Mass immigration and the refugee crisis have transformed European politics over the last decade. The United Kingdom has experienced some of the biggest changes, as repeated popular revolts against immigration have led to both Brexit and the collapse of the Conservative Party in favor of Reform UK. The American Conservative sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a British journalist and political commentator, to talk about the impact of immigration on the UK and the country’s future.
Let’s start with something that I think a lot of Americans have found quite puzzling looking at the situation in the UK. Immigration is the question in British politics, especially right now. Every British government for years has been elected on the promise of lowering immigration. None have done so. Why?
When you say for years, that means going back to 1974. Every single election referendum since has promised lower migration and never delivered. There’s a few reasons.
The first, I think, is the economic system. Anytime someone promises to cut immigration, a pie chart is wheeled into the room by the so-called experts, and they say, “If you do this, we won’t be able to fudge the numbers on the population, which then builds our annual GDP up, which then allows us to borrow even more debt to pay down for subsidized socialized medicine and pension system.” One thing that Keir Starmer ran into when he was elected to government was that because the Treasury predictions are done on an annual cycle, you can’t cut the size of the civil service, because if you make anyone lose their jobs—and it’s very hard to do the extra legislation anyway—but if you make anyone lose their jobs, they get a year severance pay, and it doesn’t register as cuts. If you cut immigration in the short term, there might be a dip in GDP, because you cut X amount of totally useless jobs. So instead, all they ever do is cut the very few things that they can do—the extra payments and pensions and things like that, which ends up estranging entire swathes of their voter base.
So economics is one reason. The other one is that there is a human-rights industrial complex that has taken root. Keir Starmer, when he was a human-rights lawyer busy going around the world acting on behalf of murderers to get rid of the death penalty, actually helped write the text for Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act, which wrote the European Court of Human Rights and Convention on Human Rights into British law. So even after Brexit, we still have European laws on our books, because they’re a separate entity.
That means that you get Pakistani pedophiles or Albanian gangsters who say, “My son doesn’t like the taste of foreign chicken nuggets,” appealing to the statue and saying, “My right to a family and private life should mean that I get to stay in this country even though I’m a criminal.” No politician wants to touch that because of the deep taboos that have existed since 1945, since the atrocities of the Holocaust, since Hitler killed a lot of people in a very racist way. So all these antiquated human rights doctrines, like the UN Refugee Convention, like the European Convention of Human Rights, which were written with Dutch Jews fleeing persecution in mind, are now pertaining to North African rapists, and we’re just battery-farming them at the taxpayers expense.
The final reason, I would say, is that the government has a hell of a lot of contracts with private security and housing firms like Serco. So local councils which mismanage their budgets and these private security firms and these hotel chains will take direct government subsidies to house not just legal migrants that come over (95 percent of whom aren’t paying any taxes at all, and are just a net drain), but also loads of illegal migrants who have come over the physical barrier of the English Channel. These illegal migrants have been picked up by the RNLI, our border force, ferried back, and are now housed in four-star accommodations at the cost of over £14 billion a year to the taxpayer.
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