HUMPHRYS PRO-IMMIGRATION BIAS: John Humphrys on Saturday presented a 27-minute Today feature on immigration. It was unusually long and amounted to a documentary inside the Today format. What was the purpose? Humphrys opined that the topic was causing a debate of a kind that he had never seen in his 50-year career. He said he wanted to explore whether concern was based on a perceived pressure being on national resources, or was it a ‘fear of being overwhelmed in some ill-defined way’?
It was the latter that undoubtedly emerged as the key fulcrum and purpose of his feature. In Humphrys’ view the recent explosion in immigrant numbers was not worth mentioning, and nor was the EU’s role in triggering.it. That in itself was bias by omission. But he also showed heavy bias throughout towards those who oppose immigration. His approach disproportionately emphasised claims that it is the ‘whites’ who have caused, and are causing, problems of segregation; that mosques are innocent centres of enlightened thinking; and that concern about immigration since the arrival of the Windrush had been based on prejudice.
He included voices that opposed immigration. But – unlike the other side – the editing of their remarks made them sound fearful, unreasonable and disjointed.
It was a carefully-planned piece. It had been constructed over the past few weeks and had involved visits by Humphrys to Keighley in Yorkshire, Shirebrook in Derbyshire and Hackney in East London.
An initial major issue is how Humphrys defined his mission. A central feature of his analysis was a potted history of immigration since the Windrush steamer arrived soon after the war with 500 immigrants from Jamaica. But missing entirely from his analysis were the subsequent numbers, and how the picture had changed in recent years.
The statistics actually show there has been a rise in foreign-born nationals in the UK from 1.8m in 1951 to 7.5m today, and a near doubling of the numbers in the last 20 years alone.
Why is this important? Because the current debate is not about whether immigration should happen. It is the scale of the influx, and whether it can be reduced.
Also missing from Humphrys’ commentary was the role of the EU in generating this huge explosion. Immigrants from Eastern Europe were briefly mentioned in the Shirebrook section, but this was not picked up and explored as a theme. The main focus was rather on the impact of Asians.
There was also clear bias in the opening sequence of short soundbites one from Keighley, one from Shirebrook and one from East London. The first said it was white people who were causing divisions, that Asians were not welcome and were being physically attacked. The second from a Shirebrook resident, in effect confirmed the hostility, and the third was from a London headmistress who said the appropriate response to immigrants should be to welcome them civilly.
Humphrys then looked at the history of immigration. By necessity, it was a whistle-stop account. But, in line with the theme already established, the emphasis was that early opposition to the influx of new people was based primarily on prejudice: landlords deliberately discriminating against black tenants; patronising attitudes; unfair molestation of blacks; youths (clearly white) mounting race riots; and ‘wrong’ predictions in the ‘rivers of blood’ speech by Enoch Powell.
Other problems were:
KEIGHLEY: The sequence from Keighley featured a local (Asian-British) taxi-driver, a series of vox pops from (white) members of a local curry club and a visit to the main local mosque. The main contributions were undoubtedly from the taxi-driver, and from the leader of a local mosque Both said that immigration was not a problem that any segregation in the town was due to white attitudes and inflexibility. The mosque leader (in one of the longest individual contributions to the programme) concluded his remarks with this:
You know, they fear Islam but they don’t know Islam, they fear Muslims, but they don’t know Muslims. Like, for example you come to the mosque today, you’ve been inviting, somebody who’s not come to the mosque, they might think there’s a military camp going on in here, and the mosque is training up jihadis who are going to stop long themselves up. But you come in, and there’s nothing like that whatsoever, you see carpet, you see walls, you see chairs, in a short while, you’ll see the worshippers coming in. But not everybody gets to see that, because they’re not willing to take the step like you have to come into the mosque and see what’s actually going on here.
