Immigration: biting back

By Richard North - May 20, 2023

ONS data on annual immigration are due out on Thursday and, with the expectation of record high figures, the media is gearing up for the perfect storm with analytical articles already finding their way into print.

The Times for instance, is running a lengthy “weekend essay”, headed: “Net migration is at a new record high. How did it come to this?”.

With that, we get a long sub-heading telling us that: “For 13 years Tories have promised to bring immigration down, but the post-Brexit system has allowed it to soar as foreign workers take unpopular jobs. For Rishi Sunak, it’s a political headache and an economic necessity”.

I don’t need to review the content of the piece. Anyone who is particularly interested will read it for themselves and those who know everything there is to know on the subject will pass it by and give the rest of us the benefit of their wisdom regardless.

What did grab my attention, though, was the closing paragraph which notes that Sunak has suggested he wants to cut the numbers to below half a million, and then asks: “Is he channelling one of his predecessors?”.

Moving on, author, Matt Dathan, the paper’s home affairs editor, informs us of a comment made by Lord O’Donnell, Cameron’s cabinet secretary, at an event on Thursday.

According to O’Donnell, when Cameron made that infamous pledge to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”, he had “no intention of doing it”. The cabinet secretary learned of this when he proposed ways in which the policy could be achieved.

These including the prospect of leaving the EU or a vast reduction in visas, to which Cameron had responded: “Don’t be daft. It’s an announcement, don’t get carried away”.

Actually, O’Donnell’s recollection might be a little wonky, as Cameron first made that pledge in January 2010, before the general election, while he was still leader of the opposition.

The comments made at that time, over a decade ago, are instructive. After net immigration had reached 237,000 in 2007, declining with the recession in 2008 but still reaching 163,000, the figure was averaging out at 200,000 a year – or two million a decade – which Cameron thought was “too much”.

If he won the election, that year, he said, he promised to limit net immigration to “tens of thousands” per year, arguing that he didn’t think that was unrealistic. It was “the sort of figure there was in the 1990s and I think we should see that again”, he added.

It is germane to note that ONS figures were suggesting that the population would rise by nine million to reach 70 million by 2028, which prompted Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, to back calls for the all the parties to make general election promises to stop the population hitting 70 million.

With the population standing at 67.33 million in 2021, and other half million added in the 2022 figures, if this year’s figures are closer to the million-mark, and a million is projected to follow in 2024, the population could top 70 million by 2025, a level that Carey thought would drive people to the British National Party.

Yet, while immigration has soared, the BNP has disappeared. And far from presenting a united front to curtail immigration, we now seem to have a position where – like net-zero – all the main parties are adopting a pro-immigration stance.

Thus, sailing past mere analysis into rhetoric, we have Tom Harris in the Telegraph writing under the headline, “Britain has to kick its addiction to foreign workers”, declaring: “If the Conservatives don’t tackle legal migration numbers, they will be sunk at the next election”.

When quizzed by journalists during his flight to the G7 in Japan, Harris remarks, Sunak got a taste of what the next general election campaign will be like. He was asked if he still hopes to bring down legal migration, whence he made it clear he would rather talk about illegal immigration because, although the numbers here are pretty awful too, he does at least have a plan to sort it out.

And that is the very singular point. While for electoral reasons – as with Cameron before him – Sunak will talk the talk, few people have any expectations that a newly elected Conservative government would curtail the inflow, while it is a racing certainty that Starmer’s dire mob will preside over an even greater increase.

Harris concludes that, unless Sunak starts taking the challenge of legal immigration seriously, he risks institutionalising six, or even seven-figure, levels of arrivals in this country in the long term. For those with a political commitment to open borders, Harris adds, that will be a happy day, but for most of the public, it will be a dangerous indication that democracy, once again, has failed them.

Thus, while the BNP has disappeared from British politics, the sentiments which brought it into being are still with us and, by dint of political neglect, could just as easily drive the emergence of a new party opposed to turning the UK into a third world slum.

While the liberal left papers skate past the issue for the present – no doubt poised to leap to the defence of the open-borders crowd, telling us how “enriching” mass immigration is – the Guardian has adopted the high moral tone, as always.

It asserts that, if Sunak indulges the capture of his party by “xenophobic nationalism”, this would make the Tories both toxic and out of touch. Britain, says the paper, “doesn’t need more snarling populists. They have damaged the country enough”.

This leaves Douglas Murray to take up the slack. In the Telegraph, he draws a parallel between here and the US, observing that “American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie” – that we need immigration to bolster the workforce.

Both Biden and Sunak, he asserts, claim to be seeking to bring the numbers down, while doing nothing to actually achieve that. Governments like those in Britain and America have simply lost control not only of their own borders but of their own arguments.

Too many politicians do not want to address such questions raised by rampant immigration because every time they restrict immigration – especially illegal immigration – they are accused of heartlessness by the vocal critics to their Left. They perceive a reputational price for restricting immigration, but none whatsoever for allowing it to run away from them.

Nevertheless, there is a brutal but necessary truth here. Neither America – and certainly not Britain – can save the rest of the world by taking in even a modest percentage of the global population.

In the UK alone, Murray says, we have nowhere near enough houses, nowhere near enough money and nowhere near enough social capacity to absorb millions of people. He adds that you can have open borders or a welfare state – but you cannot have both.

Like Harris, Marray draws a similar conclusion, noting that the public knows this and, although there is no political way to express it yet, in time there will be. There is only so much time, he says, you can keep being lied to.

To an extent, there is a parallel here with Brexit. For decades, the lofty elites were telling us that the EU didn’t matter, that no-one was interested in the issues, and that there was no possibility of change. Then came the referendum defeat which none of them saw coming, so certain were they of their own rectitude.

Yet, day after day – as ordinary people have multi-cult propaganda shoved in their faces by endless TV adverts which depict a land where the majority seem to be black and every other family is mixed-race -there is stirring down in the weeds.

If, as Murray suggests, the political classes continue to hold a debate on the issue that is not only detached from reality but also from what most voters want, there will eventually be a reaction of the same seismic importance as Brexit.

You can only ignore your voters for so long, and they will only tolerate so much, before they bite back. Allowing millions of immigrants to descend on this country is stretching tolerance beyond breaking point. I would like to think that the teeth are being sharpened.