Balanced

Good old George Carey. I always knew that, if they kept him on long enough, then he would say something sensible eventually.

It was Ann Cryer, a member both of the Campaign Group and of Balanced Migration, who told Radio Four in September that her view was that of “an old-fashioned Christian Socialist”: we cannot provide the welfare and the public services that our people have rightly come to expect if we do not even know how many people there are in this country; and we should be using overseas aid to develop such provisions in other countries, not bringing those countries' people over here to put intolerable strain on ours. So there are still a few good politicians knocking about after all.

Her fellow Eurosceptic Labour MPs Frank Field, Roger Godsiff and Ian Davidson are also Balanced Migration members, Field and Godsiff at least from Labour’s Right rather than Left, but nevertheless definitely from the Labour Right, not from any sort of New Labour. The same is true of Peter Kilfoyle, of the old trade union stalwart Lord (Tony) Jordan, and of Betty Boothroyd, Cross Bencher though by convention she must now be. The Muslim Labour peer Lord Ahmed is a member, as is the London-based Kurdish journalist Hazhir Teimourian. Lord Skidelsky was both a founding member and a finishing member of the SDP. Peter Bottomley is a Tory Reform Group grandee. The main glaring absence is of Lib Dems. Don’t they believe in the welfare and the public services that our people have rightly come to expect, or in using overseas aid to develop such provisions in other countries?

Further to Carey’s preference for Christian immigration, we should specifically give priority to those whom we left to the mercy of (Israel-loving, Iran-hating) Hindu nationalists in Orissa, Nagaland and other parts of India; to the Palestinian Christians; to those who have not been persecuted out of existence in our dear NATO and putative EU brother, Turkey; and to those who have not been persecuted out of existence in “liberated” Iraq. At least some of these should appeal, not only to certain Balanced Migration members already listed, but also to Nicholas Soames, Colin Burgon, Michael Ancram (even if he did originally sign up to the Henry Jackson Society), Robert Key and others.