, after official figures suggested (wrongly) that very few Romanians and Bulgarians were coming here, the then BBC political editor, Nick Robinson, scoffed: ‘ So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming from Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened’.

As late as December 2014, Mark easton — the supposedly authoritative BBC home editor, who over the years has been relaxed about eU immigration — told Radio 4 listeners there were ‘ probably 100,000’ Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain. It took John Humphrys to point out that there were already 189,000.

In short, the all-powerful BBC has been spectacularly wrong. If more than 400,000 people from two countries come to live here in the space of a few years, that surely amounts to some sort of ‘flood’. The BBC was reporting what it thought would happen — not what actually did.

The dependably leftist Channel 4 News was equally awry. In 2014, it published a ‘fact check’ which declared: ‘predictions of a mass influx of immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania have failed to come true.’

The explanation for such superciliousness is hardly obscure. even the BBC’s former di r e c t o r- general, Mark Thompson, admitted in 2011 that there were ‘ some years’ when the Corporation was ‘very reticent about talking about immigration’. Nothing much has changed. Auntie, and others, should hang their heads in shame.

one organisation ( long shunned by the BBC and the left-wing media) did predict what has happened. In 2013, Migration Watch estimated that between 30,000 and 70,000 Romanians and Bulgarians a year would come to the UK. Its higher figure has proved almost exactly correct.

All this matters because it shows how the preconceptions of our national broadcaster prevented it from telling the truth about an issue which, as the Brexit referendum illuminated, is important to millions of people.

Much of the political establishment also colluded. We’ll probably have to wait until 2044 under Whitehall’s secretive 30year rule to know what level of immigration the Government envisaged from Romania and Bulgaria. But didn’t David Cameron have a duty to tell us?

It was partly because millions of people thought they had been deceived and betrayed by politicians and parts of the media that they voted in June last year to leave the eU.

They didn’t — and don’t — dislike poles, Romanians, Bulgarians or any other foreigners. They simply realise that, when the number of migrants rises so quickly, there is bound to be pressure on school places, hospitals and Gp surgeries. Many of them know that migrants sometimes undercut indigenous workers.

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also realise, though politicians seldom admit it, that the housing shortage is to a significant degree the result of uncontrolled immigration. Migration Watch, whose record entitles it to be trusted on such matters, estimates that nearly half of housing demand is attributable to migrants.

Inevitably, there is a fightback from those who assert that the British economy will grind to a halt post-Brexit if it cannot sustain existing high levels of immigration.

on the left, there are those who stubbornly insist on untrammelled immigration as a universal entitlement, even if it disrupts the lives of working people, many of whom are natural labour voters. on the Right, there are businessmen who relish mass immigration because it provides a huge pool of cheap, compliant and usually competent labour. In this respect, the office for National Statistics report on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants offers a fascinating insight. It says that while the average national hourly earnings of UK workers are estimated at £11.30, citizens from these two eU countries receive only £8.33 an hour.

In other words, Romanians and Bulgarians will work for less than their British counterparts because the average wage in their own countries is about a fifth of what it is here.

There will be a need for foreign labour post-Brexit. But every time a business leader bellyaches about a shortage of workers, remember he has an interest in continuing to pay eastern europeans less than the home-grown variety.

only yesterday this paper reported that a former senior Home office official has admitted Britain is home to at least a million illegal immigrants. They are also part of this huge pool of cheap labour that is so alluring to some businesses.

one wonders whether the much- lamented lack of productivity growth in recent years may be a consequence of companies employing cut-price labour instead of investing in new plant.

We stand at a crossroads over Brexit, with reactionary forces in the government, led by Chancellor philip Hammond, intent on ensuring that as little as possible changes.

But for the good of this country — its workers, its public services, its businesses, not to mention social cohesion — we have an opportunity to end wildly uncontrolled immigration, whether the BBC and the establishment like it or not.