As your namesake, Mr Howarth, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I am grateful to my hon. Friends for curtailing their speeches to enable me to make a contribution.
I start by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner), not only for securing this important debate, but for the significant points that he made. As he said, this is the most important issue facing our constituents. My constituents in Aldershot are constantly raising the issue of immigration with me. They feel that nobody is speaking up for them and that they are on their own. Indeed, they preface all their remarks by saying, “I am not a racist, but—”. They then go on to express opinions that are denounced by our opponents as racist, so they have felt intimidated from expressing their perfectly legitimate and perfectly honourable concerns about how they see their country has been transformed.
Yes, my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) rejoices in being an immigrant; I rejoice in tracing my roots to nowhere else but into the soil of this kingdom. What my hon. Friend needs to understand about the wave of migration, which has so upset the people of this country, is that between 1066 and 1950, we had about a quarter of a million migrants to this country. We have now seen a massive change, with something like 8 million people coming into this country. The numbers are what is upsetting people. It is not necessarily the colour of people’s skin, although, of course, that brings different cultural challenges. It is the numbers—that is what Enoch Powell was trying to draw attention to in 1968, for which, of course, he got roundly traduced.
Of course, it is now okay to talk about immigration. It is extraordinary—apparently, the Leader of the Opposition has declared that it is all right to talk about immigration. As my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight said, we have had successive former Labour Ministers, including the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), apologising for the mistakes that were made. Of course, it was Andrew Neather, a speechwriter for the Labour party, who let the cat out of the bag when he said that it had been a deliberate act of policy to encourage mass migration—the 2.2 million that my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight mentioned. It was a positive decision, as Andrew Neather said, in order to
“rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.