In other words, anything that the local community (or anybody) thought negatively about immigrants was totally unfounded. The emphasis place by the editing in terms of its length and juxtaposition with other views confirmed that it was designed for maximum prominence. Another issue here is again by omission. Humphrys chose to say nothing at all about the role of mosques in fomenting extremism. Instead, he asked the mosque leader for more words about his version of multiculturalism:
Does it sadden you that . . . that when you come into a town like Keighley, or city like Bradford, you don’t see people of different races living together?MI: Put it this way, what type of site would I like to see? I would like to see a society where you have non-Muslims and Muslims interacting with one another. But at the same time, you know, being allowed to adopt and keep their own identity, which is reflective of their beliefs, that would be a beautiful situation, where there’s no compromise, there is no assimilation taking place, but they can interact and share facilities and such things, but at the same time, hold strongly their identity, I think there’s a beauty in that.
With this sequence, Humphrys dealt with and, in effect, dismissed, ‘white’ concerns about Islam. They wanted their version of integration and were accommodating. By contrast, views of ‘whites’ from Keighley were confined to a few apparently narrow-minded remarks about not liking to live in areas where ‘Asians’ lived. The editing gave no coherence to their standpoint.
SHIREBROOK: The sequence from Shirebrook was the shortest. It was two locals expressing their fears about the level of influx of ‘Eastern Europeans’ and stating that while they were fearful of numbers, their concerns were focused mainly on that there was trouble-making and pressure on local services and resources. John Humprys asked if they were racists. They were naturally forced to deny this, but the clear implication of the inclusion of Humphrys’ question was to plant strongly in the minds of the audience that they were. Before introducing the section, he had said (in one of his longest links):
‘Keighley is the perfect example of how for decades, generations, the debate about immigration in this country has centred on differences, alien cultures habits and religion, above all, the colour of the immigrant’s skin. But that’s changing. A succession of laws outlawing racial discrimination have worked to the magic. Racist movements that have tried to become great national parties have failed miserably. Our vocabulary has been transformed, we’re shocked when we hear the ‘n’ word. The essential difference between the migrants at the heart of this referendum debate and most of us British is that they are poorer’.
Humphrys’ second interviewee from Shirebrook was the man ‘said to be leading the fight to keep the number of immigrants down’. Again, he had clearly been pushed to defend the idea that he was racist. He declared:
‘We’ve had well over our quota in this area. This is not a racist quote . . . we don’t want anymore, because we have got thousands in this village. 95 or more percent of them absolutely lovely, families, all they’ve done is they’ve come over, taken money, money for their families, which I would do if there was no work over here. We’re at us limit, obviously you can’t send . . . them lots good, we’ll keep them, and we’ll manage with what we’ve got, but we don’t need any more.’
And that was it. Nothing about the actual numbers in Shirebrook, Nothing about the extent to which local services were under pressure. And definitely, no detailed arguments about what opposition to immigration was actually based upon. The opinion of the ‘whites’ seemed unfounded and based on unreasoned fear.
IMMIGRANTS: Humphrys’ next sequence involved exchanges with two immigrants. Both had been in the UK for many years and one was from Poland, the other, Brazil. Both had jobs. Both said that the referendum debate had generated unfairly negative attitudes towards them and had misrepresented them to the extent that one ‘felt more like a foreigner’ and the other that she had been put ‘on the other side of the border’. Humphrys later spoke to Saleema Gulbaha, the daughter of immigrants, who now had a master’s degree and two children. She told him that as a child, she had been spat at by locals at school. Humphrys suggested that her eventual success was possible proof that immigration worked, and that there were few countries that would not want her as a citizen.
