Immigration: Guarded votes

The partys rise can be traced to the same issuethe rapid increase in nonwhite immigration,particularly from the Muslim worldthat has recently empowered far-right parties across Europe,notably in France. Nick Griffin,a soberly suited,51-year-old Cambridge-educated graduate in history and law leads the party.

Griffin is a fringe politician. But in this election,more than in any other in memory,popular anxiety about the rapid rise in immigration in the 13 years of Labour rule is the ghost at the banquet. It is a political reality strong enough,according to opinion polls,to influence votes in dozens of constituencies,but one the major parties can afford to address only in the most modulated of keys.

To understand that,it is enough to recall Enoch Powell. Forty-two years ago,Powell,a prominent Conservative,made a speech saying Britain had to be mad to admit 50,000 immigrants a year,mostly then from British islands in the Caribbean. He likened the consequences to the tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, the 1968 race riots in America. A classicist,he indulged his passion for ancient history. I am filled with foreboding, he said. Like the Roman,I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

Powell was promptly sacked from the Conservatives shadow cabinet. He left the party and wandered in the political shadows until his death in 1998. His rivers of blood speech has stood ever since as a warning to mainstream politicians of the fate of those who raise the immigration issue with overwrought language,particularly with a racist tinge.

In 2005,many people thought Michael Howard,then the Conservative leader,crossed the line with his tough language on immigration,further dooming his party to its third straight loss to Labour.

Small wonder,then,that the prime ministerial contenders trod warily when a nonwhite woman in the audience raised the issue at the second of three televised election debates last week.

To nobodys surprise,each of the three emphasised the need to curb migrant inflows. But their competing policies were less notable than the care the three took to avoid any shade of prejudice. The first thing to say, David Cameron,the Conservative leader,said,is that we have benefited from immigration8230;we should be incredibly warm and welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and integrated country.

One party leader not invited to the debates was Griffin,though he wrenched the debate back down to street level when he unveiled the B.N.P.s election manifesto. It called for absolutely no further immigration from any Muslim countries,as it presents one of the most deadly threats to the survival of our nation. Griffin said Britain was full up, and it was time to close the doors.

What has given the issue new political weight is the scale of immigration during Labour rule. Extrapolations from government figures suggest that looser regulations adopted in Tony Blairs early years as prime minister have led to a net inward migration of about two million people since 1997. Many new arrivals have come legally from East European nations in the European Union,notably Poland. But by far the most have been Muslims.

The numbers may seem modest to Americans,who saw Congress struggle during the George W. Bush yearsand failto agree on a plan to deal with a backlog of 12 million undocumented immigrants. But Britains two million new immigrants pose a challenge of at least comparable scale. Britain,with 62 million people,is already one of the most heavily populated countries in the developed world.

Drawn by Europes most generous welfare system,and by the status of English as the global lingua franca,illegal immigrants have shown inexhaustible resourcefulness in breaching the border controls of an island nation that Shakespeare vaunted as an oceanbound redoubtThis sceptred isle 8230;This other Eden8230;/ This happy breed of men,this little world,/ This precious stone,set in the silver sea.

One of the countrys most powerful newspapers,The Daily Mail,has made a staple of the systems failuresof Afghans and Albanians and Iraqis and others stowing away in trucks and astride the wheel assemblies of freight trains shuttling through the Channel tunnel; of tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers who evade deportation for years; of illegal migrants who murder and rape,then emerge from prison and win court orders that let them stay in Britain because their wives and children live here.

To people like Griffin,all this is grist to the mill. His aides warned that the failure to curb Muslim immigration would lead,perhaps as early as mid-century,to a Britain that is an Islamic republic.

If that,too,was a spectre raised Powell,he must be given some responsibility for making it a prospect too thorny,at least in this election,for the mainstream politicians of our age to engage.