A peerage for the man who dared to talk about immigration - Telegraph
The peerage conferred upon Sir Andrew Green, the founder of MigrationWatch, is a well-deserved accolade for an individual who dared to raise a subject no one else wanted to talk about.
I interviewed Sir Andrew for the launch of his organisation for the Telegraph in 2002. It caused a huge storm with the prediction that Britain would receive two million immigrants over the following 10 years and that 80 per cent of Britain's population increase up to 2020 would be as a result of immigration.
The forecast was rubbished by the Home Office, Labour politicians and Left-leaning newspapers. Sir Andrew was accused of scaremongering and of massaging the figures.
But official statistics have subsequently shown that he was not only right but too cautious. Migrationwatch researchers exposed the rapidly accelerating trend that began when Labour came into office and took off at the beginning of the last decade.
In 1997, net migration was about 50,000 a year, a level at which it had consistently remained for about two decades before that. Since then immigration to this country has been running at levels unprecedented in our history. You may argue this is a good thing or a bad thing. But without knowing what is happening it is impossible to reach any meaningful conclusion.
A career diplomat for 35 years, serving as ambassador to both Syria and Saudi Arabia, Sir Andrew set out to challenge the official statistical assumptions, relying upon academic demographers like David Coleman at Oxford University as advisers.
As Sir Andrew said at the time MigrationWatch was launched: "Suppressing the facts is much more helpful to extremist parties than bringing them out for proper debate.”
Almost single-handedly he managed to get this debate into the mainstream of British politics.
