The danger of Melanie Phillips

Published in the Jewish Chronicle

It is an unwritten rule of my trade that you do not attack a colleague: dog doesn’t eat dog. We’re meant to show our teeth only to those in power, not humble scribblers like ourselves. But it is a tribute to one of my colleagues that her conviction and energy have made her a figure of genuine influence, one who has — as I shall reveal — moved beyond commentating on public affairs to affecting them. She is now more than a journo, rather a player in the national and, crucially, international conversation.

I am speaking of my fellow resident of this slot, Melanie Phillips. Though I always enjoy her company, I confess that I disagree with Melanie on most things. That’s fine: disagreement is a Jewish sport and we enjoy it. But in recent months, I feel Melanie has crossed a few lines that should not be crossed — and cannot go unchallenged.

First was a piece she wrote on her blog in which she condemned the Independent Jewish Voices group: it was headlined “Jews for genocide”. Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV — most of them amply aired already on these pages. But even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide — literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people. I understand Melanie’s apparent logic — that by criticising Israel, IJV align themselves with a radical Islamism that wants Israel wiped off the map, ergo IJV are pro-genocide — but it is an absurdity, one that drains the word “genocide” of any meaning. For if Mike Leigh and Stephen Fry are for genocide, what word is left to describe, say, the Sudanese regime and their murderous assault on the people of Darfur?

But it was a sentence in Melanie’s January JC column that really got me going. “Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion,” she wrote, “but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Read that line again. I have, along with the entire piece that preceded it. Think about what it means: that the Palestinian urge for national self-determination — their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation. No. Their shared desire, their national project, is to join David Irving in pretending that Hitler did not murder six million Jews. Of course, it follows that such people — a nation of neo-Nazis — deserve nothing, let alone a state of their own.

Some will tell me there is no point getting agitated by such sentiments, that newspaper columns are merely tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrap. That may be true of what most of us in the column business churn out. But Melanie Phillips is different. She has acquired a particularly devoted audience — far beyond these shores.

In the United States, Melanie has a substantial following, with thousands logging on daily to her website or lining up to hear her lectures — several of the leading lights of American Jewry among them. They snap up copies of her book Londonistan, in which Britain — a rotting, decayed island awash with amorality — is on the brink of an Islamist takeover. Above all, they swallow whole her insistence that Europe is back in the 1930s, and that Britain now seethes with Jew-hatred.

I hear this from several well-placed leaders of Britain’s Jewish organisations, who have had to hose down their American counterparts. “I understand it’s not safe to walk down the street here as a Jew,” one US Jewish bigwig told a British colleague. “From what I hear, you guys are experiencing the kind of pogroms my grandmother lived through,” said another. Both these remarks were offered during recent fact-finding missions to Britain by major American Jewish organisations, here as if visiting a besieged community of Jews in peril.

In response, no less than the Chief Rabbi has had to join other British communal leaders to tell these visiting donors — associated with Aipac and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, among others — that London is not the Warsaw ghetto, that Europe is not an inferno and that there is no need for the big US bodies to come to Anglo-Jewry’s rescue. They have also had to explain that the US method of doing business — offering heavy financial help to pro-Israel MPs, for example — would not play well here.

Of course, it is mad to blame one person for shaping this distorted world view. But when asked where they had picked up this apocalyptic impression of the state of British Jewry, the Americans apparently cited one name again and again. Melanie will doubtless be heartened by that — but it might not be so good for the rest of us.

March of the Scots

Why the break up of the UK would be a mistake for London

Published in the Evening Standard

A political earthquake is still possible, but if it doesn't come, Britain is about to be ruled by a Scot. Gordon Brown is due to become prime minister, the first man representing a seat north of the border to do that since Alec Douglas-Home more than 40 years ago. At the same time, the ground is trembling in Edinburgh, with a new poll this week showing the Scottish National Party pushing ahead of Labour in May's elections to the parliament there. That party's signature promise, lest we forget, is a referendum on Scottish independence.

