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Government failing to reach immigration cut target, admits Home Secretary Theresa May

David Cameron pledged that a cut in immigration numbers by the next election

Sunday 23 November 2014 13:20 GMT

Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May (Getty)

Theresa May today acknowledged the Government is heading for failure over David Cameron’s promise to achieve deep cuts in overall immigration levels.

Before the last election, Mr Cameron pledged that he would have overseen a reduction in the net annual migration rate from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands by the next time the country voted.

The latest statistics showed net migration jumped to 243,000 in the year to March, a rise of 68,000, and fresh statistics this week are likely to reveal a similar figure.

10 things immigration has done for Britain

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1/1010 things immigration has done for Britain

10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Mini

The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marks and Spencer

Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Thunderbirds

And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The House of Windsor

Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

I Vow To Thee My Country

Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Curry and Cobra

Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park

Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Sun

Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marxism

OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The NHS

They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for.

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Mr Cameron and Ms May have refused to abandon the target, but the Home Secretary today prepared the ground for an admission of failure, which she blamed on the government’s powerless to reduce high levels of migration from within the European Union.

She told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “It is of course unlikely that we are going to reach the tens of thousands by the end of the parliament. Why is that? It is because we have seen increasing numbers of people coming from across Europe, partly because our economy is doing better than other economies across Europe. We have been doing what we can in relation to EU migration but there is more to be done.”

Her comments came ahead of a major speech by the Prime Minister setting out his plans to curb levels of migration from within the EU, as well as further restrict EU nationals’ right to receive benefits.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, said: “Theresa May has finally admitted her net migration target is in tatters yet she still won't take responsibility for it.

“The Prime Minister promised ‘no ifs no buts’ to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands, and Theresa May has spent four years claiming she was on track.

“Net migration is now more than twice her target and rising - and she has finally been forced to admit her target is ‘unlikely’. Continually making and breaking grand promises on immigration is only undermining confidence in the entire system.”

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