Perhaps the most illuminating comment made by Nigel Farage during his discussion with Fraser Nelson on Spectator TV earlier this month was when he reflected on the Brexit campaign. ‘I remember being told, by [Daniel] Hannan and Boris Johnson, “no, no, don’t discuss immigration in the referendum”,’ reminisced the former leader of UKIP. ‘”We’ll lose the referendum. Some of our very posh friends don’t like this sort of thing”.’
It’s not just posh Tories who blanch at the mention of the ‘I’ word; so do posh socialists, which explains why immigration is now out of control in the UK. The vast majority of MPs, if not all strictly ‘posh’, certainly hail from the middle-class graduate class. A decade ago the Financial Times reported that 90 per cent of the House of Commons attended university, which for 30 per cent meant Oxford or Cambridge.
Isn’t it the job of a socialist government to stand up for the more disadvantaged members of its society?
This transformation has been a long time in the making; in 1951, 37 per cent of Labour MPs were working class, a figure that had fallen to 13 by 1997. Last year the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) revealed that just 7 per cent of MPs could be categorised as working class, and in the case of the Conservative party it was 1 per cent. This for a nation where 34 per cent of working age adults are considered working class.
The same skewered demographics dominate the National Assembly in France. Of the 577 MPs elected to parliament in the 2017 election just 1 per cent were working class. This figure rose to 6 per cent in the 2022 election because of the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, 18 per cent of whose 89 MPs are working class.
In contrast, 70 per cent of MPs in the French Assembly are categorised by the IPPR as coming from ‘intellectually superior professions’, which account for 22 per cent of the population as a whole. In 1946, 19 per cent of French MPs were working class, but this figure has been whittled down over the years, a process that accelerated in the 1980s and 90s.
It’s no mystery why ‘posh’ people are more relaxed about mass immigration; they have the money to avoid the consequences of the population explosion. Farage spelt it out to The Spectator: it’s the working class who have their wages compressed, who most feel the effects of the social housing crisis, the lack of school places, the NHS waiting lists and what he described as ‘fundamental changes in community’.
No party in France has suffered as much from their refusal to address immigration this century as the centre-right Republicans, a fact that should give those in Westminster’s Conservative Campaign Headquarters sleepless nights.
In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy was the candidate of the working class in both the first and second rounds. In the run-off against the socialist Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy won the support of 53 per cent of the working class, the biggest chunk for a centre-right candidate since Charles de Gaulle in the 1965 election. In the parliamentary election of 2007, the centre-right won 313 seats; in last year’s election it was 64.
That the Republicans have become a fringe party is no one’s fault but their own. For years they drifted to the centre, a party run by the affluent middle class for the affluent middle class. Never was this more evident than in their choice of candidate for last year’s presidential election: the bourgeois globalist Valérie Pécresse, whom I described at the time as ‘Macron in a blouse’.
Pécresse was humiliated in the election, winning just 4.8 per cent of votes in the first round. The upshot was the election last December of Eric Ciotti as the new chief of the Republicans. There were squeals of protest in one or two quarters, and a handful of centrists resigned from the party because they regarded Ciotti’s positions on immigration and law and order as too right wing. But most Republicans understood: it was either Ciotti or electoral oblivion in 2027.
As well as sending Macron a letter last week, demanding a referendum on immigration, Ciotti also went to Denmark. The left-wing government there is becoming accustomed to French MPs turning up on their doorstep for lessons on managing immigration. Earlier in the month Olivier Véran, the government’s official spokesman, visited Copenhagen on a fact-finding tour.
A journalist accompanied Ciotti on his trip and, after the Republican leader had met Kaare Dybvad, Denmark’s immigration minister, she interviewed the Dane. Having confirmed that that he was ‘200 per cent’ left-wing, Dybvad explained why his government was the only left-wing one in Europe to take a tough line with illegal immigration. ‘If you’re from the left then you must have a strict immigration policy because it’s always the working class which pays the price of immigration…never the rich or bourgeois.’
The journalist asked Dybvad if he was OK with the fact that his government’s immigration policy was seen as ‘a model in France by the right and far-right’. ‘If we can inspire other countries to control their immigration, I think that’s great,’ he replied. Ciotti retweeted a clip of the interview, calling it an ‘extraordinary declaration by the socialist minister of Denmark’.
Was it ‘extraordinary’? Isn’t it the job of a socialist government to stand up for the more disadvantaged members of its society?
That is what motivated Red Wall voters to ‘lend’ the Tories their vote in the 2019 election. They believed their pledge to take back control of Britain’s borders. There won’t be a similar loan in next year’s election. But nor will many of these Red Wall voters return to Labour, a party that is indistinguishable from the Tories when it comes to mass immigration.
In his interview with Spectator TV, Farage warned that the failure of mainstream political parties in Britain to reduce migration has created an ‘anger gap’ and ‘something or someone at some point is going to fill it’. Marine Le Pen filled the ‘anger gap’ in France, although the Republicans are belatedly trying to muscle their way in. In Britain the gap remains empty, for the moment.
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