Humphrys’ conclusion was:
‘What I’ve tried to do in this report is answer two questions: what effect has immigration had on this country, and if we’re afraid of it, why? The first is relatively easy. Immigration has had a profound effect on us, on our attitudes to people whom most would once have dismissed as foreigners. We’ve become to an extent, unimaginable after the war, multicultural country. And we mostly rub along pretty well. If we’re afraid of where growing numbers of immigrants may take is, that fee is based on something different. It’s about how it will affect our economic and physical well-being, getting our children into a decent school, waiting to long in the GP surgery, competing for jobs and houses. It’s partly about where we live, a couple of thousand immigrants arriving in London is barely noticeable, in a small town in Yorkshire and Derbyshire it can be overwhelming. I’ve been reporting for the BBC for nearly 50 years, we’ve never had a debate quite like this. Whatever happens in the referendum, the issues that have been raised will resonate in this country perhaps for generations to come.’
Overall, hese were clearly important issues related to the immigration debate. But Humphrys’ approach was heavily biased. In his world those who oppose immigration do so predominately from a position of prejudice. He purported to explore the topic in the context of the referendum debate, but missed out numbers and rate of expansion – the key bedrock of opposition to current levels of immigration.
Contributions of those who expressed concerns about immigration came across as shallow and prejudiced, a picture that was made worse by Humphrys’ repeated putting of ‘racist’ claims to them. They had to deny they were racists, and were given only minimal space to advance their fears about numbers.
On the other side of the coin Humphrys heavily stressed the contributions of those who were, in various ways – in their own estimation – victims of prejudice about immigrants. Immigrants he spoke to wanted a better world, and had been thwarted in that quest only by white prejudice. What he meant by being ‘overwhelmed in some ill-defined way’ emerged as both the dominant theme – and in his view, it was based on that prejudice.
Full Transcript:
BBC Radio 4, Today, 17 June 2016, Immigration, 8.33am
JOHN HUMPHRYS: Five days to go and it still the economy and immigration dominating the referendum campaign. If immigration is indeed at the top of our list of concerns, what is it that worries us about it? Migrants taking our jobs, driving down wages competing for houses and health services and school places? Or is it the fear of being overwhelmed in some ill-defined way? Well, we have tried to answer those questions is to look at the effect immigration had on this country since the war. So, over the last few weeks I’ve been to 3 areas of Britain each with its own distinctively different experience of it. I began in the North of England. 50 or 60 years ago, the immigrants started arriving here, mostly from Bangladesh and India, and they kept coming. Today, Keighley is one of the most segregated towns in Britain.
VOX POP MALE: It’s not the Asians that are causing the divisions, it’s the white people that are causing the divisions. There is some areas where we are not welcome, we go there, we buy a house, we get cars vandalised, windows put through.
JH: Drive an hour down the motorway from Keighley to a little town called Shrirebrook, and you’re here on the frontline of the latest wave of immigration.
VOX POP MALE 2: You see them coming off the trains from the train station, every single day, at least half a dozen, a dozen, with their cases and everything, it’s like balloon, and you fill it with water, it can only hold so much, then after a bit it’s going to explode.
JH: Another couple of hours south to what is perhaps the most cosmopolitan city on the planet, and this is a primary school in East London where English is a second language, they’re taught to be British.
VOX POP FEMALE: I think it’s about demonstrating what we now call British values, such as holding the door open for anybody who is walking along the corridor, sending a thank you letter, being able to shake hands and lift your head and look somebody in the eyes.
JH: Three different voices from three different parts of Britain. Three different experiences of immigration. In this report, I’m not looking at who’s right and who’s wrong in the referendum debate, but rather at the effect that immigration has had in this country since the first wave landed on the shores of post-war Britain.
NEWSREEL: Arrivals at Tilbury. The Empire Windrush brings to Britain 500 Jamaicans, citizens of the British Empire coming to the mother country with good intent.
JH: They wanted jobs, they wanted homes, they wanted schools for their children, and doctors when they got sick, and they were welcomed. The nation was intrigued . . . curious. But when many more crossed the Atlantic and then Asians started arriving that curiosity began morphing into concern.
I’m very pleased to have the opportunity of introducing this series of programmes.
JH: Ministers felt the need for a public gesture of welcome.
For it is part of their purpose to help you to an understanding of life in this country, so that you can settle happily among us.
JH: In other words, ‘integrate’.
