Immigration: Britain Must Call Time on Tory Trickery

Don’t worry your racist little gammon heads about immigration, Rishi Sunak is “crystal clear“—”the numbers are too high, and we want to bring them down.” Well that’s alright then. If only he were someone with the authority and power to effect change, rather than just the prime minister. Like so many before him, the soundbites and slogans may roll off Sunak’s tongue, but push him a little harder on the substance and he becomes suddenly squeamish. He does not, for instance, want to put a number on what might constitute an ‘acceptable level’ of immigration—that would “depend on how the economy’s doing at any particular time and the circumstances we’re facing.” How convenient. We’ve seen this charade before … for the majority of the past 13 years as a matter of fact, but before we get into that, let’s have a brief analysis of the latest figures. 

As The European Conservative reported, the Office for National Statistics published data earlier this week revealing that a net figure of 606,000 people came to Britain in 2022. That is of course an all-time high, but hold on, it gets better. Overall immigration was almost 1.2 million—925,000 of whom were non-EU nationals, offset by the 557,000 who chose to leave the country. The rise was mostly comprised of those coming to study (361,000 students and their 135,788 dependants, a ninefold increase on the figure for 2019 incidentally), those coming to work (235,000), those fleeing oppression (172,000), and those claiming asylum (76,000). 

These numbers are likely to be, dare one use the term, ‘conservative,’ since they are the only the official figures we know about; seeing as hundreds of small boat illegal migrants regularly abscond from their hotels, or simply do not wait around for processing on the south coast of England, and reflecting that estimates of the number of illegals present in Britain were well over the million mark four years ago. 

The fact is for all the Tory bluster, no government since Blair (they’ve all been Tory, with the odd bone thrown to the Liberal Democrats) has done anything to reduce immigration. Certainly, they made all the right noises. David Cameron pledged to reduce the ‘swarm’ to tens of thousands back in 2010, Theresa May did the same in 2017, Boris Johnson consented to reduce unskilled immigration in 2019, Liz Truss swore to ‘take back control’ in 2022, and Rishi Sunak made it a focal point of his ‘five-point plan’ to “stop the boats.” Nothing has been achieved. While net immigration has run at roughly a quarter of a million per annum since 2010, it soared to 488,000 back in 2021—a number dwarfed by this year’s tally. In short, cheap labour is a drug our overlords appear incapable of weaning themselves off. 

If the electorate had not already done so, it must now accept the reality: the CONservative Party is the party of uncontrolled immigration and it has lied to us, of that there can be no doubt. This is not the usual equivocation of pretending you don’t understand what Brexit means, or that you are incapable of understanding your own lockdown policies; this is out and out deceit. Why? Because rising numbers year upon year is a pattern not an error, because the Australia-style points system never materialised, because the minimum salary required for migrants to settle in UK was quietly reduced by 30%, because the leaked immigration figures approaching a million to lessen the blow were desperately cynical, and because frankly no one could be that incompetent. 

Naturally, I accept that the civil service is a problem. It is clear that a fierce activist element lurks within Whitehall—one that has repeatedly attempted to frustrate Priti Patel and now Suella Braverman’s attempts to get to grips with immigration. But if this cannot be dealt with by discipline and dismissals where necessary (heaven forbid one is accused of ‘bullying’), then one must resign with one’s head held high. What you absolutely cannot do is stand for election on a conservative ticket, and pretend the current state of immigration is acceptable to the public. 

Meanwhile, the operation of the Home Office is more akin to something out of a Monty Python sketch than the workings of serious government. Just this week, 50 illegals in a dinghy in the English Channel refused to be picked up by a French warship, demanding instead that the UK Border Force collect them. So, thanks to Rishi’s generosity, the taxpayer is bribing the French to the tune of half a billion pounds not to do their job, and doing it for them; all so we can blow another £7 million a day housing illegals in stately homes in perpetuity. 

It’s time to get serious: the old arguments on immigration are now all defunct. Immigration is not a net benefit to Britain even in pure financial terms. While inevitably, mass immigration cannot help but raise GDP, the Office for Budget Responsibility confirmed recently that GDP per capita is not positively affected. The Tories have obviously no intention of dealing with the matter, no matter what promises they make. Which means the argument that ‘the Labour Party would be worse’ is now spurious. How exactly could Labour be worse? At least there’s a vague hint of honesty to their open borders fantasy, their desires for realignment with the EU, and their anti-British sentiment—you might even get free wifi to watch the nation burn if you vote them in. 

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering why you cannot get to see your GP, your children cannot get a primary school place, or haven’t moved out by the age of 40, perhaps you’re starting to get the message. Sure, open borders means the nation’s hand carwashes are full, but so are the roads, the hotels, the prisons, and the NHS backlog. White middle-class berks like Monty Don may whine that the Chelsea Flower Show is too white, but these problems will no doubt be short-lived. Whites are already a minority in the country’s major cities, and will soon be everywhere else too. 

Pilloried as a racist and dismissed from the shadow cabinet before the ink was dry on his “Rivers of Blood” speech, Enoch Powell wasn’t far off the money when he said this:

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated. 

How prophetic. It’s worth recalling that Powell’s ‘inflammatory’ speech only mentioned immigration numbers of 50,000 per annum—that’s less than a tenth of those now regularly being reported. 

The only question now facing Britain is what the response to such catastrophic mismanagement is going to be. An alternative is going to emerge on the right of politics—particularly because there currently is no party on the right. Whether that is going to be a sensible proposition or something more dangerous (“Nick Griffin Mark II” as Nigel Farage recently mused) remains to be seen. The common man will only tolerate wilful incompetence for so long—and as we’re beginning to see with the police non-reaction to Just Stop Oil, he is close to breaking point. 

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