It's OK that Ukip has got all three main party leaders talking about migrants, as long as we can do it like adults
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David Cameron is the latest party leader to make a show of his toughness on immigration. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Is it wrong for all the main political party leaders to start sounding tougher on immigration because Ukip is doing quite well in the polls in its current role as the protest party? Of course not. What are protest parties for if not to shake up the major parties when voters suspect they're not listening hard enough to their concerns?
The real surprise is that it has taken so long for Ukip to reach the 16% national rating recently registered in the wake of the Eastleigh byelection – four points ahead of the Lib Dems and 12 behind the Tories – considering how bothered many voters have been about the scale of immigration since the Thatcherite policy of extending the EU into south and east Europe reached fruition when Poland and co joined in 2004.
Monday is David Cameron's turn, as tireless Andy Sparrow is liveblogging here. Nick Clegg took a crack at the problem last week – he withdrew the 2010 Lib Dem idea of an amnesty as sending the wrong signals – and Ed Miliband admitted "the last Labour government made some mistakes" on immigration in his major speech in December.
It's easy for the bishop of Dudley in the West Midlands to complain, as "top bishop" David Walker did in Sunday's Observer, that politicians are exaggerating "the negative impact of immigration". Dudley has seen its share of far-right activity, but the bishop doesn't have to stand for re-election or direct a range of national policies, ranging from benefit levels to the skills in short supply for economic recovery. He's a Cambridge mathematician, so he must be clever, but that doesn't make him an economist.
Plenty of economists, including the ex-chief economist Vince Cable, are calling for a more relaxed visa regime for skilled immigrants. So is Boris Johnson, who urged a laxer regime for Chinese tourists who will otherwise go to Belgium in that car-crash interview which Patrick Wintour wrote up so vividly. Universities complain that the cull of bogus students (so many just disappear, according to the Sunday papers) is putting off the real, cash-paying students they need to balance the books.
They're all part-right of course. But so is Theresa May when she tries to cut the net inflow from six-digit levels to five-digit ones. So are Cameron, Clegg and Miliband when they seek both to respond to the challenge of Ukip's Nigel Farage – the BBC's Eddie Mair should be allowed a crack at Nigel, Boris is gravitas itself by comparison – and to reassure voters in ways that Bishop Walker wants to see.
Here's the full text of Miliband's December speech, which cites Olympic diversity as proof of the positive story Britain has to tell about assimilation and diversity, far better than some of our neighbours in my experience, but also admitting that New Labour let in more workers faster "than some of our communities could adapt".
That's putting it mildly in some parts of our cities, smaller towns in East Anglia and elsewhere too. And remember, before you're tempted – as some always are – to shout "racist", that many of those most troubling to host communities in 2013 are white Europeans, just as others are stinking rich and equally white. The strange death of Boris Berozovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch, is using police time as much as Islamist extremists or Latvian burglars.
So poor migrants put pressure on housing, schools and healthcare in poorer areas while their rich counterparts do the same in wealthy suburbs, especially in London, on posh schools and gyms, the opera house and expensive neighbourhoods – no longer Mayfair and Belgravia, but swaths of Camden and Kensington where the locals can no longer afford houses that the newcomers often don't even live in: they just park their money in what Simon Jenkins calls "brick laundromats" (ie they're washing dirty money, Cyprus-style, here too).
I know because displaced better-off Londoners, their worldly goods piled high on their BMWs and Mercs like refugees, stream westwards into my suburb, just as Cockneys stream east into Essex. I tell you, the old neighbourhood isn't what it was. All those 4x4s and braying accents.
Miliband is the son of Jewish refugees from Hitler, so he gets it. Clegg – here's his text – is so mixed-race (Dutch, German, Russian, Brit) that he makes Boris (Turk, German, English, Martian) look like a local. Even the home counties Camerons must once have migrated from Scotland in search of a better life.
But they all have to remember what the sociologists sometimes call "white heritage elderly" Brits – younger ones too – who are untravelled, perhaps less educated and instinctively wary of this multicultural stuff, not least because they suffer the downside. David Goodhart, founder of the upscale Prospect magazine and (on his own admission) a reformed "public school leftie and ex-Marxist" captures the distress in his new book, The British Dream, now being serialised in (I wonder why? Ho, ho) the Daily Mail.
It's not a crime to prefer the familiar to the different, as long as you don't start abusing, let alone firebombing, the newcomers or – Enoch Powell's grave "rivers of blood" offence in 1968 – promulgating scare stories. But governments of all colours – they've all got some aspects of policy wrong down the postwar decades – have obligations to the heritage crowd too. They're what the 2011 census misleadingly described as "white British" before announcing they are now a minority in the capital. Like many others – Canadian, French – my Kiwi wife looks and sounds white British, but, technically speaking, isn't.
Apart from closing loopholes Miliband's proposals included making newcomers learn English. Clegg wants to fine employers who hire people without the proper work permit. A senior Labour MP I spoke to during the Eastleigh ballot said that making benefits dependant on contributions would allow Britain to curb unwarranted demands on the hard-pressed state in the same way that other EU states manage. No wonder they cross France to get to Calais and Dover.
If Tim Montgomerie's pre-speech summary on ConservativeHome is correct – it often is – then Cameron is going further with a triple whammy against automatic access to benefits and to social housing, as well as Cleggish-fines for employers who avert their gaze: not easily done because both employer and worker stand to benefit from collusion.
Is this sort of bidding war decent? Provided the participants accord with respectable ground rules, I don't see why we should not have a proper conversation. Lynton Crosby, the Australian campaign strategist behind Michael Howard's subliminal dog-whistle campaign in 2005 – "are you thinking what we're thinking?" – is credited with getting some discipline and focus back into Cameron's No 10 operation. Not before time, I'd say. But the 2005 stuff was crude and Howard simply reinforced his own "something of the night" (copyright Ann Widdecombe) reputation by doing it.
Cameron is more wholesome and the problem is more acute because EU transitional controls on Romanians and Bulgarians heading west will be lifted on 1 December. Labour Britain, which let in the Poles and co without restriction, grossly under-estimated the numbers who came and did not repeat the mistake this time. But Romanians and Bulgarians will have more places to choose from and stronger ties with other countries.
Who knows what will happen? There's often a fine line between the alarmism of the Daily Mail (I daren't read the Express) over atypical migrants who want to keep their Belgravia house (I'm not making up that one) or of Migration Watch and the complacency about numbers and absorbability which ministers sometimes display. The backstory is all part of modern mass migration in a globalised world – planes playing the role played by Victorian sailing ships – hot money as well as people.
The HMRC chief Lin Homer's struggle to keep her new job after "catastrophic failure" as head of the UK Borders Agency is part of it. So is the problem now so apparent in the over-extended Cypriot banking system which Nicosia went along with and Brussels failed to check. Did we do much better? Should Homer be blamed for failures which are more deep-seated?
Whichever view you take, multicultural and tolerant or disapproving and fearful, the awkward fact is that we have not been breeding fast enough (or young enough) to keep society functioning without outside help, let alone educating ourselves to the levels a post-industrial economy is going to need.
So next time you hear someone mouthing off about bloody immigrants, ask how many kids they have, how old they were when they had them and whether or not they expect those children to look after them when they get seriously old. These are not comfortable questions for most of us.
But let us finish on a positive note. Most immigrants contribute to society, most want to become good British citizens and most strike me as more like us with every rainy day that passes. What's more, in some ways – mostly good ones – we are a bit more like them too. It will be all right as long as we talk about it openly and like adults. A conversation, not a bidding war.
