The question of fairness cannot be resolved once and for all. David Blunkett, before resigning from his position as home secretary in December 2004, had motivated the British Home Office to crack down on what was then called “sham marriages”. This was more a question of immigration policy than one of morality. Mr Blunkett wanted to stop immigrants from making marriages of convenience in order to stay on legitimately in Britain. So, people born outside the European Union and with permission to be in Britain for six months or less had to get a certificate of approval to marry from the home secretary at a cost of £135. Last year, there was a ruling against this drive and it was shut down. But the new home secretary, John Reid, tried to revive his predecessor’s idea recently, and this has been struck down again — and quite rightly — by an appeal court. The court’s reasons are telling. Such a right violated the right to marry and the right not to be discriminated against. The flagrant breach of the latter arose from the fact that the rules did not apply to Church of England marriages. The judges found this disproportionate, and although disapproving of sham marriages, they thought that each such case had to be investigated separately and in a “proportionate manner”, instead of forming blanket rules for all.

With people from eastern Europe and the new EU countries pouring into Britain without showing much desire to leave, post-Blair Britain might be entering a difficult phase with regard to its immigration policy. ‘Britishness’ could become much less nice and smiling in the process. The industry minister, Margaret Hodge, had raised a furore recently by proposing that local British-born families should get priority for scarce social housing over newly arrived immigrants, with the exception of refugees. She saw this as prioritizing “need” over a “sense of entitlement”. Ms Hodge felt that she was breaking a taboo, by initiating open debate on an issue often discussed in private, but is inevitably suppressed by political correctness. This is the Blunkett legacy, and comes with a revival of Mr Blunkett’s emphasis on other modes of “integration”, like fluency in English as a condition of acquiring British citizenship and anxiety over “the recent surge in faith schools”. But there is still the possibility of a genuine debate over such ideas, and some of the obviously discriminatory ones do get struck down.