It means the next few months are poised to see a renewed surge of angst over the state of the union that has bound these islands together for exactly 300 years. Brown's arrival will see a flaring of resentment, stoked up by a Conservative opposition that will question the government's very legitimacy. A foretaste was provided last year when one of Cameron's lieutenants, Alan Duncan, said it would be "almost impossible" for a Scot to serve as Britain's PM. Cameron himself has pushed the notion of 'English votes for English laws,' whereby only MPs for English seats would be able to vote on laws affecting England. That would turn Westminster into a de facto English assembly - except when, say, foreign affairs or defence were debated, at which time the excluded Scots and Welsh MPs would be quietly ushered back into the chamber, only to be turfed out again when domestic business resumed. That would be one giant step towards a UK break-up.

Yet the demand for it could get even more intense after the next election. I know more than one sage who's looked at the electoral map, seen that the mountain is too steep for David Cameron to climb, and concluded that the likeliest outcome is a Labour-Lib Dem coalition led by Gordon Brown and Menzies Campbell. Or, as one high-level Tory likes to put it, "two old men from Fife."

That would add to the sense of frailty of the United Kingdom that has been felt since Labour began its programme of devolution in 1997, establishing self-rule, in differing doses, for Scotland, Wales and of course London. Yet one voice has been almost silent in this existential debate about whether Britain should stay together or break apart, a debate which is due to intensify in the coming months - and that voice is London's.

Should the people of the capital care if the UK disintegrates? Many Londoners might give an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, even a little cheer. After all, on current form we get out of the UK much less than we put in. If the English don't like subsidising Scotland - a claim the SNP reject incidentally - then Londoners should be furious at subsidising England and everywhere else in the UK. According to London First, the business lobby group, this city sees a staggering £20bn of its wealth flow out to the rest of the country, whether to pay for schools in Liverpool or hospitals in Leith. We make up just 12.5% of the UK population, yet pay 19% of the taxes. If any part of the UK were itching to go it alone, you'd think it would be London.

Indeed, some commentators believe we're already half way there. The latest edition of Prospect magazine, a London special, describes the capital as a "hyper-capitalist city-state," as if we were Singapore or Hong Kong. On Monday, London First held a debate, asking whether London should jettison the UK and fly solo: proposing the motion was the former Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris.

The logic is clear enough. Once we kept our own money, we could spend it on the things we know we need, starting with better schools, transport and housing. And there might be a cultural shift too. London already prides itself on having the most progressive attitudes in the UK, with a live and let live approach that makes this city the destination of choice for immigrants, gay people and many others. Freed from the more retrograde attitudes that still persist elsewhere in Britain, London could progress yet further.

Indeed, the London case against the union can be made to look powerful: if the kingdom broke up, we'd be all right, Jack. And yet I still believe London should stand firm against what may be a surging tide in the coming months. It's in London's interest for this country to hold firm and stay together.

The first argument is one of caution, even pessimism. It says that London is indeed booming now, with a financial services sector that employs 300,000 people, each earning, on average, a phenomenal £90,000. But that boom may not last forever. Some of the regional speakers at Monday's debate warned that London risks becoming a one trick pony, too reliant on finance and vulnerable to a change in the global economic weather. International capital is unsentimental: if London became unattractive, for whatever reason - say, heaven forbid, a string of terror attacks - it would take its money elsewhere. Suddenly the roles would reverse, and London would be holding out the begging bowl to the rest of the UK. It's happened in the past, when the north-west of England was in its industrial heyday - and it could happen again.

Less gloomy is the belief that we benefit by our place in the heart of the country called Britain. We're not a faceless, antiseptic money-making machine like Singapore. We are who we are because we're anchored in a national history. Just look at our major cultural attractions, whether the National Portrait Gallery, the English National Opera or the National Theatre. Sure, they are international institutions, but they all have deep roots in the national soil. A city, even one as diverse as London, needs that sense of rootedness and connection.

