RACE and immigration lurked at this year's party conferences like uninvited guests. Nobody quite mentioned them by name, although delegates clearly knew they were there. Theresa May, the Conservative Party chairman, briefly raised the spectre of Enoch Powell—the party's late 1960s anti-immigrant firebrand—but only to gloat over the appointment of an Asian candidate in his old constituency. Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, nodded at the vexed asylum issue, calling for quotas and offshore processing of applicants. But that was as far as it went. There was no talk of immigrants swamping the country, no vision of fortress Britain.
This is odd, given the seeming strength of public opinion on the matter. The number of people citing race and immigration as important issues facing the nation has risen rapidly in the past few years (see chart). Polls show levels of concern higher than in the 1970s. Two recent polls by YouGov and MORI found that more than 80% of all people (and 59% of black and Asian Britons) saw immigration as out of control.
So far, though, the chief beneficiaries of the hardening mood have been the “brutes in suits”—chiefly the far-right British National Party (BNP), which stands for the repatriation of all non-whites. It and similar parties have amassed 18 seats on local councils, and will probably add to their tally next week, when elections are held in Bradford, Burnley and Calderdale.
If that success shows that there is anti-immigrant fruit for the picking, why aren't the main political parties reaching for it? Both Labour and the Tories have wobbled on this issue in past decades.
One reason is that in some of the most ethnically mixed parts of the country, assimilation has done a lot to dissolve prejudice. London, which has both ethnic minorities and refugees in abundance, used to be a place where the far-right enjoyed a toe-hold. Now the capital consistently displays the lowest levels of intolerance of any region in the country.
Feelings are strongest in regions where an ethnic divide is accentuated by poverty, and the resulting competition for access to public services. Media hype plays a role too, in northern and south-western regions where there are few non-white faces and fewer asylum-seekers. Last year, the BNP won nearly 50% of the vote—its all-time best—in a council by-election in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. Yet this is an overwhelmingly white area with no known asylum-seekers. Burnley, a northern town where the BNP holds fully seven council seats (and took 11% of the vote in the 2001 general election) is just 7% non-white—under the national average.
All that partly explains why nobody is chasing the xeno-racist vote. The next election will be won and lost not in the intolerant distant provinces—which are, by turns, solidly Labour and fairly solidly Conservative—but in areas with lots of marginal seats such as the south-east and the Midlands, where attitudes are milder.
Moreover, the swing voters are a middle-aged, middle-class bunch increasingly unswayed by racial overtures. While the over-60s continue to report about the same levels of racial prejudice they displayed in the 1980s, younger generations are much more liberal, with 75% proudly declaring themselves “not at all prejudiced”—up from 60% in 1987.
Although often conflated, worries about uncontrolled numbers of asylum-seekers (which are widely felt) are essentially different from opposing immigration in general (a narrower concern). On both issues there is little to choose between Mr Letwin, fastidiously liberal at heart, and the authoritarian Labour home secretary, David Blunkett.
Ultimately, for all their tough talk on the manifest failings of Britain's decrepit asylum system, both main parties reckon anti-immigrant fruit is poisonous. Their distaste leaves the far-right parties with the chance to make headline-grabbing gains. That is nasty, but, given the way most of the public thinks, not dangerous.
