Immigrants? Yes please!

I do so long to import a Polish mother's help. Or a Latvian, or a Slovakian. I hear such wonderful reports about the joys of employing an East Central European either around the house, or working on some domestic building extension : these new immigrants who joined the EU just a year ago have been, as far as I can see, greeted with open arms on their arrival in Britain.

Ireland, too. Some of my oldest feminist friends in Dublin - with whom I marched on "Wages for Housework" demos back in the '70s - now rave about the quality of migrant housework. When I grumbled a little while ago about my housewifely duties, my friend Sheila cried down the phone - "Oh you must get a Latvian maid! Or a Russian - they're quite wonderful. You won't ever have to think about housework again!" Why, Sheila enthused, her Russian maid, when dusting, had taken every book out of the shelf and dusted behind it! Instead of sullenly doing as little as they can get away with, these migrant workers genuinely want to do a thorough job. Moreover, they don't have to be asked to clean the paintwork or scour the oven: they take the initiative and just do it.

The feminists of yesteryear becoming the memsahibs of today, chattering about staff? If so - so what? We have grown up and reached the mature realisation that you cannot do everything yourself: delegation is necessary in all endeavours. Superwoman is dead: but new migrants are alive and well, and coming to these shores in their hundreds of thousands, to the great appreciation of those who employ them. This includes not just families who need domestic help, help with children, or building extensions, but even more widely in the various areas of the care and service industries. And the word on the grapevine is that these young workers from East Central Europe are industrious, motivated, willing and punctual. They are eager to work and to earn, and what is essentially lacking, I fear, in so many of our home-grown workers, eager to improve themselves. In the service industries, they are friendly and obliging. They are also, according to reports, properly educated, politely brought up, and not foul-mouthed. This is now the accepted wisdom among the bourgeoisie - that these new migrants are highly desirable as employees.

And this is where, I believe, Michael Howard and the Tories have got the immigration question wrong, as a "touchstone issue". The middle class voter who is inclined to vote Conservative does not, in my view, suffer from a great anxiety that immigration is out of control. Quite the contrary - since the middle-class Tory is more likely to be in a position of hiring people, and is dependent on migrants, she may worry more about the supply of immigrants suddenly drying up. The notion of a new bureaucratic system of "controlled immigration", with the CBI ruling which skills are in demand and which are not, rather horrifies the employing Conservative who would sooner make that decision herself, thank you.

The people who fear and dislike immigration are, paradoxically, much more likely to be Labour voters. There has always been, with some justification, a fear of incomers among the native worker, since immigrants have historically accepted lower wages. This was the basis of Engels's racist rants again the Irish in the mid-19th century, when he first characterised the Irish migrant as a primitive brute who slept with his pig: he feared that the poor Irish would work for a halfpenny where the English worker required a penny. It can the case that immigrants, who will often do a job more cheaply, are a competitive labour threat to a native working class.

But there is another side to this. It is simply the experience of many employers looking to hire that there is now a degraded British proletariat who are unemployable. They have been ill-educated in rotten schools, indulged by a welfare and "compo" culture, coarsened by a ghastly diet of "in-yer-face" television and had their heads filled with rubbish about "rights", unaccompanied by responsibility or discipline. This lost underclass cannot compete with the new migrants, not because of job rates, but because they have not been brought up with a work ethic, or indeed, facing the hardships that those from many migrant countries know.

Politicians promise this and that and the other: but the main problems with the underclass are not amenable to political remedy. They are social, cultural and moral problems. If a teenage yob can threaten a teacher with "assault" if she should put her arm on his elbow to remove him from the class - and have the teacher suspended while an enquiry is conducted over three years - then yobbishness rules, discipline is non-existent and crime encouraged. "Education, education, education" has no impact on those who have scorn for learning, authority and moral self-betterment.

There may, of course, be unconscious or even racist discrimination against differing types of immigrants: it is a fact that gypsies are seldom welcomed as a migrant force, because they do not have the reputation for honest toil. Perhaps people of colour would not be so valued as the East Central Europeans as migrants, although I personally think that anyone who has uprooted himself from his land and family to come to work in another country is likely to be energetic and enterprising. I grant that there may be nuances on the immigration question. But for all that, I believe that most Tory voters - like me - are far more inclined to pass by Dover docks crying "Please, send more Poles and Latvians! Now!" than to scan the horizon for a new British Border Control Police.