The Pickles equation

The integration of immigrants is the hottest of political potatoes. Marine Le Pen won the backing of nearly one in five voters in the first round of the recent presidential election in France by focusing on Muslims and immigrants and their lack of integration. Greek fascists are making opinion poll gains for the first time in a generation, charging immigrants with causing crime and social unrest. In Norway, the Anders Breivik trial shows the intensity of hatred to the realities of modern societies.

In Britain, Eric Pickles is the politician in charge of integration as the secretary of state for communities. Pickles revels in a reputation as a robust and tough operator—a politician unafraid of a fight and ready to challenge orthodoxy. On integration, we might expect strong words from him. After all, it was only a year ago in Munich when David Cameron said we needed a more muscular form of liberalism and reminded us that he thought multiculturalism had failed.

Instead Pickles has chosen to be strikingly low-key. His plan for integration was released almost a year late (in February) and was contained in a surprisingly slim 26-page document. He followed this effort with a tub-thumping speech on integration on St George’s day that spoke of building an inclusive Britain. The speech attracted not a single jot of publicity, suggesting he had not been pushing for headlines. Indeed, the perfect metaphor for the Pickles approach arrived in the middle of his speech, when the intervention of the fire alarm left audience and Secretary of State becalmed in a very British drizzle.



What is the Pickles equation on integration? The strategy’s slight appearance is not deceiving. There are no major policy announcements or initiatives and the government can be reasonably accused of stitching a set of existing initiatives together with platitudes.

Yet underneath the surface, the strategy makes clear the secretary of state’s response to the two big challenges he faces—what the state of play is and what the government should do about it.  In our recent report for the Migration Policy Institute, Shamit Saggar and I unpick those challenges.

The integration strategy is not encumbered by a great deal of evidence. In his speech, Pickles reaches for the good news anecdote—the story of the Ugandan Asians—reminding us of their incredible business success. But such a frame misses the point. Some groups do fantastically well and others appallingly badly.

More important, the government needs a view on why some groups do well and others do less well. Blaming multiculturalism is no excuse for good analysis. The Ugandan Asians succeeded because they chose to live in areas with lots of jobs, because they were highly qualified and valued education, and because they were urbanised before they arrived. Their experience is closer to that of Polish immigrants than Pakistanis or Bangladeshis.

The trick is to focus our limited national resources (our treasure, but above all our time and thinking) on those that do not do well. For instance, GCSE grades are good predictors of future economic success. In London, Chinese and Indian heritage (including Ugandan Asians) do as much as ten percent better than the average. But others do worse than the average, with Portuguese, Turkish and Somali heritage children achieving grades that are 20 percent below par. This is where we need to spend time and money and we also need to understand how best to intervene to ensure groups that do very badly, do better.

Pickles has an answer here. He sets out a theory of government intervention that sees the government is the actor of last resort. The stand out phrase of the whole strategy appears on page nine: “Government will only act exceptionally.” Government sets the playing field and the conditions of success. However, the actor of last resort approach does not square with the reality of how integration happens. Our review suggests smart investments in big social programmes are effective. There is no money for a separate system and even if there were, it wouldn’t last. But tweaks to the major levers do work—for instance when targeted additional language learning is included in education policy, results for children improve. There is not much in the Pickles’ strategy that takes us in that direction. Indeed, the rationale and the revealed preferences takes us in the opposite direction (the additional language programme has been cut).

The Pickles equation has arisen as much by accident as design. It is half-right. Pickles is surely correct when he talks of an inclusive British story, of the common weal and common language. His low key approach and celebration of openness and plurality in our national story sets the tone and he is consciously reaching for the political centre-ground. His celebration of the big national events like the Jubilee as integration manna is proof of his rhetorical skill. He is only half-right though, because without knowing which groups do badly and without policies to back up the rhetoric, we are setting ourselves up to fail.

Will Somerville is a senior analyst at the Migration Policy Institute think tank