UNNAMED SPEAKER: This is a switch on the wall, this is a light. If I press the switch, the light will come on.
JH: Breathtakingly patronising. But the government was starting to get worried, the welcome was beginning to wear thin.
ANNOUNCER: A BBC reporter from Jamaica followed up advertisement.
BBC REPORTER: I’ve come about the room that you advertised.
LANDLADY: Ah yes, it’s let already. Sorry.
BR: Let?
L: Yes.
JH: Suspicion and hostility were growing.
A: Soon afterwards, another reporter went to the same house.
BBC REPORTER 2: Good afternoon.
L: Good afternoon.
BBC2: I rang about the room about half an hour ago.
L: Yes.
A: No trouble there. He was white.
JH: Ten years after the Windrush had arrived, the first race riot in Notting Hill
UNNAMED MALE SPEAKER: Nobody is supposed to molest us, and we molest no one. You can’t go home – our home is all surrounded by young teenagers, al hurling bottles and bricks.
JH: Ten years later, Enoch Powell predicted immigration would cause rivers of blood to flow. He was wrong. There have been more race riots, but they’ve been modest affairs compared with many other countries. The last of them in Bradford.
POLICEMAN: Our offices have come under attack from groups of youths armed with bricks, baseball bats, hammers and petrol bombs.
JH: That was 2001. 15 years later, there’s no rioting here in West Yorkshire, but it’s very different now from how it was before the immigrants started coming. Mohammed Iqbal groping Keighley, his family had moved here from Kashmir in the 1960s. We’ve been driving for a while now, and I’ve not seen a single Asian face.
MOHAMMED IQBAL: (laughter in voice) No, no . . .
JH: All white people.
MI: You, you, you get that. Through this with you, it was economic was driving, most of them came with the view to come, work, save as much money as they could and send back and support the families, and that meant living with friends and, you know, tend to a room or more. But as the family started joining, and prosperity, you know, came their way, they did start moving out slowly and steadily, I mean, er, now, you will see some of the Asians living in some of the poshest parts of Keighley as well, but those who are on the relatively poor side clearly have remained in the inner-city areas. There is still sort of large segregation, were predominantly the white community lives and where the Asian community lives.
JH: We’ve now just come into the town centre, this now from now on is going to be almost entirely Asian.
MI: Yeah, yeah, my family used to have a takeaway just across there, you get lots of takeaways, restaurants, fabric shops . . .
JH: More takeaways in this area than anywhere else in Brighton (words unclear due to speaking over)
MI: (fragments of words, unclear) I would say Bradford’s probably got more, but similarly in Keighley, there’s loads and loads of them.
JH: Plenty of restaurants too. This, a cut above your average takeaway is the Shama, owned by Gulan Robali (phonetic) he acknowledges it has become a deeply segregated area, but he loves living here nonetheless, and why?
GULAN ROBALI: The freedom. The freedom of speech. You have actually the laws that protect you all the time, your rights are protected, that’s the type of freedom you yearn for when you’re in other places in the world.
JH: Almost all the customers are white, this being a Monday evening, the curry club has arrived. A group of middle-aged ladies who have been coming here for donkeys years.
UNNAMED FEMALE: Hi (name unclear) welcome back from your holiday.
UNNAMED MALE: Ah, thank you very much.
JH: They’ve grown to accept the racial segregation in this area. But they’re not all entirely happy about it.
UNNAMED FEMALE 2: Part of the problem is a lot of them don’t speak English. If they spoke English they would get out and join the community more.
UNNAMED FEMALE 3: I taught in the school here, in Keighley, and the children speak English in school, but because the mothers didn’t speak English, they went home and spoke Punjabi at home.
UF: Why should they have to learn English?
UF2: Because it would make their lives better, they could meet . . .
UF: What’s wrong with their lives?
UF3: My grandparents lived in India, but they didn’t integrate, it’s just history repeating itself really.
