It's official: the next UK general elections are to be held on May 5th.

As I noted a week ago, immigration and asylum have so far proven to be the driving issues in this election. They also represent the only policy area in which the Tories consistently outscore Labour in public opinion polls.

It's a measure of public dissastisfaction with Blair's "leadership" on this issue that, with less than one month left before election day, the Tories are poised to break ahead of Labour. Immigration regularly scores at or very near the top in surveys of important issues.

As Alice Miles puts it in today's Times (of London, not New York!):

"Race is the great, silent issue in this election. It is driving everything. Out there in the real world, away from Westminster, Notting Hill and the broadcasting studios, the electorate in the marginal seats over which the parties are now fighting is obsessed with immigration. These voters seethe over confused groups of immigrants, asylum-seekers and gypsy travellers who appear to them to get away with breaking all the rules and living off everybody else. They don’t pay taxes, they claim benefits, they use the NHS and they get 'our' houses. And they seem to be beyond the law."

Drop the part about gypsies, the NHS, and political parties competing for votes over the issue, and it all starts sounding strangely familiar.

"Immigration and asylum is the only issue among the dozen or so most important in determining how people vote in which the Tories have a lead over Labour. Read that again. The only issue. In every single other area, from the economy to health, education, pensions, taxes, and even Europe and Iraq, Labour is in the lead. Yet the parties are within a couple of points of one another in the polls.

Like it or not, this is the issue quietly dominating this election."

I like it. And so should every other supporter of immigration reform, in Britain and beyond.

Changing the discourse is a first, necessary step to bringing about real reform. Thanks to Michael Howard and the Tory Party -- whatever their many failings and however things turn out on May 5th -- that's already happened in Britain.