The other issue which I didn’t feel was addressed in Brown’s speech was not immediate immigration but the position of older waves of immigrants. Many of the conflicts in Bradford and Oldham do not occur simply within new migrant communities, but among young people who were born and raised here. Poverty, joblessness, lack of aspiration and racial hostility are what really affects social cohesion on our estates. There is a danger that Brown will give a false sense that the jobs he is saving are for white citizens only, not brown or black ones. And the only way you head that off is by saying loud and clear that migrants who came here legally and settled in this country deserve exactly the same rights to work, to social housing and to benefits as white citizens. That was somehow missing in the speech I felt.