Comment

The people have lost patience with an immigration system built on lies

Migrants are seen in silhouette as they walk past the message, "London Calling" near the make-shift immigrant camp, called the jungle, in Calais
The next PM must tear down the whole broken apparatus Credit:  PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/ REUTERS

Why let basic facts get in the way of a botched liberal elite mission?

Britain’s status quo isn’t so much a “broken system” as a self-justifying swindle. This week was a blistering reminder  – and not just because of those plotting Remainer MPs who love nothing more than to sneer down their constitutional noses at the will of the people. Two other potent national symbols of the managerial scamming that now passes for modern government have been in the spotlight over recent days: namely, bogus recycling and uncontrolled mass immigration.

Although these are two very different governmental controversies, they have a lot in common. In both cases, the public are impatient for reform: while Middle England has bristled over the last few days at the infuriating revelations that recycling centres are sending plastic and paper to be incinerated, Boris Johnson’s announcement that he’d favour an Australian points-based immigration system as PM was enthusiastically received.

What’s more, in both areas basic reality has long been crushed under the weight of bureaucratic chaos and self-delusional orthodox thinking – our administrative overlords have spent years trying to convince us and themselves that the country’s future depends on baffling, opaque procedures that they have painstakingly devised.

But it turns out – as most people suspected long ago – that their grand solutions are shams, which seek to manipulate us into a false sense of enlightened progress while aggravating the very problems they seek to solve: our complacently consumed, if lovingly rinsed and sorted, milk bottles are furtively shipped to Malaysian landfills; in spurned areas of the country, the mass immigration that we are told fuels our economy and enriches our culture stokes social tensions and prevents us tackling our economic shortcomings.

Nowadays, MPs seem reasonably willing to have more frank conversations about how we deal with the plastics crisis – but they are considerably less forthcoming on migration, what with the topic’s pongy populist associations.

Boris’s proposal is certainly a step forward, nonetheless. The prospective PM intuitively grasps the nation’s desire for a tough, tightly controlled and highly selective system. That said, his deliberately squishy proposal eschews any kind of target setting, and could lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in overall numbers migrating to Britain.

If this is Boris’s game plan, he should really think twice. Immigration and Brexit are indelibly intertwined in the marginal Northern seats that his party badly needs to win in the next general election. Just as Thatcherites have threatened insurrection if Brexit fails to deliver us the freedom to strike our own trade deals, swing voters in the Leaver heartlands will not hesitate to ditch the Tories if they smell that they have been duped on the subject of border control after we have left the EU.

Instead, the next PM must tear down our whole immigration apparatus, which is built on lies and bureaucratic obliqueness. The question of what replaces it should be founded on one simple thing: basic honesty. The current scale of immigration to Britain is unsustainable.

This is not prejudice (or even hypocrisy in my case, as the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant); it is just fact. So is the uncomfortable reality, swept under the plush, Polish builder-laid office carpets of our ruling class, that migration will not generate the tax receipts needed to finance the new infrastructure we require to accommodate the scale of population growth. Any immigration reform worth its salt must, therefore, involve a reduction in numbers.

Some say that an overly strict visa system is incompatible with having an open economy and outward-looking society. What rot. It is not a question of possibility, but of will.

Unfortunately, today’s politicians are too stricken with prejudice and intellectual laziness. To bureaucrats who view reality through the prism of graphs and figures, immigrants are “labour” rather than human beings, and the North is a land of worker shortage “hotspots”, rather than troubled post-industrial towns. All those soft-palmed parliamentarians who so love to theorise about the academic merits of immigration in their after-dinner speeches have no desire to dirty their hands grappling the on-the-ground challenges.

More widely, across British “Remainia”, indifference to mass migration has become a warped marker of bourgeois sophistication, worn by bohemian liberals with the same slouchy self-satisfaction as their Waitrose cotton shopping bags. But as long as the metropolitan elite continue to dodge the issue, our “woke” society will carry on sleepwalking into a perfect storm.

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