Queen’s Speech

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, it was suggested earlier that Cross-Benchers are a bunch of left-wing intellectuals. I do not think I have ever been accused of being left-wing and certainly not an intellectual. That may explain why I intend to strike a very different note.

I intend to tackle a subject that many of your Lordships love to hate. You have guessed it: immigration and, in particular, its impact on and consequences for the future of our society. I will do that in about four and a half minutes, I think.

This Government promised at the last election to take back control of immigration and to reduce it. Regrettably, they have failed to do so. The truth is that, quite apart from the chaos in the channel, which I shall leave aside, immigration in its normal sense is running out of control. Last year more than 800,000 long-term entry clearances were issued, the highest total since 2005. How many migrants left in that year? We do not know. Why not? It is partly because Covid disrupted travel patterns, as we all know, but also because the official statisticians chose to abandon key parts of the International Passenger Survey, even though they had nothing reliable to replace it with. What we see is a rapid increase in the inflow and no reliable information on the outflow in the past year or two.

Looking back over the past 10 years, we know that the Conservative Government who promised in 2010 to reduce net migration to fewer than 100,000 a year allowed it to rise to an average of 230,000 over that period. Looking back over the past 20 years, three metrics illustrate the impact of immigration on such a scale. They are not very often referred to but they are not in doubt and they are not challenged. First, the UK population has grown by nearly 8 million and 80% or more of that increase was due to immigrants and their subsequent children. Secondly, the share of births to one or more foreign parent has almost doubled in England and Wales to about 35%. Thirdly, the ethnic minority population of Great Britain—I include in that migrants from the EU—has almost doubled to 21%. We now find that in London immigrants by that definition are 56% of the population—a majority. Birmingham at 48% and Manchester at 43% are not far behind.

What of the future? The share of ethnic minority children in state-funded schools is now about one-third. Twenty years from now, on reasonable assumptions, they could well become the majority in our schools. Meanwhile, on a wider scale, three well-known academic projections have put the white British population 40 years from now at between 55% and 65%. That means, whether you like it or not, that our grandchildren would, in their lifetimes, have become a minority in what I would call their own country. Just think about that for a minute. Is it really what we want to see for the future of our country? Some will say yes, but an awful lot of people, especially the less rich and the less comfortable, would not welcome it at all.

We are already seeing the impact of these very rapid changes on our political system. I will not say much about that as it is really not my business, but all parties are increasingly concerned to attract the immigrant vote. As a result, the Immigration Rules, already under pressure from industry, have been steadily weakened. We are getting close to the point where there is no effective control. Meanwhile, although the salience of the matter varies with time and with what else is going on, in 2021 a YouGov poll found that 55% of the public said that reducing immigration should be a high or medium priority for the UK. As I have pointed out before in this House, that amounts to about 30 million adults. The Lib Dems do not like that, but it is the case.

It is no use blaming the white British. The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, in her recent comprehensive study of immigration into the UK, put it rather well. She said this:

“It isn’t racist … to say that the pace of change from immigration in recent years has been too much for some communities … People are understandably uncomfortable when the character and make up of a town change out of all recognition in five or 10 years.”


That was her view, and I happen to share it.

To conclude, this massive, continuing inflow could well lead to serious social tensions in Britain, as we are already seeing in France. Even in Sweden there have been serious riots. Indeed, its Prime Minister said recently that integration is failing and that certain communities in Sweden live “in completely different realities”. Noble Lords may think that some places in the UK are similar. I hope that in the coming Session this House will turn its attention to the crucial impact of current levels of immigration on the whole future of our society. It is not too late to act, and policies are available. What is needed is the political will to address an issue that so many have preferred to avoid.