So we should remedy some of the imbalances that currently penalize London. More of those billions London earns should stay here, to pay for the roads, sewers, schools and hospitals currently creaking under the strain. We should explain to the rest of the UK that this is not London greed, but rather a wise investment in Britain's future, ensuring that the golden goose, whose eggs currently feed the entire country, stays healthy. When we ask for Crossrail, linking the city from east to west, we shouldn't have to wait 15 years. We should get it, because if London benefits, so does Britain.

We should say all that, even as we fight those eager to give up on the union, those whose voices will soon be heard louder. This country certainly needs London - but London also needs this country.

Now is the time to call the bluff of the land of missed opportunities

The Arab League should bypass Ehud Olmert and go directly to the Israeli people with its offer for a Palestinian settlement

Published in the Guardian

Why does Mandy hate Gordon?

From the Guardian's G2 section

Suddenly a new guise: actor and showman. Signs of Stalinism? Certainly not comrades

Front-page commentary on Gordon Brown's last Budget

Published in the Guardian

Ken apologises for slavery

Published in the Evening Standard

Well, at least we now know he can apologise. For a while, Ken Livingstone seemed to have inherited a speech impediment from the Fonz, the hero of the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, who was physically unable to utter the word ‘sorry.’ But yesterday we saw that our mayor has no such disability. On the pages of the Guardian, he issued a formal apology for London’s role in the “monstrous crime” of the transatlantic slave trade, whose bicentenary will be marked on Sunday.

Writing that article can’t have been easy. We know from recent experience that it can take the mayor quite some time, Fonzie-style, to spit out the s-word. When many Jewish Londoners were offended by Livingstone’s branding of a Jewish reporter – the Evening Standard’s Oliver Finegold — as a concentration camp guard, Livingstone refused to say sorry. It took the best part of two years and a bitter legal process before he finally, and to his credit, apologised last December.

Perhaps, though, it’s easier to say sorry for those things you didn’t actually do — and whatever gripes we may have with our mayor, not many of us hold him personally responsible for the murderous trade in Africa’s people. Tony Blair is no different, readily apologising for Britain’s role in the Irish famine of the 19th century – though uttering not a word of regret for those decisions in which his involvement was rather more direct. As one comic has quipped, at the present rate we can expect the British government to apologise for the lethal invasion of Iraq around the year 2153.

The temptations to cynicism are obvious. Yet not all retrospective apologies are without value. If for example, the victims of a crime are still alive, it can be a great comfort to hear an apology, even if it comes from the descendants of the original perpetrators. The textbook example, cited by the mayor yesterday, is Germany’s apology for the Holocaust, something the remaining survivors of that catastrophe badly needed to hear. But there are others.

The same is true of an apology which entails a promise to change future behaviour or which implies a deep and soulful reckoning by the institution doing the apologising. Think of Pope John-Paul II’s semi-apology to the Jews for Christian anti-semitism on a visit to Jerusalem in 2000. He stopped short of saying sorry, declaring instead that the church was “deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-semitism directed against the Jews by Christians.” It wasn’t enough; it didn’t mention the church’s complicity in the Holocaust. But still it had meaning, because the Pope was giving an implicit commitment that Catholicism would not return to the anti-Jewish teachings of its past.

But the mayor’s statement on slavery is not in the same category. He was not, like Germany, addressing the direct victims of the crime: those people are long dead. Nor was he, like the Pope, promising a new course of behaviour by the body he heads. Nor was there the sense that the mayor’s statement emerged from a long, serious process of grappling with an uncomfortable history. As it happens, many British institutions are looking hard at the calamity of slavery, with exhibits and lecture series going on across the land: the current Peoples, Portraits and Abolition season at the National Portrait Gallery is an admirable example. Ken Livingstone’s intervention yesterday might be part of that process, but it would be a stretch to see it as the culmination of a period of collective soul-searching.

Without those elements, the mayor’s apology is well-intentioned, even welcome — and he is surely right that it is squalid for the prime minister to avoid saying sorry simply to deflect legal claims from slaves’ descendants — but it lacks emotional gravity. It feels too much like a political move to have real heft. What are the politics behind it? A clue is provided in the passage where Ken suggests the man currently lauded as the great liberator of the slaves — witness the new film Amazing Grace — is over-rated. “No one denigrates William Wilberforce,” the mayor writes generously, “but it was black resistance and economic development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy.”