JH: Do you think that this, Keighley, Bradford, the whole area, would be richer in all sorts of ways if there was not this divide . . .
UNNAMED FEMALE 4: Yeah, if they were integrated more yeah, definitely.
UF2: They are still coming in, immigrants, if you read the papers, so I think we should just be able to close our borders and leave it as it is for the moment.
UF3: Our resources are just so stretched, our education system, our health system, we’ve only a finite amount of money and we’re so liberal, saying that everybody must be equal. But I do worry, that in the future there will not be enough money for working class white children. And they’re the ones that I think are suffering. Really poor, working class white children, in the centre of Keighley really suffer.
JH: And what about the poor Asian children? There’s plenty of them too, some of whom feel alienated from the whites, and, as Mohammed Iqbal told me, resentful.
MI: I think the resentment largely arises because of political and cultural issues, it’s more to do with the broad image of say, Islam, and what’s going on politically across the world. There, there are serious differences developing in young people.
JH: There are four big buildings dominating the centre of Keighley. Three supermarkets and a mosque. It’s Imam is Mohammed Ali.
MUHAMMED ALI: There is hostility, but equally then then you could argue that there some hostility with some Asian people against white people, and I think hostility is one of those things that’s existed since mankind existed, but that’s not, in any way shape or form, based on an Islamic teaching. There has been an increase, and I think the reason for that increase is ignorance. You know, they fear Islam but they don’t know Islam, they fear Muslims, but they don’t know Muslims. Like, for example you come to the mosque today, you’ve been inviting, somebody who’s not come to the mosque, they might think there’s a military camp going on in here, and the mosque is training up jihadis who are going to stop long themselves up. But you come in, and there’s nothing like that whatsoever, you see carpet, you see walls, you see chairs, in a short while, you’ll see the worshippers coming in. But not everybody gets to see that, because they’re not willing to take the step like you have to come into the mosque and see what’s actually going on here.
JH: Does it sadden you that . . . that when you come into a town like Keighley, or city like Bradford, you don’t see people of different races living together?
MI: Put it this way, what type of site would I like to see? I would like to see a society where you have non-Muslims and Muslims interacting with one another. But at the same time, you know, being allowed to adopt and keep their own identity, which is reflective of their beliefs, that would be a beautiful situation, where there’s no compromise, there is no assimilation taking place, but they can interact and share facilities and such things, but at the same time, hold strongly their identity, I think there’s a beauty in that.
JH: Behind the mosque is where the mill workers once lived – tightly packed back-to-back terraced houses, with close lines strung across the streets and washing still hanging on them, even though it start now. Only Asian people live here. I wanted to talk to some of the boys and young men hanging around, looking bored, but I made the mistake of telling them that it was for a BBC report on immigration. They didn’t like that, they refused even to let the switch on our recorder. Why talk to others about immigration, they demanded – we’re not immigrants, we’ve always lived here. Pervais Naka (phonetic) who owns a local taxi firm was more than happy to talk, he says it’s not the Asians to blame for segregation.
PERVAIS NAKA: No, it’s the Asians that are causing the divisions it’s the white people that are causing divisions . . .
JH: It’s called white flight.
PN: White flight. There is some areas, where there’s mostly whites, and mainly council estates where we are not welcomed. So it’s not that we Asians are creating the division or segregation. To me, it’s the white people that are creating it.
JH: Keighley is the perfect example of how for decades, generations, the debate about immigration in this country has centred on differences, alien cultures habits and religion, above all, the colour of the immigrant’s skin. But that’s changing. A succession of laws outlawing racial discrimination have worked to the magic. Racist movements that have tried to become great national parties have failed miserably. Our vocabulary has been transformed, we’re shocked when we hear the ‘n’ word. The essential difference between the migrants at the heart of this referendum debate and most of us British is that they are poorer. And nowhere is that more visible than here in the Derbyshire town of Shirebrook. The locals know what it’s like to be on the front line in the great immigration debate.
