At our April Meeting, The Rt Hon Sir Vince Cable gave a fascinating talk about populist politics and immigration a subject he has been specialising in. He has written a paper for the Overseas Development Institute (ODI),of which he is a distinguished fellow, giving a detailed commentary on this subject which can be found at

 

 

Sir Vince was the Business Secretary in David Cameron’s government 2010 to 2015 as well as the Lib Dem leader 2017 to 2019. The migration of people is usually triggered by economics or strife. Sir Vince gave us a history of immigration to this country over the past hundred years and made the point that we are all immigrants since the human race originated in Africa. Points in UK immigration have been between the wars when persecuted Jewish people came, Hungarians when the Russian invaded Hungary in 1950s, Carribean immigration when we needed people to work in transport in 1950s, Ugandan Asians deported from Uganda in 1970s, a large influx of Eastern Europeans in 2004 when the EU expanded. When Sir Vince was Business Secretary he was under pressure from businesses to obtain immigrants to fulfill shortages of labour in Care Homes, the NHS and fruit picking. The UK has a similar level of immigrants to other Northern European countries such as Germany Sweden and Denmark at around 12-14% of population. The current immigration problem in the UK is driven by conflict in Africa, Iraq,Iran and Afghanistan creating persecuted asylum seekers and economic migrants. The uncontrolled immigration creates capacity problems in Schools, the NHS and Housing.