Fraser Nelson:

Business and society have faced up to the reality of mass migration, but the politicians are in denial

Seven years ago, a former Downing Street speech writer called Andrew Neather made what was seen as a bombshell disclosure. Tony Blair’s government, he said, had used mass immigration as a “deliberate policy” to “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”.

So waves of immigrants would be deployed as a political weapon, sharpening Labour’s electoral edge and consigning the Tories to the same kind of demographic agony now gripping the US Republican Party. It was a great theory, but implausible for one simple reason: it implies that someone, somewhere, knew what was happening with immigration. As we now know, no one did.

Even yesterday, the Prime Minister was struggling to find out how many foreign citizens are living here. The chaps with the clipboards reckon about 1 million EU nationals have settled here over the past five years. We now learn that National Insurance figures suggest over 2 million registrations. For all immigrants, the best guess is that about four million have settled here since the turn of the century – the equivalent of digesting another Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield. It was utterly unplanned but, in the circumstances, has been a striking success.

No one told the supermarkets that there would be 4 million more mouths to feed, but we haven’t run out of food. There’s plenty of clothes to buy, Ryanair isn’t rationing flights, nor is there a shortage of televisions. In fact, all of these things are more plentiful and – in many cases – cheaper than 10 years ago. Employers have found plenty of jobs for the newcomers, the economy has expanded to accommodate them. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, never strong in the first place, has not risen over the last decade. Yes, the immigration levels have been amazing. But Britain’s ability to cope has been even more so.

The same cannot, alas, be said for the Government. The ministers who flung open the gates have struggled to provide the school places and the doctors’ clinics for all those who arrived. British complaints about immigration can be separated from concern about often home-grown Islamic extremism. When we moan, it’s normally about the pressure on creaking public services. And there has been plenty of pressure. The Sunday

Telegraph revealed last weekend that one in 15 pupils has a parent from other EU countries. If you include all children born to immigrants, the figure is one in four. In London, it’s one in two.

So the problem, in Britain, is not really with immigration in itself – but with the Government’s failure to respond to that immigration. The shops, restaurants, pubs, employers and health clubs have all expanded elegantly; crime has fallen to a 35-year low, the fertility rate has risen to a healthy 1.8 per woman (for my immigrant wife, it’s 3.0). But in Whitehall and in town halls, officials have been running around trying to resolve the problems caused by a chronic inability to plan. Hence the queues for the swings and passport control, the “closed” lists in GP clinics, the five-year-olds crammed into school Portakabins and the intensifying housing crisis.

The biggest single problem is political denial. David Cameron has spent so many years talking about reducing immigration to the “tens of thousands” that he probably believes it himself. The target is a fantasy, blurted out by a former Tory immigration spokesman then adopted as policy because party officials didn’t want to admit to the blunder. It was never achievable on the first place, and if Britain votes to remain a member of the European Union it never will be. The promised £9 hourly minimum wage will be an even bigger draw – especially as it will be higher than the average salary, let alone the minimum wage, in several EU countries.

If Britain were to vote to leave the EU, then we would have the powers to introduce tighter border control. But as things stand, it looks likely that we’ll vote to Remain – and that net immigration will keep running at about 200,000 a year. Whatever happens in the referendum, it’s time for a fundamentally different approach – based on honesty and realism. It’s time to stop treating high immigration as a constantly-surprising blip, and accept that no EU member has the tools to control it. We’ll be taking in the equivalent of a Solihull or a Gateshead every year.

So it’s time to give schools and GP clinics the freedom (and financial incentive) to set up where they think the demand is the greatest. If this happened, GP appointments and classroom places would be no harder to come by than food and water is today.

Michael Gove’s school reform has helped create a few hundred more schools, but they have not (yet) been given full financial freedoms. If schools were able to behave as businesses, and run a surplus, then they’d expand rather than run a waiting list and the idea of a sink school would be as unthinkable as a sink supermarket. It’s a big step, but an obvious one. The part-liberalisation of schools has helped a lot; full liberalisation would help even more.

Twenty years ago, the BBC’s Evan Davis wrote a book asking why Sainsbury’s is better at selling food than most schools are at teaching. The public, he said, has “lost faith in the state as a vehicle” for delivering public services. It was true then, and is even more true in the era where government has shown itself unable to count, let alone respond to, the everrising population.

Needless to say, those worst affected tend to be those in the poorer areas, the ones badly served by government in the first place and who now have to compete with immigrants for work. Much more needs to be done for them.

For too long, immigration policy has simply involved the government deluding itself about what was happening, and pretending that the problem is one election away from being solved. The truth should, by now, be clear: the world is on the move and high-wage Britain is the destination of choice for the most discerning immigrants. They’re likely to keep coming, in their hundreds of thousands, for the foreseeable future. And they, like everyone else, will need a government that’s able to cope.