DAVID STRAW: I mean, now the town is flooded.
JH: David Straw is the local butcher, he’s lived in Shirebrook for 33 years with his wife Cat.
CAT STRAW: This time last year, the marketplace was terrible, wasn’t it? You couldn’t walk over, there was cans everywhere, they were drinking.
DS: People can’t get into the doctors, because there that many there. People’s . . . I don’t know really, it’s not because they’re Polish or Eastern European, it’s just because there’s too many people for the facilities, and that’s it. Even schools than that, they’re stretched.
JH: Some people would say, well, it’s racist not to want other, you know, foreigners to come in here.
DS: No, not at all, it not racist at all. I mean, if the place were bigger, yeah, I mean, my young lad if he wanted to get on the housing market, your parents have got to help them out, because it’s shooting the prices up.
JH: And I suppose you could say it’s making the place richer?
DS: (exhales) No, because a lot of the money, these Europeans are getting their own shops, so they’re keeping in to their own community.
TROY CUSSAIN: Can I have a weak coffee, three sugars make please.
JH: The man who is leading the fight to cut the number of immigrants is Troy Cussain. He acknowledges that things have improved quite a bit since last summer, where the immigrants were making a real nuisance of themselves, urinating and defecating in the streets, drinking a lot, fighting. And the police were too slow stopping them.
TC: The problem would be better if you didn’t have this like . . . small minority of trouble causes. I think there could be a lot of trouble. Just one really bad incident to the wrong person in Shirebrook, and there could be bad consequences.
JH: Violence?
TC: It could kick-off, yeah. We’ve had well over our quota in this area. This is not a racist quote . . . we don’t want anymore, because we have got thousands in this village. 95 or more percent of them absolutely lovely, families, all they’ve done is they’ve come over, taken money, money for their families, which I would do if there was no work over here. We’re at us limit, obviously you can’t send . . . them lots good, we’ll keep them, and we’ll manage with what we’ve got, but we don’t need any more.
JH: Shirebrook and Keighley, two towns at different stages in their immigration evolution. Two small towns – that’s important. Drive another couple of hours south from Shirebrook, and you’re in one of the world’s great cities, and Londoners where vast numbers end up. For every 10 foreigners who come to live in Britain, four end up here. Two of them are Juliana Scapine from Brazil, who works for the NHS, and Matchek Polaski (both phonetic) who came as a student 14 years ago from Poland and took up building to make some money. Now he’s going home.
MATCHEK POLASKI: I didn’t come here with my family to get a house or a council house or whatever, I came here to study and work, and I think the majority of people aren’t like that, I don’t know anyone who’s come here with that purpose, to live off benefits.
JULIANA SCAPINE: I understand that loads of people don’t like foreigners, and I think . . . I’ll, I’ll be always a foreigner, but I’ve never felt that people were not happy because I was here.
MP: As an immigrant, this EU debate shows that there is always an element of putting people on the other side of the border, whether the border is there or not. I think the EU referendum has managed to divide people.
JH: Made you feel more of a foreigner?
MP: I think it did.
JS: Yeah, it’s a little bit . . . difficult to hear that some people think that you are a burden, because people tend to generalise, so ‘all the immigrants are a burden’ – and I don’t think I am.
MP: I think in general, British attitudes towards immigration was . . . very . . . constructive and open-minded, but recently it’s sort of become a battleground for politicians and, it’s a bit of a shame that we as citizens and as immigrants as well not taking this debate back to create something that will help us to move on and do something constructive, instead of trying to fight one another.
JH: And fighting one another is exactly what they’ve been doing, with increasing venom, since the referendum campaign began. Strip away all the dubious statistics and broken promises and at the heart of the debate is whether this country should continue to grow at anything like the rate of the last few years. Should we try to close our doors or keep them open, or at least exercise more control over who should be allowed in. The Brexit camp says, if we leave, we’d have more control. But try getting them to put a figure on how many they’d allow in. The Tory minister, Priti Patel, is one of their leading voices
PRITI PATEL: I don’t have a figure, and actually I don’t think this is about having a figure and an immigration target, I think fundamentally the British public want to know that the government of the day is in control of their borders and their immigration policy and system. And importantly that we are not at the behest of the European Union when it comes to determining the numbers of people that come into Britain.
