Of Immigration and India

We need both a cap and a points system.

We need to restore to citizens of countries retaining the monarchy or other constitutional ties (such as the right of appeal to the Privy Council) at least the same rights of entry and abode here as are enjoyed by EU citizens.

We need to go to the ideological root of the problem. There cannot be a “free” market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography. There cannot be unrestricted global movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour. Requiring a union card is no different from requiring a British passport or a work permit. We cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

And we need to be realistic about India. Yes, there is a very special relationship. Yes, India is a coming superpower. Yes, India is a bastion of democracy, or at least tries very hard to be. But India is also, on the one hand, the land of the BJP, the RSS and others even worse whom we insist on indulging with our "Mumbai" and our "Chennai". And India is also, on the other hand, the land of the Stalinists of the Communist Party of India, of the Maoists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and one of whom nearly became Prime Minister as recently as 1996, of the All India Forward Bloc founded by Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian National Army that fought for Hirohito, and of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India's half-digestion of Trotskyism by Bengal's pre-existing Anushilan movement of not just Hindu, but explicitly Brahmin, nationalists. Again, among others even worse. The Naxalites may be among the numerous disprovers of Marxism by reference to the fact that it never arises anywhere where it is supposed to in its terms. But that does not make them any better. And like the Shiv Sena and such like, they have fellow-travellers and full-blown allies at the very heart of India's political life.

Just as we cannot tolerate face-covering (not head-covering, but face-covering), or polygamy, or genital mutilation, or Sharia law, or Muslim schools, or non-Christian festivals as public holidays, or mosques with domes and minarets, so we cannot tolerate, most obviously, caste discrimination in general and untouchability in particular. Nor is Britain any place for Stalinism, Maoism, the ideas of Subhas Chandra Bose, or the marriage of Trotskyism and Brahmin nationalism. The country where these are all significant forces may be one dear both to our hearts and to our wallets, and may be a key ally in some specific causes. But it is not somewhere about which we should be anything less than rigorously realistic.