Rohan Silva
(Picture: Rohan Silva)Old Bob was bonkers. He was a regular at the Yorkshire pub I used to work at when I was younger, and over a pint of frothy best he liked to tell me his secrets. Like how he’d figured out that Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses in London are actually entrances to secret underground government bunkers. Or how he knew Princess Margaret was being used to incubate body organs for the Queen Mother.
But Bob wasn’t always so friendly towards me. When I first started at the pub, he stared at me menacingly for the first few days, before eventually coming up and saying: “When I first saw you working here, I thought there must be new owners or something. But you know what, I’ve been watching you, and you’re all right.” And then he shook my hand.
What Bob meant, in his own weird way, was that he wasn’t expecting to see someone who wasn’t white standing behind the bar. And to be fair to him, I was the only brown in the village.
Because that’s the thing about immigration — it’s not evenly spread across the country, and even more importantly, many different parts of Britain have very contrasting attitudes about it.
If you look at the British Social Attitudes Survey, for example, Londoners are twice as likely as Brits in general to think that foreigners are good for the economy.
In other words, London is pro-immigration, and we’d happily allow more foreigners to work here — whereas lots of other parts of the country see things differently.
It’s fine that other regions have different views — the problem for London is that immigration policy is determined nationally, with the result that the current Government is making it hard for talented foreigners to work in the the UK because most of the country would like to see immigration reduced, not increased.
It’s a different story in Australia and Canada, where local areas can offer regional work visas — meaning an immigrant is allowed to live and work in a particular part of the country. Those foreign workers can obviously go on holiday or travel outside that patch, but when it comes to your place of work and residence, it has to be within the designated area.
We need this kind of localised immigration policy here in the UK. It would mean the capital could introduce London work visas, and be much more open to global talent — while the rest of the country could rest assured that immigration in their areas was being controlled. Win-win.
I’ve no idea if Bob is still alive, but I’d like to think he’d agree with this idea. Then again, he was slightly crackers, so maybe that’s not saying much.
The capital is strongly pro-immigration, whereas other parts of the country see things differently.
