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Immigration is not the only issue in the EU referendum – it is not even the top issue for most voters, according to ICM research for British Future’s recent publication How (not) to talk about Europe. But it is still probably fair to say that the main reason we are having a referendum on Britain’s EU membership is, in a word, immigration. The issue remains more salient and more important to the public than the EU itself. Ask most people to describe how the EU affects them and the issues of free movement and immigration are those most likely to come up.
These high levels of public anxiety about immigration may look rather worrying to some. Yet Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was right last week when he said that these concerns are, for the vast majority, not driven by racism. Britain is, thankfully, a much more tolerant society than it was 20 or 30 years ago. While racial prejudice still exists, and needs to be called out whenever it enters immigration debates, those who hold such noxious views are now confined to the extreme margins, with openly racist parties like the BNP effectively dead and buried as a political force.