Livingstone is right to recall the heroism of those slaves who staged revolts, from the first in 1570 right through to the 1831 rebellion in Jamaica. But most historians agree that these uprisings could not, alone, have eradicated slavery: the British Empire was simply too strong to fold in the face of a few pockets of resistance here and there.

Instead the key factor was the stirring of British civil society, as Christian evangelicals galvanized public opinion to reject this hateful trade on religious and moral grounds. London can claim a particular role, since Wilberforce and the other prime movers operated from here, earning the name the Clapham Sect. You’d think that Livingstone, a progressive, would celebrate this movement of enlightened social reform. Yet he dismisses it. Historian Tristram Hunt suspects he knows why: “Because Christian evangelicals don’t quite fit the Ken world view.” The heroes of black resistance are a more comfortable object of praise.

Still, none of that would have mattered if Ken had made the John-Paul II move – using his apology to promise action in the future. For slavery is not entirely eradicated; nor is it confined to our history. It lives on, in this very city.

In the London of 2007, there are perhaps thousands of women, mainly from eastern Europe, tricked and trafficked into this city and now locked in windowless rooms, where they are forced to have sex with up to 40 men a day in 20-hour shifts. The meager money they make they have to give to their captors, under threat that if they don’t their families back home will be killed.

Tomorrow Britain will sign the European Convention against people trafficking. That’s good, but action from the mayor to eradicate it in this city would be even better. An apology for the slavery of the past is all very well — but abolition of the slavery we live with right now would mean so much more.

This political limbo leaves Brown cast as Westminster's Prince of Wales

The chancellor has been paralysed and exposed in this bizarre, protracted spell. But it appears that Blair just ain't bovvered

Published in the Guardian

Watch out for the new poll tax

Published in the Evening Standard

When Americans speak of an issue that's too hot to handle, they call it "the third rail": like the power cable on a train line, you only have to touch it to die. In Britain we have a third rail of our own - and it's called local tax.

We'll see it's destructive power again next week, when Sir Michael Lyons publishes his review of local finance. Leaks suggest he's going to add a couple of new council tax bands at the top end, so that someone living in a #1m home could see their annual bill double to #4,400.

It's no coincidence that it's an unelected official who's been saddled with delivering this bit of bad news. No politician wants to go anywhere near the issue. Look, they tell you, their voices a-tremble, what the poll tax did to Margaret Thatcher. Call it the rates, the community charge or council tax, it makes no difference. It's a political killer.

That's partly because it may be the only tax many people actually feel. For most PAYE earners, income tax is lopped off at source, before they ever know about it: it's tax under anaesthetic. VAT is included in the price of most goods and services, so we hardly notice that either. But council tax is different. Either you write a cheque, or you watch the direct debit flow out of your account. You feel the paying - and it hurts.

Which is why the government has run a mile from the issue, even though the system is in dire need of reform. The current set-up is based on property valuations that were carried out when the Soviet Union was still standing, back in 1991. Yet ministers have found reason after reason to delay, even postponing re-valuation till after the next election. No one wants to repeat Thatcher's error.

But they won't be able to put it off forever. If the government endorses the Lyons proposal, effectively raising the maximum those in the biggest houses can pay, they will face serious heat from two groups whose votes they badly need.

First in the queue will be homeowners in London and the South East, who have seen the value of their properties sky-rocket since 1991. Plenty of middle class families, who would never consider themselves at the top of the heap, are nevertheless living in houses that have entered the top bracket. It's estimated that tens of thousands of houses in this city and beyond are now worth the magic seven figures. Nor is this just the obvious mansions of Chelsea and luxury apartments of Kensington. One expert I spoke to yesterday said that when you see a substantial family house in Kentish Town or Camden Town, you're looking at a million-pound home.

Most irate will be those people whose properties may be big, but whose earnings are small: think of the elderly widow, rattling around in a roomy house, but with no way of finding #4,400 a year. If Gordon Brown were to endorse Lyons, he would either have to ensure a battery of extra benefits, to cushion the impact on the poorest - or prepare to face the wrath of those two vital elements in the famed New Labour coalition, the London middle class and the elderly.

