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By  Charles Moore

When Laszlo Andor, the EU Employment Commissioner, said this week that Britain risked becoming a “nasty country” because of its attitude to immigration, I happened to be in Paris. I was exercising the right of freedom of movement, due to me as an EU citizen, to make a speech there and visit some archives. 

Paris is strangely empty of French people these days. This is partly because an estimated 300,000 of them are currently in the capital of the newly nasty country, London. The French Lycée in South Kensington is grossly oversubscribed. Educated French people have fled President Hollande’s punitive taxes and the continuing high unemployment and economic gloom of the eurozone. 

Although it does contribute to the dangerously inflated level of house prices in London, this Grande Armée on our shores, though more numerous than any ever threatened us by Napoleon, is not a serious problem. The workers coming are skilled, law-abiding and more than pay their way. Few of them live on our welfare, clash with our culture or threaten us with terrorism. 

In Paris, I addressed a joint audience of the organisation British Conservatives and a new French political movement within the main conservative party called Droit au Coeur. It was an assumption shared, I imagine, by all those present, that it was a good thing that the British could live in Paris if they chose, and the French in London. If barriers went up, it would cause real resentment, damaging prosperity and friendship. 

But most British people do not feel that same reciprocity towards the Bulgarians and Romanians whom, from January 1, we shall be compelled by EU law to admit without restraint. Given that this entry has been inevitable since Romania’s and Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007, David Cameron has been slow to address the problem. This week he announced that he would stop the benefits of new arrivals after six months if they had no chance of “realistic employment”. It is this, and various other not very terrifying threats, that provoked Mr Andor to call us nasty. 

Are we? Are we, at the very least, hypocritical, happily buying our second homes in foreign countries, happily employing cheap foreign workers for domestic or service-industry tasks, but then getting angry when the latest wave from the poorest nations hits our island? 

Certainly we are nasty if we take it out on the Bulgarians and Romanians. If they are free to come, and calculate that it is advantageous to do so, who can blame them? One does not wish to cast aspersions on one’s fellow-countrymen, but these immigrants are probably more likely than we are to work hard. They know what it is to struggle. 

But if Britain has had, pre-Mr Andor, a reputation for being a nice country, what does that derive from? It is surely not our climate (though personally I like our temperate changeability), or even our terrain (lovely though much of it still is), or some special ethnic characteristic of our native people (such as our bewildering sense of humour). Zimbabwe, after all, has delightful weather, Iran is very beautiful and no doubt the North Koreans – if only one were allowed to speak to them – would prove utterly charming. 

No, Britain’s reputation is to do with its institutions – its law, its Parliament, its uncorrupt Civil Service, its Army that doesn’t lead coups d’etat, its police who (unless you are the Tory Chief Whip) do not frame you, and so on. Thanks to those institutions, Britain has proved much better than most at being free, prosperous and peaceful. 

That is why people want to come here. What nasty country has a queue of people trying to enter it? There is no better index of a country’s reputation than whether its main problem is keeping people out or keeping them in. 

And how does a country build up such a reputation? Ultimately it does so because it retains for the institutions it has developed and the people they represent the right to run their own affairs. Without that right, they lose their power. Eventually the nation they represent ceases to be an entity and becomes no more than a populated space. Mr Andor speaks of Britain as a “country”, but perhaps he has not given much thought to what that word means. In what sense is it a country if it cannot rule according to its own laws, or decide who may live in it? When it ceases to be a country, you can be fairly sure it will become nastier for all. 

It is only quite recently that this problem of intra-European immigration has become acute in the European Union. In the early days, what was then called the European Economic Community had only six, roughly economically equal members. So the free movement of peoples created little practical difficulty. Today, enlargement has brought into the union countries, such as Bulgaria, where the average wage is no higher than our unemployment benefit. At much the same time, the eurozone crisis has driven down wages in a member state such as Greece by 10 per cent and put up unemployment in Greece and Spain to more than 25 per cent. 

Before all this happened, but continuing during it, countries such as Britain hugely increased our welfare benefits. We also, under Tony Blair, made what was presumably a deliberate effort to increase immigration. We let the Poles and Hungarians in before the EU said we had to, liberalised the work permit system and dropped the primary purpose rule in relation to marriage and immigration from outside the EU. 

So everyone started coming. We opened our doors so wide that we now have the highest population increase in our history (400,000 a year), more than half of which is composed either of immigrants or the children of immigrants. And now that people want to shut these doors – or rather, to close them enough to control the flow – it is proving practically impossible and, in many cases, illegal. If, as we should, we abolish an unemployment benefit system that pays out to those who have never contributed, the apparatus of non-British courts that now governs us will probably find against us. 

Note that Mr Andor believes he has the right to speak because he is Employment Commissioner. The single currency has proved an unprecedentedly powerful machine for destroying jobs, both within the zone and in the satellite countries to the east. The eurozone, the embryo of the United States of Europe, has proved a nasty country to its poorer citizens. Brussels naturally wishes to get others to remedy its own mistake. 

Since Britain is not in the eurozone, we have lower unemployment, and now, better growth. So it is, in Brussels’s view, our European duty to shoulder this burden. I don’t think many British voters agree with that. Since the vote in British general elections is one of the few rights not automatically acquired by other EU citizens when they arrive here, expect it to be exercised against such a demand. Hence Mr Cameron’s belated sense of alarm. 

It would not, in fact, be a marvellous thing if we threw the free movement of peoples away. Such freedom, though it should not be an absolute, is a good presumption. But what is frightening to the citizens of our generally fairly nice country is the knowledge that we are not being allowed to decide this ourselves. Fear drives us towards nasty politics. Whose fault is that? Not the fault of the institutions of representative government, but of those who have undermined them.