A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has provided an interesting slant on population movements in Britain. The report’s full of interesting stats, which, if I could be bothered to quote them, would probably bury the point of this post in numbers. The thing that really struck me was there are 5.5 million Brits living abroad. That’s 9.2% of the population and means there are more Britains living abroad than foreigners living in the UK.

Related to those figures is the finding that: “a small but significant minority are finding the settlement experience much more challenging. Often these Britons come up against linguistic and cultural barriers that they have not prepared for, and have, in response, clustered together away from the host society.”

Could it be that many Britains fail to integrate with their host communities? Surely not!

Now, I used to work with an avid Daily Mail reader and staunch racist. Every week I’d have to challenge her on some new bigotry aimed at immigrants and their funny ways. Often she’d express her desire to retire and move to Spain – where, I have no doubt, she would fail to learn the language, live amongst ‘her own kind’ and do her damndest to hold onto all of her English cultural trappings. Isn’t it funny how we spend so much time criticising immigrants for failing to adopt an English way of life (as if there is such a thing in any but the broadest of terms) and then behave in the same way ourselves? Looks like we have more in common with those relatively recent arrivals to our proud nation than the red-tops and Blair would have us believe.

But fear not – we are not the only hypocrites in Europe. Not so long ago I remember visiting my parents, who’ve emigrated to Ireland, and being exposed to the Irish media. While I was there the papers were full of stories attacking immigrants (only dark skinned ones, or eastern Europeans – so my parents were exempt). Complaints were levelled for taking jobs away from locals by working for peanuts, and numerous fanciful rumours abounded about the freebies and special treatment received from the authorities. Yes – you heard that right; there are a great many people in Ireland who don’t seem to like immigrants!

I guess the bottom line is that we hate others for the faults we find in ourselves. I hope that this sort of report will encourage the Party to be a bit more enlightened next time immigration policy is looked at. The things that really annoy me about the way we in Britain talk about immigration is that it’s always referred to as a problem; immigrants are to be ‘tolerated’ not embraced; and our policies should always be couched in economic terms. This last point reflects what I think should change in the Lib Dems. If we continue to think that the only was someone can provide a positive contribution to the country is in economic terms then we will be a soulless country indeed. It’s time we stopped allowing the right-wing tabloids to set the policy agenda on immigration.