David Cameron's problem with immigration

The responses to David Cameron’s recent comments on immigration keep coming. We’ve covered it with an alternative speech that the Prime Minister could have said and in today’s Guardian journalist Hugh Muir has the following to say:

“Let me tell you about Green Street. When first I came here, more than 40 years ago, it was high street anytown. There was the supermarket but also Marks & Spencer. The high-street banks each had a presence. My mum, dragging me and her shopping trolley, would buy staples from Tesco and Queen's Market, stopping to wave to our white English neighbours: that was fine. But also to chat with church contemporaries, strapping black women in need of guidance/gossip. That was interminable. The West Indian stuff – the yams, green bananas – came from a ruddy-faced Englishman called Hammond. Heckling him about the quality of his yam was part of the theatre.

So what happened? About the time I went to college, the recession ravaged Green Street. The banks drifted away, as did M&S and much of the populace, and into this near corpse of pound shops and charity stores came a life-saving influx, first of Indians, for whom the rents were now agreeably cheap, and then of Pakistani Muslims. They traded there. Bought houses in the surrounding streets. They turned it into the "Bond Street of the east". So where's the disconnect?”

Read the full story over at The Guardian.