JH: The shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who wants us to remain in the EU won’t put a figure on it either, but that’s because he thinks it’s all about how well our economy is doing, and how attractive this country is to those who might want to come here.
JOHN MCDONNELL: I think there’s a natural limit, dependent on the . . . how the economy’s doing, and that’s been our history for a century and a half, where people have come here when the economy is thriving, and there is a need for labour and when there isn’t actually, our own population, and has then shifted, well, all over the world. So, I think it’s a natural limit that actually takes place, which is largely dependent on the prosperity of the economy.
JH: Few people would argue with that, immigrants want to go to countries that are richer than their own, for entirely obvious reasons – they want a better life. So, if the British economy’s doing well, and jobs are being created we can expect more people to come here. But that raises some important concerns. Even if the jobs are here, will they work for less and drive down wages? Where will they go? Which part of Britain? And what effect will their arrival have. Shirebrook and Keighley have proved that if you allow disproportionate numbers of immigrants to settle in one small town, the local people pay a price. But on a national scale it’s not so easy to find cold, hard statistics. Madeleine Sumption is the Director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.
MADELEINE SUMPTION: In order to answer very specific policy questions about the impact of a particular group on a very particular service, the data that would you need is not always there. If you look at public services, for example, in the NHS, there is necessarily data collected about the nationality of the person who goes to the NHS to use services at a particular point of time, and there are probably good reasons for that. I don’t want to give the impression that we know nothing about the impact of immigration, there is a lot of quite good evidence about the impact of immigration in a number of different fields, to the extent that it is possible to generalise – most of them have found that the impacts of immigration are actually surprisingly small. The other thing is that the policymakers have to make decisions all the time, in all sorts of fields, where they don’t really have sufficient evidence.
AMANDA PHILLIPS Bengali, Silletti, Catalan, Chinese, (fragments of words, unclear) English, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Somali . . .
JH: Amanda Philips in the playground of Old Ford Primary School in Tower Hamlets in East London, reeling off some of the 32 languages that children here speak. Ms Phillips was the headteacher when I first came here five years ago, and she is now the executive principal of four schools.
AP: We see groups of pupils who would be playing with their own community because that’s who their parents know for example, but we also see other groups of pupils who we have a whole range, just like we would see in the classroom, playing together in the park, or going shopping together, the older children on a Saturday afternoon.
SALEEMA GULBAHA: I grew up in East London in the 70s and 80s, I remember being spat at, I remember being called names, you know, there’s no point dwelling on that.
JH: Saleema Gulbaha has two children at the school, she was born in Bangladesh, she grew up here.
SG: I’m optimistic, because I think that as a country we have lots to offer. I think the fact that I grew up on a council estate and I’m . . . I, I got a masters and I got a good education, and I’d managed to travel and work elsewhere says something.
JH: And your parents, of course, would have been . . .
SG: Yeah, my parents are . . . you know, my father’s passed over, my mother is proud, she talks about us erm . . .
JH: And they were first-generation immigrants?
SG: Yeah, it doesn’t take long for children to feel British.
JH: Proof that immigration works? No. Proof that immigration can work? Which country wouldn’t want Mrs Gulbaha as a citizen? And here’s was interesting, I’ve spoken to well over 50 people while we’ve been putting together this report, and all have their own examples of the positive effect of immigration on their own lives, including people like Priti Patel, a government minister and one of the leaders of the campaign to leave.
PP: My parents came to Britain from East Africa through the exodus that took place, through the Idi Amin expulsions, and of course that was a huge generation of now British Indians who integrated in our communities, contributed to public life, the economy, as well, focused on educating their children, and actually became British.