But there is another, more radical way. Instead of tinkering with the council tax, he could propose an entirely new way of funding our local services. The clue is in the word local. The answer could be a local income tax.

Under this approach, the Inland Revenue would simply make a note of your postcode, add three or four pennies in the pound to your annual tax bill and send the money to your local council. It may sound outlandish - after all it was part of the Lib Dem manifesto in 2005. But local income tax works well across the world, from Scandinavia to parts of the United States.

Indeed, when I lived in America that was how I paid for my bins to be emptied and my street to be cleaned. At the end of the financial year, I signed two tax returns: one for the federal government and another, much smaller, one for the local city hall. No one ever asked what kind of apartment I was living in.

The advantages of such a system are obvious. Income tax is progressive - with the rich paying more, the poor paying less - while a property charge asks the Duke of Westminster to pay the same as the penniless old lady in a big house. Surely its fairer for people to pay according to what they afford.

Income tax is also what the experts call 'buoyant', in that revenue does not stay static but goes up as incomes rise. That would give councils more money to spend on services often starved of cash.

It sounds like an obvious move. But there would be loud opposition. In London, where incomes are high, we'd suddenly be paying much more than we currently shell out in council tax for the same services - while those in poorer parts of the country, where incomes are low, would be paying much less. That would be the inevitable result of the Treasury gathering in all the money, then spreading it around according to need, seeking to equalise between rich and poor.

Alternatively, each area could be allowed to keep exactly what it raises in local income tax from its residents. Great for K & C or Westminster; not so great for Hackney or Brent. The solution then would be to do what I saw in the US: simply draw the municipal boundaries in such a way that no area was all-rich or all-poor, but contained a mix, as many London boroughs do already. That way redistribution would happen locally, without need for Treasury meddling.

If all that sounds too terrifying to our anxious politicians, they could always take it slowly. They could phase in a local income tax, so that it runs in parallel with a reduced property charge. Gradually the blend could change, so avoiding any sudden shock to the system. Then all they'd have to do is find someone else to announce it.

The legacy of Iraq is that the world stands by while Darfur burns

An unprecedented plea from 14 UN humanitarian bodies on behalf of the people of western Sudan has been roundly ignored

Published in the Guardian

The arts are humming: let's keep it that way

Published in the Evening Standard

f the weather turns fine, expect Tony Blair to pop up at the Met Office, explaining how his ten years at Number Ten have created more sunshine than in the dark days before 1997. That would be in keeping with the tenor of the legacy tour, in which the outgoing prime minister travels the kingdom, claiming credit for the glorious achievements of what he hopes history will call the Blair decade.

This week he was at Tate Modern, hailing the “golden age” for the arts over which he has presided, like a latter-day Medici, dispensing purses of generous patronage. “Together,” he said, he and the directors, conductors, designers and writers assembled before him had transformed the culture of the country, making it “more confident, more assertive, more creative and alive.”

For once, that was not a wholly vain boast. In the arts things did actually get better under Labour. Government funding has doubled since 1997, so that theatres or galleries that were skinny and starving in the 1980s are now in rosy-cheeked good health.

The proof is especially visible in London. Tate Modern was a smart location for Blair’s speech because it has, in the seven short years since it opened, become the most popular modern art gallery in the world, pulling in more visitors than either MOMA in New York or the Pompidou in Paris. London’s museums are humming, helped in part by Labour’s abolition of entry charges, while the National Theatre is playing to packed houses and bagging multiple awards with hits like the History Boys. Blair quoted the Tate’s Nicholas Serota as saying that today’s museums “’feel’ different; they have a different atmosphere.” That’s vague – but it’s also right.

Indeed, this cultural flowering is a large part of what makes living in London worthwhile, despite all the daily hassles. To see a great play, or a gorgeous exhibition, is an exhilarating experience, one that can lift you out of the grind, allowing you to look at life afresh. That kind of transcending experience is available every day in the London of 2007.

