Cameron and the Tories have reduced immigration to tens of thousands. NOT!

Tory failure to cap immigration is an opportunity for a policy rethink

The PM promised something he couldn't possibly deliver. Now he needs an honest conversation with the public

• 
• • Hugh Muir
  • theguardian.com, Friday 28 February 2014 10.41 GMT

Passengers board a bus for western Europe from Sofia, Bulgaria: 'Cameron's problem is EU migration, and he can’t do much about that'. Photograph: Vassil Donev/EPA

Is there anyone who wouldn't have paid good money to have been a fly on the wall in Downing Street over the past 24 hours? David Cameron doesn't seem to be a sweary type; he doesn't blowtorch underlings or kick the copying machines in the style of Gordon Brown – but there will have been ructions on receipt of those latest migration figures from the Office for National Statistics. Net migration up 30% in the past year when, after all the breast-beating, and from all the promises Cameron made to the electorate, it should have gone down.

That was the battleground for the next election. Nothing else had the potential to address the Labour poll lead that has been so long out of reach. Cameron put all of his betting chips on what seemed to be the party's trump card: the "vote for us, we're tough on migration and tough on migrants" strategy. The bet was lost; the result not even close. Net migration has hit 212,000 and gone is the hope of bringing it below 100,000 before the general election. What do you give a dumb punter who has lost everything. Sympathy? He hardly deserves it.

Perhaps some advice, instead. The first thing to say is that he should stop taking silly positions. His problem here is EU migration. He can't do much about that. He shouldn't have given the impression that events outside his control were within it. He can't change the rules because his EU partners won't let him. And regardless of the chunterings from his backbenchers, he knows that to actually leave the EU – the only way to regain complete control – would be ruinous for Britain in terms of economics and world positioning. The path to irrelevance.

He acted as he did to show those backbenchers that he is a toughie, to draw the poison from the tabloids, and to head off Ukip. But over-promising has left him in a worse position with all three than he was in before, and with his credibility in tatters. He should get back to square one and fast.

He needs to start listening, as he should have from the outset, to the people who actually have to make his market-based capitalist system work. They are against his crude machinations on migration because they know how it affects their efforts to provide for Britain the economy he says he wants. He has, to use Geoffrey Howe's cricketing metaphor, been sending them out to the crease having sabotaged their bats.

Frustrated by his inability to deal with EU migration, Cameron will inevitably redouble efforts to rein in non-EU migration, which might be popular for a while, not least because it might also curb visible migration by non-white Commonweath types. But if he does opt for a rethink, he might use as a starting point advice from Mark Boleat, policy chair of the City of London Corporation. Writing yesterday in the London Evening Standard, Boleat said: "What is needed is a sensible, fact-based debate over what migrants bring to the capital, while also acknowledging their impact on communities and services. A row where only the loudest are heard fails this test … Policymakers should clamp down on those immigrants who come to Britain to take rather than contribute. But the overwhelming majority of immigrants come here to make a better life for themselves and their families through hard work, and in so doing are of huge benefit to Britain. Closing our borders or Swiss-style immigration quotas are not viable or sensible solutions." No hangwringing Guardianista is he; no authority more instinctively Conservative than the City of London Corporation.

The PM might opt to be brave. To take on the unreasoned, backward thinking populism we hear from Ukip and his right. To rein in his own election strategist Lynton Crosby who, from all we have seen in this and previous campaigns, appears to think that divisive manoeuvring on migration works like some form of electoral Viagra.

Cameron might decide to have a straightforward and honest conversation with the public. People flows and money flows are how the modern world works; there will be costs and benefits. We can rage against the dynamic or we can better adapt to it, thinking more about how we channel resources to those areas most affected, how we strike the balance between the needs of long-term residents and those newly arrived, and how we achieve balanced and harmonious communities.

This is hard, mainly because it means a break from the nostalgia that underpins the worst of our failings in this area. But there really is no going back to Britain as it was. It is hard but it is necessary, and the PM may observe one of life's ironies: with failure comes opportunity.

