Ben Lowry: We have not turned a corner on immigration into the UK - it is still a crisis

​They say that the election of Donald Trump in the US and the rise of anti immigration parties in Europe means that at last nations will begin to control their borders.

I don’t agree. I think this is a worsening crisis and that efforts to tackle the massive population influx into countries such as the UK are too little, and far too late.

Labour has for a more than a year been talking tough on the topic but much of that party has no stomach for the complicated reforms that will be necessary to slash the massive numbers of people that are coming into the UK. And even if they did, even if they stopped completely all arrivals tomorrow then the massive increase that there has already been in the population in the UK would be so great that immense and irreversible cultural change would have been inflicted on the country, and massive and perhaps calamitous pressure put on our infrastructure.

One reason why people are reluctant to criticise immigration is fear of being called racist, so I want to start by saying that in my teens, when apartheid in South Africa was crumbling in the 1980s, I thought racism not merely an obvious evil but believed that eradicating it a key goal for the western world. I assumed that Muslims in Britain suffered racism and discrimination. I thought immigration and subsequent multi culturalism could only be a good thing, that would bring diversity to the overwhelmingly white Europe and north America.

A lot has changed since the 1980s – meanwhile, I have grown up.

A key turning point in my own thinking was the Salman Rushdie affair. I had just turned 17 when the Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwa on the brilliant Indian-born writer and Muslims in Bradford began burning his book – a shameful saga, the implications of which have still not been absorbed by much of the western world. More on that below.

I also remember well a controversy over a speech in the early 1990s by the then Conservative MP called Winston Churchill (grandson of the war leader). The main part of his speech that I remember related to numbers. He said, in criticism of his own Tory government: “With this government continuing to bring in immigrants each year at a scale, in Mrs Thatcher's immortal phrase of 15 years ago, 'equivalent to a town the size of Grantham', a halt must be called ... if the British way of life is to be preserved.”

What struck me then was that ‘a town the size of Grantham’ meant roughly the same as a town the size of Bangor, Co Down, where I grew up: around 50,000 people. That is a small sounding number of immigrants, but it only took a bit of reflection to realise that 50,000 people a year is 500,000 people over a decade, and a million people over 20 years. Even then, in my early 20s, I was coming to realise that a decade is not a particularly long time.

As it happens one subject I enjoyed at school was geography, in particular things like population, so I knew that the UK was one of the most densely populated countries major countries in the world. If you strip out the rest of the UK, England is near the top of the most crowded list.

Even when 50,000 people a year were coming in it was huge number if sustained over a long period. Well, that was nothing compared to now. In recent years net immigration – the numbers of people arriving in the UK after the number of leavers is subtracted – has been in the 750,000 to 900,000 a year range. Over the decade the net number of immigrants has been four million.

Even setting aside recent research that suggests that most of these immigrants will in fact cost more to the country in benefits and services than they earn, the absolute number is staggering. It is quite obviously a disastrous strain on health, housing and schooling. We were not even close to building enough housing for the existing population, let alone now

Immigration is at the heart of the grossly excessive British house prices that are stopping an entire generation from owning its own home. And this is before you get to the cultural tensions.

I did not remember what Mr Churchill had said on culture, only his point on numbers. But revisiting his speech I now see that he said that “the population of many of our northern cities is now well over 50% immigrant and Muslims claim there are now two million of their co-religionists in Britain”.

So back to the post Salman Rushdie period. In 1997, I began working on the breaking news section of The Times newspaper during which I did an early shift, 630am start, so a lot of the news came from the east (everyone else was still asleep). One of the big stories was the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. I remember reading, then editing and putting online, stories from the wires about people being stoned to death for adultery or having a wall bulldozed over them for homosexuality. I remember well Osama bin Laden’s barbaric bombings of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, because that too dominated our breaking news. Suffice to say radical Islam was on my radar years before the 9/11 extremist Muslim attacks on the US.

In recent years I have written about scandals such as the way in which the late Pastor James McConnell was prosecuted for an anti Islamic sermon after a complaint from an immigrant who defended those mass murdering barbarians, Isis. It would almost be comical, if it wasn’t so serious. You might have thought there would have been uproar over that trial, but there wasn’t. (Click here to read Ben Lowry in 2016: ‘It was indeed shameful to see Pastor McConnell floundering in the dock’)

I know well that immigrants are at heart of vital sectors of out society including health. Outstanding workers, who often take jobs that others will not. But while some immigration has been unavoidable, the problem is the scale and pace of it.

I say: we need to adjust the work and benefits system so that enough of the existing population do take the jobs that can only be filled by immigrants. We had far too many people on disability benefits before lockdown, let alone now.

But try writing about that trimming benefit entitlement without getting abuse. You can't. I know because I did and was attacked as much for that as I have been for the questioning immigration.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor