Britain’s immigration is out of control, and could spell the end of the Tories

Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Eurovision, one fact was curiously overlooked in all the reviews. To borrow Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh’s infamous comment about the British Royal family on the Palace balcony, Eurovision was “terribly white”.

Of the 26 acts on Saturday night, only a handful featured a black person at all. Ukraine’s lead singer was originally from Nigeria, and Belgium’s entry – the oldest man ever to think it was a good idea to wear pink culottes – had three black female backing singers, as did the Lithuania song. The eventual winner, Sweden’s Loreen, has Moroccan parents. Apart from a few dancers, though, that was it for ethnic minority representation in the whole of Europe. 

I must have missed the uproar. Where was the Channel 4 News item bemoaning Eurovision’s appalling lack of diversity? Remember former anchor Jon Snow gazing with north-London horror at a pro-Brexit march and complaining, “I’ve never seen so many white people in one place.”

Did The Guardian splash on “institutional whiteness” in Europe?  Not a peep. When it came to the overwhelmingly pale stage at Liverpool, there were no cries of “racism” from Labour MPs, no allegations of “white privilege” from the identity politics agitators. Why the silence? 

I think we know. To criticise the overwhelmingly homogenous contestants from Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, France, Austria, Czechia (six porcelain-skinned damsels) et al would be to acknowledge that, by comparison, the UK is really not the ghastly racist country the left wants and needs to claim we are.

On the contrary, according to the recent World Values Survey, Britain is one of the least racist nations in the world. Meanwhile, the supposedly enlightened, brotherhood-of-man, caring-sharing EU, worshipped by the Remainer elites, is riddled with the kind of bigotry and discrimination that has long been on the decline here.

Of course, the BBC felt obliged to shoehorn diversity into the show elsewhere. In the Eurovision interlude, John Lennon’s Imagine was performed by Mahmood from Italy when a talented lad from the streets where John, Paul, George and Ringo grew up would have been more appropriate, not to mention comprehensible. Unfortunately, white, working-class boys are the wrong kind of “underprivileged” for middle-class TV executives.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s refreshing that other European countries have not yet been guilted into featuring non-white people in every band, advert and drama, in wholly disproportionate numbers to their presence in the population. The non-Anglophone world has largely been spared the toxic import of identity politics from the US that views everything through the poisoned prism of race. Lucky them.

Unlike us, they are still allowed to be unashamedly proud of their heritage and culture, even if that meant Norway was represented by a strapping lass who looked like the love child of a hockey goalie and a mythological green elf. (Charming song, though.)

As for that chanteuse in the coquettish black beret smouldering atop a phallic crystal pillar and practically smoking between verses. Just a wild guess – French? Evidemment!

With Eurovision over for another year, Suella Braverman made a barnstorming speech about immigration, which struck a chord on a related theme. “It’s not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration is unsustainable in terms of housing supply, public services and community relations,” insisted the Home Secretary. The “unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with identity politics, is a recipe for communal disaster”. In addition, she told the National Conservatism Conference in London: “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt. Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born.”

That this should even need saying by a British government minister is grim proof of how successfully leftists have assumed ownership of immigration, shutting down debate by saying anyone who frets about the likely effect on our national quality of life is “racist” while turning “white” into a dirty word. So, all credit to Braverman for marching into the treacherous ground where timorous Tories fear to tread.

But it’s a bit late, I’m afraid. May 25, 2023. Pop that in the diary as the day the final nail was hammered into the Conservative coffin. Next week, the Office for National Statistics is expected to report that net immigration (after deducting those who have emigrated) has risen to between 700,000 and 997,000. That follows a record of 504,000 in the year to end June 2022.

Anyone who claims they are relaxed about this – Grant Shapps, I’m looking at you – hasn’t really grasped the scale of what’s happening. Over the past 20 years, the population of the UK has risen by 8 million, with nearly 7 million (85 per cent) of that due to migrants and the children of migrants. And this population explosion happened with net migration of about 245,000 per annum. We are now approaching four times that.

The pressure of numbers on housing and the health service, unmatched by enhanced infrastructure, will soon turn us into the kind of failed state asylum seekers come here to escape.   

This is not what the millions who voted for Brexit had in mind. We can say with complete confidence, I think, that everyone who voted Conservative in 2019 wanted the exact opposite. The reduction in immigration promised in that Tory manifesto united people in both the Red Wall and the Blue Shires. Those people have been betrayed on an almost unimaginable scale. Traduced, kicked in the teeth, lied to by a government which, far from enforcing a tough, Australian-style point-based system has engaged in a crazy loosening of entry criteria, with no limits and few checks on those coming in.  

Instead of governing with the people’s interests and values in mind, the Conservatives have sold out to hyper-liberal globalists who owe their loyalty to no place and no one. The rootless elite are at odds with the deep rootedness of a good society.  

In addition, greedy universities (some of them barely worthy of the name) have admitted hundreds of thousands of foreign students to sustain their rapacious business model while discriminating against our own young people. It should be utterly shocking that there are 200,000 students from outside the UK at our top Russell Group universities, a staggering 34 per cent of all students. Who knows, if we’d given half the medical places allotted to wealthy international students to British kids, maybe we wouldn’t have a catastrophic shortage of doctors. Oh, and why has the UK admitted 136,000 “dependents” of foreign students; who takes their mum to college?

Before I self-combust, let me point out that the net migration rate in France last year was only 161,000. France is a country which jealously guards her culture, language and special ethos. What are we? Increasingly, a hotel, not a home. A place which cares little for Britishness, admits too many too fast for successful integration and sacrifices community harmony in pursuit of GDP.  

On Tuesday, a universities’ spokeswoman told the Today programme that the UK needed to remain “an attractive destination” for foreign students. I nearly threw the radio. How about remaining an attractive place for the people who live here?

Braverman did well to speak out, but it’s not enough. When she offered the Cabinet yesterday several proposals aimed at cutting immigration, just one was approved. This betrayal could be the end of the Conservative party. I hope we see a principled resignation by the Home Secretary next week when the shameful immigration figures come out.  

We deserved to do badly in Eurovision. And the Tories deserve what’s coming. Nul points.