We are clamping down on immigration now, but the gates have been wide open since 1997, writes Charles Moore.
On Thursday night, the same day as David Cameron was making his speech about immigration, I had to propose the toast of ?England?. My host was the Honourable Artillery Company, sometimes described as our oldest regiment. Today, the HAC is part of the Territorial Army. We honoured some of its young men who had just served in Afghanistan.
Its St George?s Day dinner (held early this year so as not to clash with Easter) is always a feast of patriotism of the sort which reached its apogee in the last years of Queen Victoria. After dinner, a band tootling under their busbies marches in, and everyone sings Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory until their lungs burst. Men in red bum-freezer military evening dress stand on their chairs, some swaying precariously. Then the proposer of the toast (in this case, myself) speaks, inducing post-prandial somnolence.
The HAC kindly arranged for me to be transported to and from the dinner. In these days of satnavs, few drivers really know where anything is: this one got slightly lost. Eventually, I had to stand in a central London street in my white tie and tails, waving my arms and calling in the driver on my mobile phone. He was a friendly man, who quickly endeared himself to me by saying that I had a ?lovely accent?. He spoke somewhat fractured English and when I asked him where he was from, he said Bangladesh. It turned out, however, that he was born and had spent his entire life (about 40 years) in England.
He asked where I was going after dinner. I said Sussex. He had never heard of it.
What, I asked myself, was his ?England?? If he had had the misfortune to sit in on my speech that night, would he ? even if he spoke the language better ? have picked up any joke or reference that I made? Would names like the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson, or William Blake have rung even the faintest bell? ?And did those feet??,? we sang. ?What feet?,? my driver might have wondered. Anyway, what is ?England?s green and pleasant land? to a man who lives 50 miles from Sussex but has never heard of it? He told me he finds our climate horribly cold, so that when he wants to get out in the country, he flies ?back? to Bangladesh.
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