by Another year, another betrayal of mass migration.
The ONS has announced the latest legal migration numbers, 672,000 in the year to June 2023. I would say these numbers are alarming. But we shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, the importation of hundreds of thousands of migrants – and new records for the level of migration into the UK – was par for the course for the Conservative Government.
Rishi Sunak has tried to style himself as a different kind of politician, breaking away from the chaos of the Truss and Johnson years. But when it comes to our borders, it is the perfect candidate for continuity.
It has been politically useful for the government to give the impression that they take net migration seriously: take the appointment (and removal) of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, nicknamed “Cruella” by the left-wing press for her tough stance on border control. .
But it turned out that Suella Braverman’s rhetoric was just that – rhetoric. By the numbers, she proved herself to be the country’s greatest Home Secretary on immigration ever.
Boris Johnson – the hero who oversaw our withdrawal from the European Union, and the last directly elected prime minister – bears a significant proportion of the blame for today’s figure. After all, it was under his leadership that the state loosened many of the visa requirements responsible for our current surge.
The introduction of the social care visa, a reduction in the salary threshold for workers, and an easing of student visas all contributed to today’s numbers. Yes, the “take back control” party has succeeded in troubling immigration from its pre-Brexit peak.
Mass immigration has transformed Britain. In 1991, around 7 per cent of people living in Britain were born abroad. According to our latest census data from 2021, that share has risen to 16.8 per cent.
This transformation has always been carried out without the consent of the community – and in many cases directly opposed. No government has been elected since 1997 on anything other than a platform to control legal migration. And yet, within months of taking office, their manifesto pledges would be delivered.
New Labor oversaw the first explosion in legal migration, as we all know. But it was not until the election of David Cameron in 2010 that the opening of Britain’s borders was accepted as a permanent feature of political office. The then Prime Minister promised to “return net migration to 1990s levels – thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”.
The opposite was true: net migration over five years averaged 247,000, with new arrivals reaching 600,000 in 2014. When the party addressed the electorate again in 2015 and 2017, they made the “thousands promise” over and over again. In fact, the average net migration would be 251,000. Boris Johnson may have felt a little embarrassed when he quietly dropped the commitment to “thousands” in his own manifesto, vaguely indicating a desire to reduce the total number.
Any politician serious about ending the endless cycle of frontier capitalism will have an uphill battle: the Treasury, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education – and yes, the Home Office . It’s not that mass migration has made Britain rich – no – but that our short-term politicians have become addicted to it. It shows that they prefer cheap labor to capital investment, the lowering of institutional standards in place of costly reform (which is electorally unpopular), and negligible GDP growth over per capita improvements.
And what about culture? Suella Braverman was right to say that multiculturalism has failed. It is simply impossible to integrate millions of people from completely different cultures, especially when our own political, cultural and media classes claim our culture as unruly and violently oppressed. Global Britain is expected to always erase its own history.
Integration has proven to be a false God, anathema to the liberal values that built our nation. The result of this failure is clear: we have seen weeks of hate marches where some people who have come to Britain openly support terrorism; institutional coverage of Asian grooming gangs across England; and multiple terrorist attacks. Legislation aimed at easing community tensions has encouraged police officers to arrest citizens for naughty tweets and increase diversity and inclusion.
With Continent Europe riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, engulfed by voters who are sick and tired of their usual political class shamelessly flouting their democratic mandates, a question arises here: will we have our own anti-immigration movement ? Who would lead it? And could it break the bipartisan consensus in Britain once and for all?
The Conservatives are the party of mass immigration. Regardless of what is promised in the coming days, it is vital that we remember that.
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