Myths and mantras are swirling around the increasingly-toxic immigration debate as mainstream parties flounder in the face of Ukip’s insurgency. These include the old favourite that no-one is ever allowed to discuss the issue due to political correctness, when papers and political discourse have been swamped by the subject for years. Or claims the British public was never asked about allowing in floods of foreigners, despite elections contested by parties displaying a range of stances from sympathy to outright hostility.

But perhaps the biggest falsehood, frequently heard reverberating around the Westminster echo chamber, is that immigrants undermine Britain’s public services. We hear this charge from across the spectrum as panicking parties chase after Nigel Farage, the Pied Piper of pessimism. Yet the truth is rather different. If there is a cover-up committed by Westminster as large chunks of the electorate seem to believe, it is by politicians abusing the issue of immigration to hoodwink voters and hide their own deficiencies.

Take the health service. There is regular tiresome talk of crackdowns on ‘health tourism’, although the young European migrants moving to this country are far less likely to be a drain on health care than the one million mainly-elderly Britons who have moved to Spain. Indeed, some Polish acquaintances say they fly home even for dental treatment rather than risk our rickety health services.

Yet as Stephen Nickell from the Office for Budget Responsibility reminded MPs last week, the NHS would be in dire straits without migrant staff. They have come from more than 200 countries. More than one quarter of doctors and one in seven of all qualified clinical staff in hospitals and surgeries are foreign nationals - along with a huge number of carers (as I have seen from grateful personal experience with my profoundly disabled daughter).

Instead of condemning immigrants for threatening the welfare state, politicians should be praising them to the heavens for supporting the nation’s most precious public service. And this is ignoring the dry economic reality that they contribute more to the exchequer than they take out, as shown by scores of studies, as well as being more likely than native-born Britons to set up businesses and less likely to claim benefits.

10 things immigration has done for Britain Show all 10 1 /10 10 things immigration has done for Britain 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Mini The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marks and Spencer Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Thunderbirds And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television. Rex Features 10 things immigration has done for Britain The House of Windsor Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain I Vow To Thee My Country Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached. Creative Commons 10 things immigration has done for Britain Curry and Cobra Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Sun Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marxism OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The NHS They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for. Getty Images

Then there are schools. One of the most remarkable recent stories in global education has been the astonishing turnaround of London schools, improving much faster than those elsewhere in the country. The performance gap between rich and poor children has also narrowed, with pupils from some of the capital’s impoverished areas now outperforming their peers from far more affluent areas. For all the scaremongering about schools under pressure from migrants, standards soared at a time when the capital bore the brunt of Britain’s recent heavy influx of newcomers.

Academics are grappling with this phenomenon. And their studies indicate immigration lies behind this transformation, as well as helping drive London’s economic and cultural dynamism. One report found an arrival of Polish pupils lifted overall school results and boosted classmates’ performance, even when they had little or no English. Another from Bristol University last month concluded the improvements were down to diversity, saying schools with high numbers of ethnic minority and migrant pupils gained best results because of their higher aspirations.

So much for Farage’s claims that immigrants are wrecking public services and ruining the quality of life in Britain. In truth, they are doing the precise opposite - propping up the health service he professes suddenly to revere and driving up school standards. Perhaps this was what Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, meant when he spoke on the radio recently about children with poor English changing the character of schools? Sadly, I fear it not; it was just another salvo in a crude political arms race.

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Clearly there are pressures when a country’s population increases fast - although our rise is also down to welcome increases in life expectancy and birthrates. Yet migrants have become the proxy for any problem, the easy target for almost any issue. But if there are too few doctors’ surgeries and primary schools, whose fault is that? Who should be blamed for decades of failure to build enough houses? Or for the low skills of too many school leavers and the shameful poverty of expectation that failed generations of working class kids? Immigrants contributing to our prosperity and public services - or politicians who failed to plan for the future?

This stench of hypocrisy wafts perhaps most strongly over the issue of housing. For at least two decades, Britain has been building about half the number of new homes needed; last year, for instance, only 110,000 of the 250,000 needed new homes were completed. Yet despite a few tentative attempts by the coalition, politicians have ducked difficult - and potentially unpopular - questions over planning, social housing and green belts, resulting in severe shortages of homes, soaring prices and rising rents.