That has to be the first argument for the arts. But if that doesn’t persuade, there are other, more mechanical ones. Chief among them is the economic impact “the cultural industries” have on this city and this country. They form some 7% of the economy, employing almost 2m people. They’re a big part of our exports and, as London knows better than anywhere, they do much to pull in tourists from overseas.

So what’s needed to ensure this golden age endures? Blair’s audience at Tate Modern were desperate to hear that their funding is not going to be cut back: they don’t want gobs more cash, just the same amount, adjusted for inflation. That sounds reasonable enough. After all, the arts can argue that just a small amount of public subsidy gives them the security they need to take risks and innovate; once they do that, they can win audiences and make a financial return. The recent revival of regional theatre supports that argument and it came pretty cheap — requiring an increase of just £25m, pocket change by government standards.

The artistic chieftans are also fretting about the Olympics: they fear that Lottery cash, which has proved vital to them, is about to be diverted instead to the bottomless pit of 2012. Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, told me yesterday that he’d like to see the Department for Media, Culture and Sport put arts funding behind a separate ring-fence — safe from the greedy hand of the Olympics. He’d also like institutions like his to have five-year budgets, so they can plan ahead, rather than waiting for the three-yearly Comprehensive Spending Review whose outcome this year has them so nervous. Again, they are hardly asking for the earth.

There are two more radical moves worth making. Blair suggested Britain had found a perfect compromise between European-style mega-subsidies and the US habit of leaving the arts to the tender mercies of market force. But that’s a distortion of the way the Americans operate. The galleries and orchestras of even medium-sized US cities are flush with cash, not from the government but from donations given by wealthy individuals and companies. Often they have established huge endowments, the interest on which alone can comfortably fund an opera house or theatre.

We need some of that here. As a new study yesterday showed London on course to become the world’s fourth richest city, it’s about time our wealthiest citizens followed the lead of their counterparts in New York or Los Angeles and dipped deep into their pockets. Some corporations are already stepping up, like Travelex, sponsors of the £10 seats at the National. But individuals need a prod. Government could help by tweaking the tax code to make endowments for the arts at least partially tax-deductible. A small change by Gordon Brown would see an avalanche of cash coming the arts way.

All of this would be pointless, however, unless there are people keen to go to concerts, plays and exhibitions. That is by no means certain, not when today’s kids are so pressed by league tables and compulsory testing that music, drama and art have been all but squeezed out of the school timetable. Too many children go nowhere near a musical instrument unless they have parents able to pay for private lessons; too many never set foot in a theatre, unless their teachers can prove the visit is linked to the national curriculum.

That needs to change, freeing up the timetable so that there’s space for those experiences which cannot be tested but which open up a child’s soul. “You need to build the audience of tomorrow,” says Hall, who suggests a performance a year for every child. Why not?

The arts have become one of London’s greatest assets. But they are a precious flower. Nurture them and they’ll grow. Neglect them and they’ll wither – and that would leave all of us the poorer.

A united Ireland is being created, not by arms but by the lure of cash

By the standards of the past, today's elections - and the prospect of a DUP-Sinn Féin government - are like a lunatic fantasy

Published in the Guardian

Personality politics

Calling for a debate on the future of Labour is pointless - people don't believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.

From the Guardian blog

London's migrants are proof of our success

Published in the Evening Standard

Watch out, here comes another one. Give it sixty seconds and there will be one more. By the time the hour is up there'll be sixty, a steady march of them that none of us can stop. Or to put it as plainly as the full-page advertisement that appeared in yesterday's Daily Telegraph: "A migrant a minute is entering Britain."

Well, it makes a change from the aquatic imagery usually deployed by the anti-immigration lobby: normally we're "flooded" or "swamped" by a "rising tide" of newcomers, as if the British Isles themselves were about to sink under the weight. The so-called Speakout campaign which paid for yesterday's ad have gone for a different, though equally doom-laden approach - the ticking clock, evoking a countdown to some terrible midnight.

