Who in Westminster is ‘right-wing’ on immigration? Which parties are actively propelling the Overton window to the right?
If you listened to some mid-wit urban leftists you’d think all three parties jostling to be top of the polls – Reform, Labour and (least successfully) the Tories – are engaged in a mad political arms race on the subject.
Clive Lewis, the left-wing Labour MP, this week accused ministers of ‘enabling the mainstreaming of racism’ by putting out a video of people being deported. Certainly, we have travelled a distance from the days when even attempting to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants was deemed unconscionable.
But if there is an arms race going on, it must be over which party can construct the best pea-shooter – because none appears to understand the sulphurous public mood.
For the past 20 years, pointing out the downsides of mass immigration has been my specialist subject. Damage to social solidarity and cultural cohesion, heightened levels of criminality within some migrant groups, high welfare dependency in others, the overwhelming of public services and infrastructure capacity, downward pressure on pay for working class jobs, the housing crisis, rape gangs, ‘honour’ violence, FGM, electoral fraud, terrorism – all seemed worthy of comment to me.
As did the serious harm caused to faith in the political process by the constant lying to voters about bringing immigration down. It always seemed like a plurality, probably an outright majority, of the British public were similarly sceptical of immigration. The EU referendum result seemed to bear that out. But across most of establishment politics – the media, academia, the arts and in legal circles too – such thoughts were verboten. All were required to muster around the mantra that ‘Diversity Is Our Strength’.
Yet something has changed. Even in elite circles this mindset is in retreat and in popular ones it is now openly ridiculed regardless of the chilling threat of ‘cancellation’ for heresy. Several factors are at work. The shocking scale of the anti-Semitic hate marches which followed the Hamas pogrom in Israel is one. The electoral success of the nationalist right in other western countries is another. The belated trickling out of data on crime, low economic contribution and high welfare dependency among some migrant cohorts is yet another. The false premise that native white people are inherently exploitative and those from minority groups invariably victims of oppression is increasingly the cause of public disgust. Who can fail to have noticed that burning a Quran is now an actual crime, while abusing a police officer as ‘stupid and white’ is not? And after half a decade of the Tories failing to ‘stop the boats’, it has taken just half a year of Labour failing to ‘smash the gangs’ to crystalise this cynicism.
Against this backdrop, none of the ‘big three’ parties is properly connecting. Techy Kemi has unveiled a plan about Indefinite Leave to Remain, Reform chunters on about how bad things are but produces no policy at all, Starmer releases videos and hypes up his new Border Security Bill which in fact reinstates a pathway to citizenship for illegal arrivals.
Nobody appears to understand that the old paradigm has collapsed
Nobody appears to understand that the old paradigm has collapsed. Even Nigel Farage has pulled back from the leading edge of public opinion, scoffing at the idea of mass deportations and arguing ‘if we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose’.
There are only three MPs I would assess as having fully grasped the magnitude of the British opinion shift: Reform’s Rupert Lowe, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, who has been proven right about basically everything since Sunak sacked her as home secretary.
The public appetite for drastic action is growing all the time. For instance, instead of ‘reforming’ the asylum system, why not just abolish it as a rancid racket? Japan barely does asylum and yet is hardly treated as a global pariah. Its high-trust, low-crime society is instead a cause of widespread envy, just like those of migration-sceptic European countries such as Poland and Hungary.
Instead of dreaming-up nerdy micro measures to try and rein-in activist judges, why not save billions by scrapping the entire immigration tribunals system? Just do away with the right of foreign nationals to challenge decisions by British authorities to require them to leave the realm. Make Judge Hugo Norton-Taylor and his pals redundant.
Perhaps you consider such measures unthinkable. They won’t seem like that by 2029. Someone ought to be getting ahead of the curve.
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