For most of the past 40 years, there was a consensus across the British political spectrum that to raise the issue of immigration in any form would merely give succour to extremists. It all went back to the days of Enoch Powell, who in 1968 raised the issue in such an inflammatory fashion that it became taboo for a generation. But in recent years, as the centre of gravity in British politics has shifted inexorably to the right, the old consensus has started to go into reverse. The prevailing view in the two main parties wnow appears to be that it is precisely by not mentioning immigration that people are driven into the arms of parties like the racist BNP. Well, call me old-fashioned if you like, but I can never quite get away from the fact that I come from that generation that regarded it as bad form to talk such matters. The people who seek to present immigration as a social evil often seem to forget that the National Health Service, along with many other service industries, could not function without it. But those who aspire to be political commentators as opposed to mere polemicists must take the world as they find it rather than the world as they would like it to be. And there can be little doubt as we approach the forthcoming General Election that immigration is one of the issues, if not the issue, that is uppermost in voters' minds. At Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, Tory leader Michael Howard asked Tony Blair whether he was satisfied with current levels of immigration, spearing him on the horns of a tricky political dilemma. If in reply the Prime Minister had said that he was satisfied, Labour would have been seen as not being sufficiently tough on immigration. But if he had admitted that he was not, it would have begged the question why the Government had not done more to tackle the problem over the past eight years. As usual, Mr Blair dodged the question by turning it around on to Mr Howard's allegedly "unworkable" plans which involve pulling out of the Geneva Convention on refugees. But workable or otherwise, Mr Howard is at least articulating the public's concern about the issue in a way that may well strike a chord with parts of the electorate. The wider question, though, in assessing the Tories' overall election chances is: which parts? Though immigration is clearly a major issue for some, the renewed emphasis on it from the Conservative leader raises much more fundamental questions about his broader political strategy. What it shows is that the Tories are at risk of repeating the very mistakes they made in the run-up to their 2001 election failure. A brief history lesson will show that the Tories in the current Parliament have followed an almost identical path to that followed in the last one. When he became Tory leader in 1997, William Hague followed what I believe were his natural One Nation instincts and attempted to move the party back towards the centre of British politics. But with the public still hopelessly in thrall to Mr Blair, he failed to make much headway, and by 1999 had been persuaded to embark on a radically different course. The upshot was the failed "core vote" strategy at the 2001 General Election in which Mr Hague mistakenly placed asylum policy and Europe at the top of his campaign priorities. The cycle then began again under Iain Duncan Smith, who though himself from the right of the party, sought to reach out to the centre ground by making the Tories the party of the vulnerable. There has been very little talk of that, though, since the bloodless coup that brought Mr Howard to the leadership in November 2003. A bitter rift has since emerged between party chairman Maurice Saatchi, who still believes the election can be won, and chief strategist Lynton Crosby, who wants to concentrate on winning 30-40 extra seats. Publicly, of course, the Tories fight to win - but behind the scenes Mr Crosby, whose ideas are essentially a reworking of the "core vote" strategy, appears to be getting the upper hand. The political dilemma facing the party is perhaps most acute in predominantly Labour-voting areas such as the North-East. Do they even attempt to win back constituencies like Tynemouth and Stockton South which they held when last in government but which have since been converted into semi-safe Labour seats? On the basis of Mr Howard's remarks to The Journal's political editor last October, it would appear not. But as I pointed out at the time, the bald truth is that unless such seats are returning to the Tory fold, there is no chance of them regaining power. The tragedy of this for the North-East as a whole is that Labour remains in desperate need of a viable electoral challenge to make it sit up and take notice of the region's problems. After years of ignoring the North-South divide, or denying its existence, the Government finally seemed to have come up with a strategy for sharing prosperity more evenly across the country. It was called the Northern Way, and its basic aim was to turn the three Northern regions into a huge economic growth linked by new infrastructure. Yet this week the influential peer Lord Haskins confirmed what many have suspected for some time - that this is essentially an M62-corridor initiative which the North-East has been tacked on to for "political reasons." What this story reveals is that the case for the North has still not been answered, and that there remains a need for special, targeted solutions to tackle the region's economic and social problems. But what have the Tories to say about all this? Nothing, save that they are going to scale down the work of the region's development agency. Banging on about "core vote" issues such as immigration may well gain the Tories those extra 30-40 seats in the South, but it is not going to win back those lost voters in the North. And though Mr Howard may deny it, it is those voters he needs if he is ever going to enter Number 10. | 
