So it seems I spoke too soon in hoping that we could discuss issues related to immigration sensibly, without immoderate criticisms being thrown at anyone who raised the issue.

Margaret Hodge wrote in Sunday’s Observer that immigration can lead to tensions in some already deprived communities, and that politicians have a duty to listen to the concerns and fears expressed. “We need to question and debate whether our rules for deciding who can access social housing are fair and promote tolerance rather than inviting division.”, she wrote. “We prioritise the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement others feel they have”¦We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants…We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight in a transparent points system used to decide who is entitled to access social housing.” (emphasis added by me)

Well can we get two issues out of the way straightaway?

Firstly, as Andrew Stunell pointed out for the Liberal Democrats, this whole issue would be much less acute if this government had not continued the policy of its Tory predecessor in progressively selling off a large proportion of the country’s social housing stock over the last twenty five years. The aspiration to own your own home is all too understandable, but like all the most Conservative policies, right to buy is a great story of all-American personal success for those who are able to take advantage of it, and sod the rest. Over time it has slashed the quantity of social housing available, and therefore substantially upped the pressure on that which remains. It’s important to understand that in some areas, the pressure of housing needs is such that going on the waiting list means not question of how many months or years you will have to wait for a property, but for almost everyone, accepting the fact that you will never ever get far enough up it to have a property.

Secondly, the issue of whether housing allocations policy should be related to length of residence is not about race. It’s not about whether someone has been here for three generations (are there any individuals who have been personally here for three generations?) but about whether someone has been here for 20 years or has just arrived. Some South Asians, West Indians, Poles, East African Asians and Nigerians, say, have been in the UK for a long long time - certainly longer than 20 years - and this discussion must be about whether their length of residence in this country should be a factor in their housing entitlement, not the colour of their skin.

So, is it fair for the length of time someone has lived in this country to be taken into account, or should housing allocations policy always be based solely on the criterion of need?

Well an important first principle here is that we do have a fundamental human obligation to anyone who is here, to ensure that they are given shelter, fed, and generally looked after. This is a principle which it has sometimes looked to me as if governments have been prepared to tinker with - providing very low levels of support, and preventing some people from being able to work, forcing them to depend on state handouts from the British taxpayer, for example. But for me providing sufficient basic help is an inviolable first-order principle.

But there is also surely an important second principle, to provide support to those people who have already for a long time been part of our community, and who have helped fund it through taxation and other means. People in communities in this country have expectations that they will be able to take advantage of public facilities such as housing if they need them, and this is also a fair expectation.

Should those two categories of people be prioritised on precisely the same basis?

Well, it seems to me quite reasonable to explore the argument that they shouldn’t. Yes, we have an absolute moral obligation to support those in need of assistance - but that falls short of saying that we must treat them exactly equally to long-standing residents.

We live this out in our personal lives - we are prepared to give to charity or otherwise support people who need help, but we don’t do that to the extent of aiming to bring everyone less fortunate than ourselves up to our own level. There’s £10 sitting in my bank account which would be more use to any one of many billions of people on this planet than it is to me - but we all have to make a judgement about how far we are prepared to go in balancing supporting others, and making our own lives comfortable.

If someone has contributed to the provision of housing, should they not be entitled to some slightly greater claim on it than someone who hasn’t?

It seems to me quite reasonable to consider whether, once the fundamental needs of recent arrivals to this country have been met, further needs should be able to drive a coach and horses through the housing arrangements of the established community, be it black, white or brown. As Mrs Hodge says, “Need is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor.”

Lynne Featherstone also has a grown-up discussion about the need to get this balance right, both on her blog and in her chapter in Britain after Blair. She quotes for example the interesting contrast with school admissions, where having a sibling already with a place is almost universally accepted as giving you a higher entitlement to a place too. And she wonders whether it couldn’t be possible to find some way, after addressing basic needs, of integrating a needs-based and time-based approach to allocations.

For alongside the abstract principle of fair government on this, there are some less high-minded but vitally important calculations which Mrs Hodge mentions, arising from the fact of our being a democracy. Bluntly, if established communities’ expectations about being able to draw something back from society when it is needed (such as housing) are very dramatically not able to be accommodated, then we do have a real problem.

To say this is not pandering to racism, it is reflecting the very real and really perfectly legitimate concerns of residents of this country. And I’m cross with the Refugee Council, who really ought to know better, saying about the Hodge comments “‘The way to counter some of the views that are put forward by the far-right parties is not by trying to follow their lead.”. The BNP also use standard campaigning political techniques such as leafletting and the media - and perhaps if a politician said something that the Refugee Council didn’t like they would attack them for “using the methods of the BNP”. It really is most profoundly dishonest of them to attack anyone talking about this issue as “following the BNP”. The BNP do indeed say unacceptable things about this, but if the Refugee Council think that that means that no-one may question policy on immigration, then they are going to get less respect from me in the future than they have in the past.

Margaret Hodge puts forward various suggestions for ways the approach could be amended to incorporate both need and other fairness factors.We may or may not accept each of them. But most importantly she says we should “question and debate”; “striking the best balance in our approach to migration is fraught with huge difficulties. But if we don’t dare to talk about it, we’ll never get it right.” Absolutely.