Diane Abbott is pushing the Left's biggest myth about immigration

Telegraph

10-06-2025

The Labour Left were always bound to loathe Sir Keir Starmer's recent speech about the downsides of mass immigration. All the same, one of their objections to it strikes me as somewhat peculiar. At a rally on Saturday, the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott thundered that Sir Keir's speech was 'nonsense' – because, as she stoutly reminded her audience, 'immigrants built this land'.
Stirring stuff. I can see only one small problem.
It's not strictly true, is it?
Clearly Ms Abbott disagrees. Indeed, she proudly declared that her own parents 'helped to build this country'.
As she herself acknowledged, though, they only arrived here from Jamaica in the 1950s. What precisely does Ms Abbott think Britain looked like, before her parents' ship pulled in? A barren, primitive, uncivilised wilderness, whose humble natives dwelt in bushes and subsisted on nettles and raw shrew? Did her parents look around, sigh, and then patiently set about erecting St Paul's Cathedral and Blenheim Palace?
I'm not convinced that they did. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that most of this country was built a fair bit earlier, largely by people who were born in it. This is because, until quite recently, only a very small percentage of the population was born abroad. Between 1951 and 2001, the average annual net immigration figure was 7,800. In 2023, by contrast, it was 906,000. It doesn't take a mathematician of Ms Abbott's stature to recognise that this is quite a sharp increase.
Still, I don't mean to pick on her. She's far from alone. In recent years, any number of Left-wing politicians and pundits have taken to pushing the line that 'immigrants built Britain'. On last week's edition of the BBC's Question Time, for example, the retired trade union leader Mark Serwotka informed viewers that Britain is only 'the great country it is because of centuries of immigration'.
From the Left's point of view, I suppose I can see this tactic's advantages. Any time a voter dares suggest that net immigration of almost a million a year is a touch on the high side, and possibly not entirely sustainable in the longer term, shut them up by telling them that a) it's always been like this, and b) they should be grateful.
The risk, though, is that some voters might feel a tiny bit insulted. Because the claim that 'immigrants built Britain' implies that the natives were so ignorant, lazy and useless, they achieved nothing until their superiors arrived from abroad to lift them out of savagery.
Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that the Left used to have a word for that type of attitude. It was 'colonialism'.
If you want a picture of the present...
It was a bright cold day in June, and Winston Smith had just sat down at his desk in the Ministry of Truth. This morning he had an important job to do. A dangerous book urgently needed to be memory-holed.
It was entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four.
For decades, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been acclaimed as a landmark work of literature. Suddenly, however, it had been found to contain the most sickening thoughtcrime.
The person who had made this shocking discovery was an American novelist named Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In a foreword she'd been commissioned to write for the book's latest edition, she declared that its main character exhibited attitudes towards women that were appallingly 'problematic'. Not only that, but the book didn't feature any characters who were black.
'A sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find,' she wrote, 'in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity.'
Privately, Winston suspected that the reason the book did not speak much to race and ethnicity was that it had been written on a Scottish island by an Edwardian Englishman in the late 1940s. That was probably also the reason why none of its characters identified as genderqueer or pansexual, and why none of them had glued their buttocks to the M25 in support of puberty blockers for Palestine.
But it was not Winston's place to make excuses for crimethink. In any case, he was used to such tasks. Not long ago he had been presented with the complete works of a children's author named Roald Dahl, and ordered to replace the entire text of each book with the endlessly repeated phrase 'BE KIND'.
Had it been up to him, Winston would have been perfectly willing to rectify the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, until all traces of crimethink had been eliminated. He could have ensured that it contained the correct number of characters who were 2SLGBTQIA+, neurodivergent or of Colour, and that they all expressed the officially mandated opinions about Islamophobia and net zero.
The Ministry, however, had decided that there was no time. Better just to drop the offending object down the memory hole, and move swiftly on to his next task. This one was going to be tough.
According to reports, there was a new TV adaptation of Harry Potter on the way, and the cast had completely failed to denounce JK Rowling. Winston had a lot of unpersoning to do.