An Indian's analysis of America

Idle Worship, Or The Non-Resident's Role Play

Come winter, and Indians will genuflect before the visiting hordes of NRIs

RAMACHANDRA GUHA A new festival has been added to the Indian ritual calendar. Like Dussehra and Diwali, it is a winter festival, but unlike them the gods it honours are living beings, who appear before us in flesh and blood instead of being frozen into stone. This relatively new addition to our lives is called NRI puja. It takes place in December, a time when thousands of Non-Resident Indians briefly become Resident Non-Indians.

As a middle-class, English-speaking South Indian, I am always part of these festivities myself. For half my family serve as deities; the other half as worshippers. Whether I like it or not, I am placed by default in the second class. Fortunately, whatever personal apprehensions I have about participating in this annual puja are overcome by the force of professional obligation. As an Indian who chose to live in India, I might affect scorn for the migrants, but as a social scientist I must take cognisance of a phenonemon whose social significance grows with every passing year.

The first thing to note about this puja is that it has space only for a certain kind of NRI. Those who live with Arabs in the Gulf or with Fijians in the South Pacific do not qualify; still less those who have made their home with humans of African descent in the Caribbean. To be worthy of worship, an NRI must live with people whose skin pigmentation is, in the Tamil phrase, paal maadri, literally, the colour of milk.

Among the gods who visit us every winter, three deities tower above the others. Analagous to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, we have Salman the Creator, Amartya the Preserver, and Sir Vidia the Destroyer. Just as Brahma gave birth to the world, Rushdie gave birth, through his magnificent novel Midnight's Children, to an innovative and globally influential school of Indian writing in English. Like the god he resembles he appears to have done little since—but, for that first and fundamental act of creation, we worship him still.

Vishnu the Preserver is supposed to have had 10 avatars. His successor probably exceeds him in this regard. Sometimes he comes to us as a Bangladeshi (by virtue of the fact that he was born in Dhaka), at other times as a Bengali, at still other times as a Global Indian. Other roles he has assumed include economist, philosopher, sociologist, historian, and seer. Like the god he resembles he comes to cheer us, to console us, to chastise us.

Siva could set the world ablaze with a mere blink of the eyelids. His modern successor can destroy a reputation by a word or two said (or unsaid). As with Siva, we fear Sir Vidia, we propitiate him, and we worship him. Who knows, if we are diligent and devoted enough, he may grant us some favours in this world (or the next).

In the Hindu pantheon there are three main Gods as well as 33,000 lesser ones. Through the month of December, the Holy Trinity are sighted from afar—prayed to, occasionally touched, but rarely spoken to. But how many Indians get to go to Badrinath anyway? Their regular prayers are offered to more modest deities who live in or visit the smaller shrines in their own villages or towns.

Among these lesser gods, the first and by far the most numerous category consists of the Family Show-Off. This is the man—less often, the woman—who went early to the West, usually the United States, to study, work and earn. He makes trips home every few years—at first coming alone, then with Indian wife acquired through traditional channels, and finally with one or two brats in tow. When these family NRIs appear, we, mere permanent residents, are obliged to pay homage, altering our own lives and work schedules to do so. It is striking how naturally we slip into the role of worshippers; they, as naturally, into the role of the worshipped.

The Family Show-Off is more than willing to speak of the upward curve of his own life: of a better-paid job, a bigger car, a house on the coast. He is certain to note the very different conditions of your life—the traffic jams, the power cuts, the credit card machines that don't work, the water fit only for animals to drink. Some visiting NRIs express anger at these conditions. Others express sympathy, which yet comes with a very large dose of self-satisfaction.

Sometimes the Family Show-Off takes on a second role, that of the Non-Resident Religious Radical, or nrrr. The nrrr tells you that the only way to build a strong, self-reliant nation is to marry Faith with State. Like exiles everywhere, he yearns for the restoration of a pure, uncontaminated, national culture, which in his rendering can only mean a Hindu culture. These nrrrs have been to the Sangh parivar what North Americans Jews are to the Israeli Right and what Irish-Americans have been to the ira—that is, an important source of moral and (more crucially) material support.

