SO THE HOME SECRETARY has called for a “mature discussion” on immigration. “We have to get away from this daft, so-called politically correct notion that anyone who wants to talk about immigration is somehow a racist,” he said. Shame Labour didn’t take that view at the last election.

It is hard to think of another issue over which there has been such concerted and effective censorship. For years, this Government has systematically underestimated the numbers of people coming in, selectively picked data to overstate migrants’ net economic contribution, dismissed questions about those figures as scaremongering and ordered the bewildered burgers of the big cities to rejoice at the new rainbow world in which they found themselves. It has had no hesitation in smearing even its own officials as racist, including James Cameron, the envoy to Romania, and Steve Moxon, the immigration official who exposed the Home Office’s policy of rubber-stamping bogus Eastern European visa applications.

Yet the old arrogance faces death by a thousand data errors. The Home Office’s confident prediction in 2004 that only 13,000 people a year would come to Britain from Eastern Europe has turned out to be wrong by a factor of almost 30. Yesterday, 25 local authorities said that they would have to raise council tax to provide services to large numbers of migrants ignored by official statistics. In Slough, where the statistics say that 300 migrants arrived in 2004, the Job Centre issued almost 9,000 national insurance registrations to non-British nationals in the 18 months to October 2005. That means a lot of unfunded school places, perhaps even hospital beds. Citizens who have endured years of preaching about the economic benefits of immigration are asking why their council tax is rising, and joking that they can refuse to pay without fear because the jails are already full. John Reid can see which way the wind is blowing.

He is also aware of mounting backbench concern. “If we are not careful”, Frank Field, the Labour MP, said recently, “we will be transformed into a global traffic station. That is not what most people mean by being part of a country.” It is time to make some decisions. Do we want to be the doormat of globalisation, passively accepting that people will flow to where the money is, no matter what strain is put on Britain’s social fabric? Or do we mean something more by a country? And if so, how do we preserve it? In talking of setting an optimum level for immigration, Mr Reid has signalled a potentially significant shift in what was a wilfully passive policy: a woolly mix of kindness, fatalism, a desire to fill skill shortages and a sense of duty to countries such as Poland (a sense I share). There will no doubt be much wrangling over who gets to sit on the committee that will dictate the numbers. But that will be academic unless the Government can also reduce illegal entry. Official figures put the number of illegal immigrants at 900,000, but it is thought to be three or four times as many. So far there has been no real political will to stem the flow. Few companies have been prosecuted for hiring illegal labour.

I recently talked to a man who used to run a contract cleaning business for big London offices. He gradually realised that none of his clients gave a hoot about his painstaking checks on his employees. He was continually undercut by firms using illegals and finally gave up last year. The London office world thrives on illegal cleaners, illegal waiters, even illegal security guards (nothing is too surreal). They are paid less than the minimum wage and they shut up about it. In London you can go to any nail bar, any snack bar, any club, and see people living on the frontier between exploitation and opportunity. While cheap, keen labour has served the middle class well, the Government tended to dismiss concerns about exploitation as “old Left”. But now it is worried that under that “opportunity” lurks a security risk. The metropolitan elite is grudgingly having to admit that its open market for talent has brought in the world’s finest drug dealers, gang leaders, terrorists and fraudsters, along with the doctors and financiers. Is it really so hard to distinguish between the good and the bad? The Australians do.

The British Government is belatedly planning to re-establish the embarkation controls that were lifted partially by the Tories and then completely by Labour. But proper biometric controls will be at least another seven years. That is too long.

If Mr Reid is serious, he will do several things: end the practice of issuing visas to all and sundry, with few interviews, for a start; fulfil previous promises to end chain migration, where each relative sponsors the next; end the automatic right to settlement for those on five-year work permits, also promised but not yet enforced.

And then he must deal with the Balkans, which could provide an ideal political opportunity. Home Office documents leaked last month forecast that 45,000 “undesirable” Romanians and Bulgarians, those thought to have criminal associations, could settle in Britain when the two countries join the EU next year. This astonishing figure includes only those who have been investigated in the course of inquiries into organised crime or stolen passports. At one point two years ago, the Home Office was flying back a new batch of illegal Roma migrants every week. Don’t open up to the Balkans yet, say officials. That is something we could control. Don’t make things worse.

Our leaders have been conducting a massive and undemocratic experiment on Britain’s population, the results of which we will not be able to judge fully for many years. It is quite wrong that a small elite has been dictating the country’s future behind closed doors. Free debate is a good start. Getting a grip would be even better.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

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