Quick pop quiz for you: Q1 – Who said “We have to make the case for the benefits of migration and the benefits of free movement”? Q2 – Who took the last Labour government to court over its decision to deny welfare benefits to asylum seekers? Q3 – Whose promotional video proudly boasts “he battled alongside Jeremy Corbyn against the Tory Brexit?” If you answered Sir Keir Rodney (you plonker!) Starmer to all three, give yourself a pat on the back. He’s a faker isn’t he? Of course he is; I doubt many of you are falling off your chairs in shock at that claim. And of course faker is a nice way of saying liar.
I was gratified that so many in the media picked-up on my parallels with Enoch Powell yesterday as Sir Keir got all ‘Rivers of Blood’ on us while announcing his new White Paper (Suzanna Reid on Good Morning Britain today used the Powell line fabulously to bait and hook Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who flapped like a landed trout as she tried pathetically to avoid the question).
But it’s just a political brickbat – it doesn’t help bring down migration. And nor will Keir, this White Paper, or the Labour Party.
It seems mind-boggling too that those who would rule us (and Sadiq Khan I’m looking at you) are now arguing over Keir’s choice phrase “island of strangers” and worrying it might sound a bit mean, rather than facing the fact immigration has changed our island beyond recognition… and I don’t remember anyone ever asking for that change.
Successive governments lied to us, and then were too weak, too spineless and too inept to do anything to stop the tidal wave they had created.
This government is no different, it just piles lies upon lies. Stamer, as is clear from the above, will say anything, ANYTHING, to get elected.
The uber-lefty pro-migration quotes above were fodder for a Labour Party video aimed at getting left-wingers to vote for him.
The thick-necked, too-many-bloody-immigrants, speech he gave while announcing the immigration White Paper yesterday was thus no more than a ridiculous posture from a quintessential Islington dinner party fop to appeal to the working classes up north who have gone over to Nigel’s party in their millions.
You may recall Keir’s very first political act was to scrap the Rwanda deportation scheme. It was an ill-considered, but indicative decision because, nuts as it was, the very threat of Rwanda deportations was already starting to work. But that is the real Keir – an instinctive Lefty – and I urge you to beware the proto Trotskyist in Tory clothing.
He’s the kind of man who, until yesterday’s emergency PR spin, would have sneered and mouthed “racist” under his breath at anyone showing the slightest concern that immigration might be the teeniest bit out of control.
And I don’t know about you, but I for one am heartily sick at having to feel like some sort of bigot because I’m slightly concerned we are importing men (and it’s ALWAYS men) from countries and cultures where racism, misogyny and homophobia are pretty much the norm.
But of course it’s an article of faith that immigrant communities (at least until a few generations down the line) vote Labour – of course they do. And so Labour courts the vote and bends the knee to cultural norms they would usually despise.
And of course this White Paper is nothing but an exercise in spin. There’s a bit about the length of time foreign students can stay without getting a decent job, an attempt to encourage business to use Brit workers, more emphasis on learning English, and a few other meaningless bits and bobs.
But nothing about stopping illegal immigration which is soaring to record levels again, nor, critically about leaving the ECHR – that monumentally out of date bastion of legal graft and a guaranteed get-out-of-jail card for every migrant. There is gaslighting going on here too.
When the Windrush generation came over, between 1945 and the early 1970s, about 500,000 people from the Commonwealth arrived on these shores over a quarter of a century.
These were people a battered post-war Britain invited – actually begged – to come and help rebuild a grateful mother country. Crucially, these families also shared a culture, broadly Christian, democratic and very pro-Britain.
More recently in one year alone – 2023 – net migration, from god alone knows where, and many cultures largely at odds with Britain’s tolerant democracy, was double that at just short of one million.
Even if every immigration control is effective the annual net migration figure is expected to be more 300,000 – a city roughly the size of Leicester every year, with all the implications that has for schools, housing, the NHS, and the benefits system. And we will be expected to be thankful for that.
Does that sound like a successful migrant policy to you? No, me neither.