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| Who will go head to head with the doom-mongers of MigrationWatch? | Who will go head to head with the doom-mongers of MigrationWatch? |
| (4 months later) | |
| Let's tell the positive story about migration, says Lord Dholakia, as pumped up as Lib Dem peers get without losing gravitas. He has been orating to a crowd of politicians, business types, academics, journalists, and everyone has been breathing in the optimism. He sees the start of something. | Let's tell the positive story about migration, says Lord Dholakia, as pumped up as Lib Dem peers get without losing gravitas. He has been orating to a crowd of politicians, business types, academics, journalists, and everyone has been breathing in the optimism. He sees the start of something. |
| But it is easier to be optimistic about the battle in the absence of the enemy. Much harder to predict what will happen when hostilities start in earnest. The Migration Matters Trust promises to be positive about migration, about the moral case, the practical benefits, the proud history. Time, it says, for "an open and honest debate about the issues of migration … acknowledging the positives … confronting the challenges". But the territory, it claims, is not unguarded. There, proprietorial and remorselessly downbeat, like the ogre in Shrek, stands MigrationWatch UK. The two must clash. The only question is when. | But it is easier to be optimistic about the battle in the absence of the enemy. Much harder to predict what will happen when hostilities start in earnest. The Migration Matters Trust promises to be positive about migration, about the moral case, the practical benefits, the proud history. Time, it says, for "an open and honest debate about the issues of migration … acknowledging the positives … confronting the challenges". But the territory, it claims, is not unguarded. There, proprietorial and remorselessly downbeat, like the ogre in Shrek, stands MigrationWatch UK. The two must clash. The only question is when. |
| Being a superficial sort, I boil it down to the personalities. At the end of the day, I ask various groupings, who is going to take on the big beast, Sir Andrew Green, the gloomy, doomy leader of MigrationWatch. | Being a superficial sort, I boil it down to the personalities. At the end of the day, I ask various groupings, who is going to take on the big beast, Sir Andrew Green, the gloomy, doomy leader of MigrationWatch. |
| Nothing to be done about the worship he receives from the Daily Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun. But who is going make sure he doesn't reign unopposed on the Today programme, Five Live and Newsnight? This triggers an interesting discussion of what qualities would be required, for Sir Andrew needs careful handling. He always sounds learned; always delivers the bad news more in sorrow than in anger; always has figures to weave in that no underbriefed presenter would dare to challenge. Always sounds like the Whitehall mandarin he once was. Beatable, perhaps; formidable, certainly – and for too long underestimated. | Nothing to be done about the worship he receives from the Daily Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun. But who is going make sure he doesn't reign unopposed on the Today programme, Five Live and Newsnight? This triggers an interesting discussion of what qualities would be required, for Sir Andrew needs careful handling. He always sounds learned; always delivers the bad news more in sorrow than in anger; always has figures to weave in that no underbriefed presenter would dare to challenge. Always sounds like the Whitehall mandarin he once was. Beatable, perhaps; formidable, certainly – and for too long underestimated. |
| We need a Heseltine type of figure, said one adherent of the new group. Someone with knowledge, charisma and media savvy. "A Ken Clarke type perhaps," chipped in another. "No," said a third. "He's not quite right." | We need a Heseltine type of figure, said one adherent of the new group. Someone with knowledge, charisma and media savvy. "A Ken Clarke type perhaps," chipped in another. "No," said a third. "He's not quite right." |
| I put the question to Barbara Roche, the former home office minister and chair of Migration Matters, halting her discussion with her co-chair, the Tory MP Gavin Barwell. So the next time Sir Andrew sits around the table on Radio 4, I ask her, who'll be on the other side? "Me. Or Gavin or Lord Dholakia," she says. Good luck. Go prepared, I say. And not before time. | I put the question to Barbara Roche, the former home office minister and chair of Migration Matters, halting her discussion with her co-chair, the Tory MP Gavin Barwell. So the next time Sir Andrew sits around the table on Radio 4, I ask her, who'll be on the other side? "Me. Or Gavin or Lord Dholakia," she says. Good luck. Go prepared, I say. And not before time. |
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