Like the good PR man he is, David Cameron has made great efforts to convince the country that his party reflects and celebrates modern, multicultural Britain. While in opposition there was the carefully stage-managed promotion of non-white Tory candidates; during the pre-election leaders' debates he spoke of his conversation with "a 40-year-old black man" to add credibility to his views on immigration – and just last week he criticised Oxford University for failing to admit enough black students.
But on Thursday Cameron showed that he is happy to invoke the rhetoric of Enoch Powell when it suits him, railing against the threat to society posed by the "largest influx" of immigrants in British history. In his speech, delivered to Conservative party members in Hampshire, Cameron declares he wants to "cut through the extremes" of the debate on immigration. He makes a ritualistic sop to the benefits of immigration (tasty food, nice clothes, good music), but the focus of his argument is that immigrants don't make enough effort to integrate and to learn English; something that has "created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness" in neighbourhoods across the country.
This is an utterly hypocritical position to take when the government is about to make harsh cuts to teaching of English for speakers of other languages. In 2007, Labour restricted free English lessons to people on benefits; now, these will only be available to those on "active benefits" such as jobseeker's allowance. Low-paid workers on income support, asylum seekers and spouses – the very people Cameron devotes his attention to in his speech – will no longer be eligible. The hypocrisy is compounded when one considers Britain's appalling track record where learning other languages is concerned. Of the 900,000 Britons who live in Spain, how many speak reasonable Spanish? Do all of the 500,000 British people living in France speak French?
A shared language is vital to good social relations, but lacking one is a threat to the migrants themselves, not surrounding society.
It has become a convenient dog-whistle for the right and Cameron's speech fits into a pattern already established by the coalition, whereby tough pronouncements on immigration mask policies that in fact harm the poorest and most vulnerable. Last year the Home Office rushed forward a piece of legislation that denies entry to spouses from outside the EU who don't speak English. As the Home Office admitted at the time, this falls disproportionately on people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where learning English is largely restricted to urban elites. The right to marry and establish a family is protected by the European convention on human rights, but the government has effectively told Britons: you can marry who you like, as long as they're not poor and uneducated.
Or perhaps that should be poor, uneducated and non-white. Cameron's argument is that it's the scale of recent immigration, not immigration itself, that is to be deplored. But while the vast majority of recent immigration has come from within the EU (in 2008, 99,000 out of 166,000 migrant workers came from European countries), the examples of abuses of British hospitality Cameron draws on largely involve non-Europeans: people who engage in forced marriages; students who are being invited to "get a free ride" to the UK by an Indian visa company; the chef who applies for a job in a fried-chicken restaurant.
Not only does this raise false expectations among voters who are concerned about immigration (if the majority come from within the EU then the promised cap on non-EU migrants will do little to reduce numbers), but it also completely misunderstands the way previous generations of immigrants have contributed to British culture. Many thousands arrived with poor levels of education, little money and often little English, but it was through hard work – and an often bitter struggle against a hostile native culture – that they and their children made themselves part of British society. Cameron's stated wish is to return to the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, where immigration was not so contentious a political topic. If that really existed (and it's doubtful) then it's because of the place that first and second-generation immigrants slowly and painfully carved out for themselves, in the face of much opposition from the Conservative party.
The prime minister may not himself be a racist, but his language certainly panders to racism. The British National party's deputy leader accused Cameron of stealing its best policies – and while it's not wise to give too much weight to the BNP's propaganda, this view was even echoed by Cameron's coalition colleague Vince Cable, who said the speech risked "inflaming extremism".
That Cameron's intervention comes shortly before local elections, when the government is facing widespread opposition to its spending cuts, makes it all the more despicable.
