Perhaps successive governments of all stripes had spent decades putting off any real discussion of this issue because they suspected not only that the public disagreed with them but that it was a matter on which control had slipped away. The Conservative Party that formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in 2010 had promised to cut immigration from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands, a promise they repeated in office. But they never got anywhere near that target. Neither did the successor Conservative majority government, despite mooring itself to the same promise. Indeed, after five years of a coalition government and the start of a Conservative government, both of which were committed to reducing immigration, not only had immigration not gone down, it had actually risen to another record net immigration high of 330,000 a year.¹⁸

2

How we got hooked on immigration

With slight variations, during these decades almost exactly the same story had occurred everywhere across Western Europe. After the Second World War each country had allowed and then encouraged workers to come into their countries. During the 1950s and 1960s West Germany, Sweden, Holland and Belgium, among other countries, all instituted a ‘guest-workers’ scheme to fill gaps in their labour supply. Across the continent this ‘gastarbeiter’ scheme, as it was known in Germany, drew from similar countries. In Germany the influx of workers came largely from Turkey, seeing a huge swell in numbers after the German-Turkish labour agreement of 1961. In Holland and Belgium they came from Turkey, but also from North Africa and other countries that were once their colonies. While part of this influx of workers would serve to address labour shortages, especially in the low-skilled areas of the industrial sector, part of it was also a result of decolonisation. In the nineteenth century, France had gone into North Africa and colonised portions of it, while Britain had colonised the Indian subcontinent. After the process of decolonisation, to varying degrees these former citizens, actually French citizens in the case of Algerians, were felt to be owed something, or at least to be given priority in the guest-workers’ schemes. The ‘Empire strikes back’ concept suggests that it was inevitable and perhaps even just that in the twentieth century people from these former colonies should return the favour, albeit coming as citizens rather than conquerors.

In each European country’s case the authorities laboured under precisely the same misapprehensions as the British authorities, not least in believing that the first guest-workers might prove a temporary phenomenon, returning to their home countries once their work was done. Across the continent it seemed to come as a surprise to governments that most of these workers would put down roots in the country they had entered – that they would seek to bring in their families, that their families would need assistance, and that their children would need to go to school. Once such roots had been put down there was ever less likelihood that they would be torn up again. And even if the lure of home remained great, the standard of living these workers were able to enjoy in the West meant far more people stayed than returned to their country of origin. Although Europe had opened up its borders at a time of need, the continent seemed to have no idea how attractive it was to much of the world, even in its diminished state.