Sir John Hayes

There has been too much immigration to this country for far too long. I have great regard for the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), as she knows, but regard allows for sharp disagreements, and if she did not know that we disagree, she will after this speech. That level of immigration has damaged our economy, our shared sense of belonging on which social cohesion depends and our public services, by increasing population to an unsustainable level. Let me first turn to the economy. The effect of mass migration on the economy has been to displace investment in domestic skills and in recruitment and retention of labour. It has displaced investment in the modernisation of our economy and it has therefore damaged productivity by inhibiting it. It has essentially created an economy that is low-skilled and dependent on the provision of relatively cheap labour, and is therefore unfit to compete in a high-tech, high-skilled world. That is what mass migration has done to our economy. For evidence, one has only to look at the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs report, which says: “we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.” The reason for that is that 70% of migrants are in low and medium-skilled roles. They are not the brightest and the best; they are not the people who we need to fill the vacancies that cannot be filled otherwise. Essentially, vacancies are being filled rather than providing opportunities for the vast majority of those Britons who cannot get a place in the labour market. Mass migration has certainly damaged social cohesion by undermining our shared sense of belonging. We simply cannot import that number of people—many of whom do not speak English as their first language—without significant investment in integration; yet even if we were integrating at pace, the sheer volume would make it impossible to hold many communities together. We have seen social fracture, with a risk of complete fragmentation, in many communities. Hon. Members from across the House will have visited schools where the headteacher has said proudly, “Of course, the children here speak 15 different languages,” as though that were a cause for celebration. Without a common language, there can be no currency for learning about one another and there can be no means by which we can share what makes us British. We have to promote the English language and we should abolish any attempt by any authority to translate things into foreign languages: let us make that a rallying cry from today. Finally, the population of this country is growing at an unsustainable rate. We have heard already that successive Governments, beginning with the Blair Government, then the coalition Government, Tory Governments and now this Government, I am sorry to say, have failed to recognise that if we increase net population by 700,000 to 900,000 people a year, a number that equates to the combined populations of the five cities of Cambridge, Norwich, Hull, Lincoln—