AFTER Reform’s stunning elections results, the Prime Minister made a speech promising a significant reduction in net immigration. It failed to satisfy migration sceptics.
It upset the left even more, whose ears pricked up at the dog-whistle phrase ‘island of strangers’. They would not have started barking so furiously if they had remembered the Government’s agreement to grant work visas to an unlimited number of Indians (exempted from National Insurance Contributions for three years) and plans to allow in young (18-30) people carrying European passports, whatever their country of birth.
They might also have recalled the Sentencing Council’s recommendation that the usual penalty for illegal immigration be reduced to nine months’ imprisonment, which is below the threshold for automatic deportation. It is interesting that although the Council is required to be impartial, seven of its eight judicial members were appointed by Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett, formerly a Liberal Democrat MP (see section 4 here).
So despite Sir Keir’s recent statement, the general direction of travel on this issue seems clear.
Nevertheless in PMQs Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts challenged Starmer, saying his Monday speech contradicted his previous support for ‘migrants’ and free movement. ‘Is there any belief he holds that survives a week in Downing Street?’ she asked. Sir Keir’s reply, ‘Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish’, was so brutal that it caused a stir on his own side as well as the Opposition’s.
He completed his response with dream-talk – ‘I want to lead a country where we pull together and walk into the future as neighbours and as communities, not as strangers’ – that left us not so much soothed as confused. How was this to be achieved?
The challenges of immigration are not simple. As Douglas Murray has said, ‘If you import the world’s people, you also import the world’s problems.’ The current dangerous confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is an example.
Again, the conflict between Israel and Gaza has resulted in public unrest in this country and influenced the election of several ‘independent’ Muslim MPs who repeatedly raise related questions in Parliament. Reportedly, half of Britain’s Jews have been considering emigration because they feel the authorities have not been grasping the Islamist nettle firmly.
There is a specific difficulty with the latter religion, because taken literally and to extremes it threatens to destroy our separation between Church and State. Theocratic rule – we have had this before, with Christianity – unites believers without reference to territorial limits, and the joys and terrors of the afterlife make any sacrifice or atrocity here well worthwhile. The easy-going liberal democracy we have enjoyed until recently is, historically speaking, a temporary sunlit clearing in an ancient monster-infested forest.
Fortunately most Muslims in the UK abide by their faith’s general rules for daily living without a close reading of all its texts. Nevertheless there are unequivocal statements in those sources that are a kind of underbrush awaiting a firebrand to begin a conflagration. When society is under severe stress – persecution, war, economic breakdown – wild movements can begin, as Norman Cohn illustrated nearly 70 years ago. This is why Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues the need for a Reformation in Islam to temper its absolutism and make it compatible with pluralist Western society.
There is another, ideology-free consideration: our country is over-populated. Already we import 40 per cent of our food. The problem will increase: net migration is more than compensating for our declining birth rate, while farmland is being converted to housing, infrastructure, ‘green’ energy and wildlife set-asides. There may come a time in our unstable world, as happened during the Second World War, when the threat of food shortages raises its head. Even postwar we once kept a strategic food stockpile, but it was scrapped 30 years ago; not that it would have sustained us for long in any case. The British political class does not plan far ahead but reality makes no concessions to lack of preparation.
However, if we choose not to let our population shrink, we must have a way to sustain it, which will be principally by boosting production to increase import substitution, and by foreign trade. We are in competition with countries whose land and labour are cheaper, or whose massive domestic market and economies of scale allow them to trade surpluses that undercut us. To stand a chance, we have to rebuild high-value engineering capacity, not just cling to a couple of ageing steelworks. Our energy policy has to abandon its hippie Garden of Eden dreams and use every available fossil-fuel resource to keep us going while we develop other, cleaner forms of cheap and reliable power. We cannot wait for Reform to oust the Energy Secretary in 2029, assuming that it can; we are fighting for our economic survival now.
Will Starmer listen? Does he have the nerve for a radical Cabinet reshuffle? Does he have the wit to abandon the Grand Plan that he got Gordon Brown to design for him? One fears his arrogance and ideological rigidity will be his political undoing.
But he may do for us first before he goes.
Republished (and slightly shortened) with the kind permission of the political website Wolves of Westminster.
