Time to tell the truth on immigration: Britain is full up
We need to be honest about immigration. The lies and the obfuscation are getting us nowhere. The great mass of the British people, including, I would surmise, lots who are themselves of immigrant origin, don’t want the thousands of illegal boat-people who turn up on the shores of Kent each week to be allowed to settle willy-nilly in the UK at their expense. For the most part, the antipathy felt is not racist in origin – though some of it obviously is. Rather, it is founded on indignation.
Britain is full. It is one of the most densely-populated countries on Earth. And there is growing need everywhere among its existing citizens. So who do these new arrivals think they are? Only a fraction of them – maybe one in ten – left their home countries in fear for their lives. None of them made the slightest attempt to achieve entry through the proper channels, choosing instead the English Channel. The great bulk of them, mainly young men on the make, want to cash in on the British way of life, which for them, if they make it to Folkestone, starts with free accomodation, a job and benefits.
And who could blame them? But to deny this is to deny the truth.
Twenty miles to the south, it is obvious that the French don’t want them either. They have enough immigrants of their own, thank you very much. They like to pretend that they don’t know how these people got into France in the first place. It was apparently through some sort of osmosis – nothing to do with them. But however they made it in, it’s time they were gone, which is why the gendarmerie, under orders from the ministry of the interior, is doing so little to prevent them from risking their lives in pursuit of a fresh start in England. The fact that sending them on their way adds to the problems of Brexit Britain is just the cherry on the cake.
And while all this is going on, two thousand miles to the east, large numbers of intending immigrants, largely from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, are being herded by the authorities in Belarus towards the border with Poland, where thousands of frontier police, reinforced by the Polish Army, are determined to repel them.
Poland doesn’t want immigrants either, not even those who have been processed and given the requisite paperwork in other parts of the EU.
The position adopted by the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is not merely that he cannot stand the sight of immigrants. That much is clear – just as it is clear that Belarus is not exactly seen as the Promised Land by migrants from pretty well anywhere in the world outside of its borders. But Lukashenko, an especially vile relic of his country’s Soviet past, has apparenty been persuaded by his master, Vladimir Putin, that it would be a splendid idea to fly in thousands of would-be migrants from Asia and then frog-march them in the direction of Poland, whose government – already in the mire with Brussels – is then left to deal with them in the full glare of the world’s media.
Laugh? I thought Putin would never start. And indeed he didn’t. He has denied all involvement and remained stone-faced throughout, much, one imagines, as Stalin appeared as he ordered another million Russian conscripts into battle against the Germans at Kursk.
The dilemma faced by the EU is acute. On the one hand, the Commission and the European Council have to defend the external border. That’s a given. On the other, by doing so, they are supporting the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, and his Law and Justice Party, whose antipathy to immigration, verging on the pathalogical, is one of the key issues that has turned Poland into an EU pariah state.
Who would be Ursula von der Leyen? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Elsewhere, in the Canaries, Spain’s Moroccan enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the remote Italian island of Lampedusa and right across the island-studded frontier between Turkey and Greece, the immigrants just keep on coming. Nothing short of machine-gun fire will stop them, and that isn’t going to happen.
Which brings us back to where I began. In France, Éric Zemmour, the right-wing pundit and one-time talking-head who may or may not stand against Emmanuel Macron in next year’s presidential elections, has taken public opinion by storm with his claim that Muslim immigrants are bent on swamping what was once Christian Europe with a view to creating a de facto caliphate stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and beyond.
Zemmour trades on a theory, Le Grand Remplacement, or Great Replacement, propagated by a renegade French writer, Renaud Camus – no relation to the author of The Outsider and The Plague – who contends that the switch is being directed, for some obscure reason, by a shadowy global élite. But there is no doubt that Zemmour has hit a nerve. He has succeeded in getting under the skin of millions of voters, including some who might have supposed themselves to be on the more liberal side of the ledger, by positing that French civilisation may be about to commit a form of societal suicide.
My own feeling is that his star will fade. He is quite clearly thrilled by the commotion he has caused, including his will-he/won’t he stance on the presidency. The celebrity he earned as a political analyst and shit-stirrer on the right-wing television channel Cnews has been amplified ten times over by nightly reports of his Trump-style rallies up and down the country. But by the time the election comes round, next April, it may well be that voters will turn to the devils they know – Macron and Marine Le Pen – and away from Zemmour, whose arrival in the Élysée would threaten not just civic order in France, but across the EU.
That said, you can never tell with twenty-first century electorates, who have shown themselves ready to be be persuaded by all manner of positional twaddle. The Macron government is currently playing it both ways. The President has passed legislation that requires Muslim citizens as well as newly arrived settlers to subscribe to a France-First policy in which Mosque and State are strictly separated. At the same time, his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has implicitly instructed his border force to turn a blind eye to the daily exodus of small boats setting out for England from the Pas de Calais.
The minister’s official position is that his officers are doing their best, and there is no doubt that they face an extremely difficult uphill task. Not only do many of the people-smugglers hide behind British passports, but, as Darmanin pointed out over the weekend, UK-based voluntary agencies have set themselves up in Calais with the express purpose of ensuring that migrants are picked up mid-Channel by British rescue boats. Whatever the truth, the reality is that nine out of ten of those who push off from shore are able to proceed unimpeded, and even those who are turned back are free to set off again the following day. Meanwhile, thousands more are making their way north from every point on the compass, using France (and Belgium) as no more than a staging post.
In the UK, the public’s response to the arrival each morning of enough illegals to fill two trains from London to Manchester has thus far been surprisingly measured. Most people, including, I would day, a majority of Labour voters, want something to be done. They just don’t know what. And therein lies the problem. The Tories proclaimed it as an article of faith that by voting for Brexit the British people would be taking back control. But this has turned out to be an empty promise. Priti Patel can no more stem the tide on illegal immigration than Darmanin can halt the build-up of immigrants in all of France’s big cities.
Even Boris Johnson, the primary author, along with Nigel Farage, of the lie that Britain could remain an island unto itself, has been forced to admit that strong-arm methods, such as those proposed, then dropped, by Priti Patel, won’t work and that something more fundamental needs to be dreamed up that over time stops the demand rather than the supply.
Don’t look to me for the answer. I don’t have it. All I can say for sure is that with climate change and population growth in the developing world upping the ante on an annual basis, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Maybe that should be the rallying cry of Western leaders in the wake of Cop26. At least it would have the ring of truth.