There is no doubt that immigration, and especially uncontrolled, illegal immigration, is the issue that concerns Britons most. It is also the issue that divides them most, but public opinion is clear: Around 70 per cent believe that the numbers are too high. Nevertheless, some Labour politicians continue to push ahead with more of the same policies that have led the country into its present predicament. Labour’s former deputy leader and Keir Starmer’s former deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, is criticising her own government for attempting to tighten the rules. Meanwhile, people are seeing the consequences of a liberal immigration policy that has been allowed to wreak havoc on the country for years, and that those who are now taking matters into their own hands are being severely punished.
Rayner believes that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain permanent residence are ‘un-British’. What is British about allowing everyone who wants to enter the country to do so and granting them permanent residence is unclear, but the word is being used as an insult. Mahmood wants to change the rules so that migrant workers must wait fifteen years before they can obtain permanent residence, known as indefinite leave to remain. At present, the waiting period is only five years. Migrant workers in, for example, the care sector have ‘moved their lives here to care for our loved ones’, Rayner believes, overlooking the fact that these migrant workers often bring their extended families with them, who in turn need care and benefits from the state, and that they are economic migrants who want a better life and certainly do not come here for altruistic reasons.
It becomes a vicious circle – the more people who come, the more people are needed in the care sector, and the more people come here to work in it. This circle is difficult to break out of, but Britons are now seeing all the negative consequences of open borders and want a more restrictive asylum and immigration policy.
Public opinion is clear
The consequences of importing people from foreign cultures on the scale that we are seeing throughout Western Europe are beginning to become so evident that frustration is building. Angela Rayner and other bleeding-heart liberals, liberals with ‘bleeding hearts’ for ‘vulnerable groups’, which they believe migrants are, are clearly in the minority. The will of the people will manifest itself in practice at the next election, and is already doing so as Reform UK and Restore grow, and the Conservative Party changes course under Kemi Badenoch and gives the finger to Boris Johnson and other former Tory prime ministers who opened the floodgates. Opinion polls show that 70 per cent of voters want a tougher line.
It is also expressed when vigilante groups and courageous individuals such as Tommy Robinson and Danny Tommo become popular heroes. A few days ago, Danny Tommo went to France, where he cut a hole in one of the rubber boats that was to carry migrants across the Channel to England. There was no one in the boat when it happened, but he was nevertheless arrested a few days later by British police after a video of the incident was published. He is now behind bars, awaiting his case. Tommo is a father of four, with his own business and a stay-at-home wife. He is sacrificing financial security for what he believes in – one can of course say that destroying other people’s property should have consequences, but the question is how severely it should be punished.
In British prisons, people are serving time for having thrown a plastic bottle at the police during a demonstration against illegal immigration – and the sentences are longer than those given to ‘new Britons’ who have sexually abused women and children. Robert Jenrick of Reform UK calls this a typical example of the two-tier justice system in Britain and says there is a ‘legitimacy crisis’ for the British state. ‘It expends far more effort suppressing people’s concerns about immigration than actually fixing it. Reform will ensure that the British government actually serves the British people again.’
Mayor Andy Burnham calls Tommo a racist.
Archaic asylum system
The simplest way to fix the problem would be to stop the asylum system as it operates today. Migrant workers are one thing – after all, they have to go through a lengthy process in order to settle in the country, and if Labour has the balls to implement the changes proposed by Shabana Mahmood, it will help to bring the numbers down. The boat migrants make up a smaller proportion of immigration, but in return consume a great deal of resources: They must be housed, supported financially, their asylum applications must be processed, and they arrive with unknown baggage – these are mostly young men who come from cultures far removed from our own. Both the economic and social costs are high, and not even left-liberals or champagne socialists want them as neighbours (cf. Piddington).
Lionel Shriver in The Spectator makes some good points:
‘The system is an archaic remnant of a bygone post-war era with smaller populations, little affordable international transportation and no smartphones. Earlier this month, a Home Office whistleblower estimated the proportion of legitimate asylum claims – refugees genuinely fleeing persecution – as ‘at best’ 1 per cent, which sounds about right.’
One per cent – one in a hundred. That makes the entire asylum system a joke. Nevertheless, organisations that help ‘refugees’ receive state support, while in practice they are helping with organised people-smuggling.
Should such activity not instead be met with arrests and imprisonment? In the topsy-turvy land of Britain, it is those who defend the borders who are locked up, while those who encourage the invasion are rewarded. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is accused of assisting people-smuggling, as it is these boats that pick up migrants from the rubber boats and take them to English ports – but naturally plays the victim card and claims that it is being harassed by the ‘far right’ for the humanitarian work it does. But as long as it assists the migrant boats, it encourages dangerous and unnecessary journeys across the Channel, and it encourages people without morals or ordinary common sense – how else can one explain the heartless, downright evil male migrant who left a baby floating in the water before boarding a boat?
Sigh. That is how the left responds to criticism, but it will not work in the long run. Britons have had enough. And the issue of immigration and boat migrants will continue to dominate the news until the asylum system is abolished or reformed, so that no one is allowed to come ashore without permission and papers. It is a gift to the right, but a tragedy for the country.
