Immigration: revenge of the Europhiles

By Richard North - November 30, 2023

They did this to us with the EU, dismissing our concerns as a “single issue” obsession. For years, we endured the sneers and the name-calling; we were “xenophobes” and “little Englanders”, and our cause was of no interest to the electorate as a whole.

Then along came Brexit and the 2016 referendum; to their great shock, this was a subject that the nation cared about and, despite a shambolic campaign from both sides, we ended up leaving the EU.

But no lessons have been learned. They are doing exactly the same with immigration, dismissing our concerns and resorting once again to stock insults, the most favoured being to brand us all as “far right”, closely allied with the free use of the “racist” epithet.

But, as Melanie Phillips wrote in The Times yesterday, “It’s not ‘far right’ to want curbs on immigration”, asserting that public feeling about an uncontrolled influx is being shown in Europe, noting that Tories are at risk as well.

For years, she says, proper discussion of all this has been paralysed. There has been an unholy alliance between progressives, who hold that the defence of national identity is racist, and free-market conservatives who support mass immigration to force down wage costs.

Yet, she argues that across Europe, the public is showing that what has been denounced as “far right” turns out to be the mainstream – which has been abandoned by the entire political establishment.

Thus, she concludes, if politicians don’t stop sleepwalking over this towards cultural oblivion, politics in Britain and Europe may become transformed into something that really does bust liberal democracy wide open and take us all into dangerously uncharted territory.

The signs of political tension are already there in the Conservative Party, for all those who care to look, with a down-page piece in the Telegraph reporting that the (not so) Cleverly had become a “flak magnet” for migration, amid growing calls from backbenchers for a tougher approach.

In fact, if Starmer is to be believed, the situation is far more taut than the Telegraph headline would indicate. He believes that Sunak is facing “open revolt” on immigration in his party and has even lost control of his own ministers – a reference to Robert Jenrick who  recently seemed to distance himself from the prime minister, saying he would have curbed legal migration “before last Christmas”.

With that, Starmer asserted at PMQs that Sunak seemed to be the only person on the Tory benches without his own personal immigration plan. “Clearly, his own side do not have any faith in him”, he jeered. “Why should the public?”

As a sign of the growing unease, we see in The Times a report which tells us that Sunak is facing pressure to scrap an immigration route that allows foreigners to be hired to plug workforce gaps despite fears that it could harm the economy and fuel inflation.

The Home Office, we are told, wants to accept proposals published by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) last month to ditch the shortage occupation list, which allows employers to hire foreign workers at 20 percent below the going rate in their industry.

The list contains dozens of jobs across a wide range of industries and has been criticised for repeated additions in recent years. As well as including occupations such as care worker, engineer and bricklayer, the list includes ballet dancers, graphic designers and “arts officers”.

That this sort of thing is going on illustrates how far from reality the immigration system has strayed. Yet, despite that, the establishment media do not really appreciate the depth of public unease, with Monday’s leading article in The Times wibbling about the need for ministers to reduce migrant numbers “sustainably”, without “hurting the economy”.

But it has gone way past that. The latest YouGov tracker poll on the most important issues facing the country has immigration as the third item on the list, for the general electorate as a whole.

For all voters, it comes below the economy and health, but while the trend is declining for the top two, concern on immigration is showing a sustained increase since April 2020, when it bottomed out at 14 percent, rising now to 41 percent on 27 November.

The picture for Conservative voters, though, is dire for Sunak and the parliamentary party. Concern about immigration leads the field, at 68 percent, ahead of health which stands at 52 percent and way ahead of the economy which comes in at 39 percent, nearly 30 points behind the lead.

Unless the concerns are miraculously defused, it very much looks as if immigration will be the key issue for Tory voters at the general election, although as the news piles up, nothing seems to be going his way.

At a select committee hearing yesterday, clueless Home Office officials were forced to admit that the whereabouts of 17,000 illegal immigrants whose asylum claims had been withdrawn were currently unknown.

Conservative MP Tim Loughton had asked why 17,316 asylum claims had been withdrawn in the year to September 2023 and whether the home office knew where the former claimants were. The hapless Simon Ridley, interim second permanent secretary, replied it was “not fortuitous”.

Clearly nonplussed, he admitted that: “In dealing with a lot of older cases there have been some of those people who have absconded at that point”, and when asked by Loughton if he had any idea where those 17,316 people were, Ridley conceded: “I don’t think we know where those people are, no”.

Even then, it is possible for things to get worse. The Financial Times has obtained figures from the Home Office which show that, of the 96,000 dinghy people who arrived in Britain between January 2018 and June 2023, only 1,319, or 1.4 percent have been removed from the UK.

To give some sense of perspective, the FT cites Peter Walsh, a researcher at the Migration Observatory, who says that since 2021 about 70,000 asylum seekers in the UK had been considered potentially “inadmissible” because they had entered “irregularly”, or without the necessary authorisation or documents required, from a safe third country.

At the same select committee meeting at which Simon Ridley so egregiously underperformed, when questioned by Conservative MP Lee Anderson, home office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft said he was unable to say how many people had been returned to a safe third country over the past three years.

One certainly doesn’t have to be “far right” here to conclude that the home office is not exactly on top of its brief, and it seems entirely reasonable to ask whether there is anyone in government who is actually in control.

Worse still, we get the likes of Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph pointing out that immigration is perhaps the biggest political issue of our time, noting that Brexit was supposed to provide answers. Yet, he concludes, so far it’s made matters worse, not better.

While Brexit has not entirely delivered the economic goods, the much bigger disappointment for many Leave voters, Warner says, is on migration. Without the promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, he argues that Leave could not, and would not, have won.

Now, with net migration surging to record levels over the past two years, there is a growing sense not just of frustration with the body politic, but of abject betrayal.

Perhaps this is what it is all about. Things are getting so bad that by contrast, even rejoining the EU’s Single Market and accepting freedom of movement has become a popular option, supported by 57 percent of respondents in a YouGov poll.

That we are being saturated by third world detritus could, in the final analysis, be the revenge of the Europhiles, making life so indescribably bad that even EU membership looks attractive. The only problem is, though, that with France potentially on the brink of a civil war over migration, and stresses apparent all over Europe, they may have miscalculated.

When even Allison Pearson in the Telegraph begins to make sense, writing as she does of “a multicultural monster beyond control”, we may have a situation that they hadn’t bargained for.