The activities of Roche and a few others in the 1997 Labour government backs up the idea that theirs was a deliberate policy of societal transformation: a culture war being waged against the British people using immigrants as some kind of battering ram. Another theory, not running entirely counter to this view, is that the whole thing was a bureaucratic cock-up that had already run out of control under successive governments, and only did so spectacularly under New Labour. The disparity between the figures of new arrivals into the country that the Labour government claimed to expect as compared to those who actually came is evidence for this case. For instance, when it allowed free entry to the United Kingdom for the new EU accession countries in 2004, the British government announced that it expected around 13,000 people a year to take advantage of the scheme. A study commissioned by the government claimed that it would be able to ‘totally control’ the flood once restrictions had been lifted. It did no such thing. Rules around work permits, among others, were reformed so that skilled and unskilled immigrants could enter the country and stay under the guise of being ‘foreign workers’. Most would stay. Entirely predictably the numbers soon ran away even from the estimates of the greatest advocates of mass migration. The numbers of non-EU nationals were expected only to double between 100,000 a year in 1997 and 170,000 in 2004. In fact over five years the government’s predictions for the number of new arrivals would be off by almost a million people.¹⁶ Among other things the government’s experts wholly failed to anticipate that the UK might be an especially attractive destination for people from countries with significantly lower average income levels or without a minimum wage. In the event, because of these policies the number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain rose from 170,000 in 2004 to 1.24 million in 2013.¹⁷

Such massive underestimations of the scale of migration were of course predictable to anybody with any knowledge of the history of post-war immigration – a history that had been replete with vast underestimates of the numbers expected to come. But it did also partly demonstrate that detailed attention to immigration control was simply not a priority in those early Labour years. Most importantly, the impression that all immigration restriction was ‘racist’ (even restriction of ‘white’ Eastern Europeans) made any internal and external opposition hard to voice. Whether the policy of a surge in migration was unnoticed or officially approved, it was certainly not opposed within the British government.

Whatever the cause, or motive, what is rarely remarked upon is that the public response to the massive upsurge in immigration and to the swift transformation of parts of Britain was exceptionally tolerant. There were no significant or sustained outbreaks of racist sentiment or violence over the following decade, and the country’s only racist political party – the British National Party – was subsequently destroyed at the polls. Opinion surveys and the simple evidence of living in the country showed that most people continued to feel zero personal animosity towards immigrants or people of a different ethnic background. But poll after poll did show that a majority were deeply worried about what all this meant for the country and its future. In spite of this, even the mildest attempts by the political class to raise these issues (such as a 2005 Conservative election campaign poster suggesting ‘limits’ on immigration) were condemned by the rest of the political class, with the result that there was still no serious public discussion.