When the BJP was in power, much attention was paid to the diasporic fundamentalist. But few, it seems, have noticed the steady growth in influence of another kind of diasporic extremist, whom I call the Non-Resident Political Radical, or NRPR. While the nrrrs tend to come from the commercial and professional classes—they are typically doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—the NRPR are located chiefly in the American academy, as students and professors. They are fervently against 'lpg': liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. This, despite being beneficiaries of L, P, and G themselves. Some NRPR offer socialist Cuba as an alternate economic model; some others, the Gandhian ideal of the self-sufficient village economy. Where the nrrrs support a political party, namely the BJP, the NRPR are more prone to support, and influence, those social movements which share their distaste for the state, the market, the establishment; for, it seems, everything - and - everyone - but -themselves.

Both kinds of radicalism stem from a deep sense of alienation. The Hindu professional might live in suburban America but he shall never be of it. His neighbours can't pronounce his name, have never heard of his place of origin, don't warm to his music and are uncomprehending of his religion. Back home, however, there are people who both understand him and need him. So he writes cheques to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, thus to preserve the essence of a culture too elevated for his narrow-minded neighbours to appreciate.

The university radical, for his part, also finds himself pyschologically out of place in America. His fellow dons all know their Marx, but in the wider society the ruling deity is Mammon. The only hope is to take succour in oppositional movements within India. When George Bush's America is so ferociously devoted to consumer capitalism, thank God for the desi leftists, who so heroically keep out the market and keep flickering the fading light of socialism. The Mother Country to the rescue, again.

Both kinds of radicals are hypocritical. Living under a Constitution that separates Church from State, the religious radical yet wishes to convert India into a Hindu Pakistan. Living in an open, free society that encourages innovation and enterprise, the political radical yet wants to refashion India into a Burma writ large, into an isolated, autarkic autocracy that shall pass itself off as a socialist utopia.

To be fair, and for the sake of completeness, I must note that there are many Anglo-American NRIs who do not fall into the categories identified above. These are human beings and not deities, as unsure as normally resident Indians normally are about how to improve the country or settle the fate of the world.With these ordinary NRIs our relationship is rather more equitable—for they talk to us, rather than down at us.

When was the first ever NRI puja held? I think I can say without too much fear of contradiction that it was not before the 1960s—when the first big wave of professional emigration into the US began—that this particular festival entered our ritual calendar. At first it was observed in isolated pockets, chiefly in south India. But over the years the number of deities grew and grew. Besides, they now came from every state of the Union, returning each winter to show their face and receive devotions in return.

However, it is just conceivable that the festival has peaked, that its most glorious days are behind it. With the surge in the economy, the previously disadvantaged worshipper has disposable cash of his own; now, come late December, he seeks to holiday in Bali or New Zealand rather than stay back for the rituals at home. In any case, repeated contact with the deity has led to a certain disenchantment. Some of us cannot wait now for the New Year to ring in and the flights to New York to take off, so that we can turn, with relief and anticipation, to worshipping those Gods—Shahrukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar pre-eminent among them—who come not on fleeting annual visits but are with us (and in us, and for us) always.

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Get closer to the jungle… I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Sreesanth, the beamer and the refusal to give an inch.

Sreesanth has been pilloried in all quarters for his beamer to Pietersen and his slight shoulder brushing of Vaughan.

But in my view, Sresanth represents the metamorphoses in the Indian attitudes to white opponents. Indians will pay back in kind and with interest for all the non cricketing aggro directed at them on the cricket pitch.

It is the near decapitating of Pietersen that hastened his departure and the rest of the English batting order and paved the way for an Indian win.

I will not encourage Sreesanth - but he is a necessary evil to all the white bullies who get aay lightly on the cricket pitch.