Theirs is a howl of rage against the arrival into this country of hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans since the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. To quote the ad: "Without a debate or vote in Parliament, our elected MPs have handed control of our borders to the European Union, allowing unlimited immigration into Britain from EU countries."

It would be easy to dismiss the Speakout crowd as a retread of the Referendum Party or UK Independence Party: the same strain of Europhobia is visible (along with some of the same people, like the millionaire former UKIP backer Paul Sykes). That prejudice is hardly allayed when you click onto the 'Who we are' segment of the Speakout website and learn the answer: "A group of northern businessmen."

But a metropolitan sneer at the xenophobic industrialists of Bradford and Barnsley is not good enough. For they are not the only ones discussing immigration as if it were a threat to be tamed. Just this week the very Labour government Speakout so despise showed the extent to which it too is wary of allowing too many newcomers to cross the British threshold. Immigration minister Liam Byrne trumpeted as great news figures showing applications for asylum down by 9%, to their lowest level since 1993. At the same time, Gordon Brown demanded immigrants undertake community work before they be allowed to become British citizens. Both were doubtless keen to divert attention from another new set of statistics, showing that some 579,000 Eastern Europeans have registered to work in Britain since their countries joined the EU in 2004 - a figure which ministers admit could, if anything, be a serious underestimate.

On all fronts the government acts as if Speakout were essentially right: that immigration is a problem and that if we can keep more people out, then that can only be good. Nowhere should that feeling be more pronounced than in London, the most diverse city in the country and a magnet for migrants.

Yet so far we seem to be managing. It is not our businessmen who are taking out full-page ads in the national press to denounce migration. On the contrary it has become a fact of London life, from the Polish deli on every street corner to the Lithuanian nannies at the school gate.

And the evidence seems to bear out what we see anecdotally. Last week [check] the accountancy group PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report showing that, far from acting as a drain on our economy, migrants have lifted it, boosting growth, keeping a lid on inflation and interest rates without undermining the jobs of those born here. That's partly because, simply put, the Poles and others are doing jobs native-born Brits either can't or won't do.

This is why supporting immigration is no longer the exclusive preserve of right-on types in Hackney. Survey opinion among the Economist-readers in the City and they too will make the case for open borders. Philippe Legrain, author of the rousing polemic, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, puts it well when he says that if Britain wants the kind of migrants Speakout would doubtless welcome - American bankers, say - then it has to have people who will "sell those bankers sandwiches and clean their houses."

What's more the Polish builders and Slovak plumbers are not on benefits, they work hard and most go home after a while. The proof of their economic impact is clearest when you consider that Britain was the EU country most open to immigrants in 2004 - and is now the best-performing economy in Europe.

Still, even if Londoners have come to see immigration in a new, more positive light, a question remains. Surely there will come a time when London, open and welcoming as it is, will simply reach its limit, a point at which it is unable to absorb any more people? Our roads are already congested, our Tube trains full, our housing in short supply and cripplingly expensive and our public services creaking under the strain. Put plainly, how much more can London take?

Legrain is unworried. His book cites the case of Israel, which in the 1990s saw its workforce increase by 15% within seven years, thanks to the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union. In British terms, that would be equivalent to an immigration wave of 6m people. Yet Israel coped, so that after the mass migration wages were higher and unemployment lower than before. "Economies are remarkably adaptable," says Legrain, and the capacity of cities to expand, as London has done steadily since 1980, is great indeed.

To ask whether public services in London could cope with extra immigration is particularly rich, given that our hospitals, buses and trains have long relied on immigrant labour. But it's also a strange question to ask. For London had a strained infrastructure even before this post-2004 surge of newcomers: the Tube was full back then, too. Yet Speakout were not speaking out then. Nor were those who now express fear for London's capacity to cope equally vexed at the decades of growth as the capital sucked in people from Manchester or Glasgow. It makes you wonder: is this concern over London's limits really that - or a disguised protest at an excess of foreigners?

Of course there are challenges for a big city absorbing more and more people. But we should see that for what it is: a problem of success. And if we really don't like it, there is an easy solution: we can become poor. No one will want to come and live here then.