JH: On the other side of the referendum debate, the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.
JM: My neighbour is Afro-Caribbean on one side, white South African on another, across from me there’s a Punjabi Sikh, next to that family, Pakistani Muslims. Across the road, is a traditional British white family, if you like, they’ve been there for a long period of time. And you know, we rub along very well, and we have a really good sense of community. And I think that’s how our society is evolving.
JH: There’s one potent word that defines the difference between the two sides in the debate – control. How to control the numbers coming in and what happens if we stay in a union that insists on the free movement of people? The pressure group, Migration Watch, which has declared allegiance to neither side has produced its own forecasts of how our population might increase in the years to come. It was founded by the former diplomat Andrew Green, now Lord Green.
LORD GREEN: Even If we remain at the present rate of net migration, including non-EU, which is about 320,000 a year, we will, the UK, have a population of 80 million, in 2040. That’s well within the lifetime of anybody under 50. That would make is probably the most populous country in Europe, because Germany has been going down, the most crowded country in Europe apart from an island like Malta. And it would change the whole social and physical environment of our country.
JH: But the history of our country, of every country is change. When the Windrush sailed into Tilbury in 1948, the population was about 50 million. Today its 65 million, and immigration has played a large part in that growth. In Keighley, we brought together a group of people, most of whom were born before those immigrants arrived from the Caribbean, and we talked about what immigration has meant to them and their lives.
VOX POP FEMALE: Well, there’s been a lot of prejudice in the past between people coming into this country and . . . and I think that takes some getting over, and we are beginning to get past that now and people are beginning to . . .
VOX POP MALE: Mix.
VPF: Yeah.
VOX POP FEMALE 2: If you were going to buy a house, would you go buy it in the middle of a . . . . black community? You’d go and move where your own people . . . and I think they are in groups because they stay with their own. And they are beginning to mix, but there’s still a lot of people don’t like ‘em, and I think it’s because they’re afraid of them.
VOX POP FEMALE 3: (laughter in voice) And I remember when I moved into Keighley, it was a great big joke to us, ‘spot the black woman’ you know, because there wasn’t many others around.
JH: And how do people react to you being married to a white man?
VPF3: At first, we do get some looks, but er . . . now it’s just a natural thing.
VPF: Years ago I fostered children and I always took Asian children, I got eggs thrown at my windows, I got notices stuck on my door, ‘go live with them’ – all that’s gone. That doesn’t happen anymore.
JH: It’s all gone.
VPF: It’s gone. I often wonder what they feel now, that were like that with me at that time.
VPF2: A great deal of the English community believe now that we become overrun by different creeds, people . . .
JH: Because, putting it bluntly there are too many of them.
VPF2: Yes that’s my point.
VOX POP MALE: We’re all but unearthed to be right with one another wasn’t we? So we have to look after one another. I mean, it’s a different world today than what we remember. I mean, I’ve met thousands of lovely people.
JH: And you have met a lot as you say, because you’re 101 years old
VPM: Yes, and I think it’s right, we want to learn to live with one another.
JH: What I’ve tried to do in this report is answer two questions: what effect has immigration had on this country, and if we’re afraid of it, why? The first is relatively easy. Immigration has had a profound effect on us, on our attitudes to people whom most would once have dismissed as foreigners. We’ve become to an extent, unimaginable after the war, multicultural country. And we mostly rub along pretty well. If we’re afraid of where growing numbers of immigrants may take is, that fee is based on something different. It’s about how it will affect our economic and physical well-being, getting our children into a decent school, waiting to long in the GP surgery, competing for jobs and houses. It’s partly about where we live, a couple of thousand immigrants arriving in London is barely noticeable, in a small town in Yorkshire and Derbyshire it can be overwhelming. I’ve been reporting for the BBC for nearly 50 years, we’ve never had a debate quite like this. Whatever happens in the referendum, the issues that have been raised will resonate in this country perhaps for generations to come.
