13 November 2014, The Tablet

Migration: truths and untruths

by Denis MacShane

 
The result of next Thursday’s Rochester by-election and the possibility of a second Ukip victory will show the impact of the party’s campaign focus on the issue of immigration. But hostility to ‘newcomers’ is nothing new in politics, and is perpetuated by a series of lies and statistics I  found myself on the high table at All Souls College, Oxford, beside a young man who, if many modern politicians are to be believed, should not have been there. He was a Pole, or more accurately a Brit-Pole who spoke not a word of Polish. He had won a Prize Fellowship to All Souls, but somewhere in his family past there had been an immigration to Britain.To listen to Conservative and Labour Ministers and their shadows trying desperately to respond to the rise of anti-immigra
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