Pro-migration charities, partisan judges and activist lawyers have made it impossible to control the border.
PATRICK WEST
The small-boats fiasco must count as one of the UK government’s most wretched and risible failures to date. Keir Starmer’s ‘four out, thousands in’ initiative on illegal immigration has only served to heap yet more derision on an incompetent Labour administration. Yet, as feeble as its efforts to control the border have been, we shouldn’t lose sight of the part played by the other factions who have enabled and aggravated this debacle: the activist lawyers, partisan judges and well-meaning charities.
Their role in prolonging this crisis is well known – to the point of farce. It was epitomised by the case earlier this year of an Albanian who was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son wouldn’t eat foreign chicken nuggets. The shambles resumed with gusto earlier this month, when one of the first deportations of a Channel migrant under the ‘one in, one out’ deal with France was cancelled at the last minute. Lawyers launched a legal challenge just 14 hours before the flight he was due to take off, claiming the Eritrean migrant might have been the victim of modern slavery. On Tuesday, the Home Office lost its bid to overturn the court order blocking his removal.
If those headlines weren’t despair-inducing enough, it has since transpired that a Home Office-backed charity, Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), is currently providing immigrants with a step-by-step guide on how to evade deportation orders. BID, which is largely funded by left-wing foundations and philanthropists, now circulates a ‘legal guide for people in detention facing removal to France’, offering them template letters suggesting ways to use legal and human-rights arguments to fight deportation. According to a report published this week, claims of ‘modern slavery’ used by lawyers in migration cases have increased by 32 per cent in the past year, and by over 1,000 per cent in the past decade.
BID is merely one example of the many charities working against the best interests of this country and the wishes of its people. As freelance journalist Charlotte Gill has disclosed, there are many such organisations doing likewise, usually funded by vast charitable foundations and the government. Among those highlighted by Gill is the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which between 2020 and 2023 received £1.4million from the taxpayer. These funds are, in turn, distributed to migration advocates, such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, No Pride in Deportations, and many more.
Not for the first time in human history, those with good intentions are making matters much worse. Rather than reducing the sum of human misery on these islands, the blindly compassionate are increasing it. They are offering more incentives for young men to pay criminals to leave France, a safe country, and to make a perilous journey across the English Channel. When they arrive here, they end up placing a huge burden on communities that are already struggling and an exchequer that is already stretched.
In Britain, we used to have a popular word to describe these kinds of people, possessed with an overriding sense of self-righteousness and belief that they had a duty to meddle. We called them ‘do-gooders’. And this was not a compliment.
It’s time that the word ‘do-gooder’ was returned to common parlance, before these people do any more damage.
Words can’t remake the world
One of the myths most beloved by hyper-liberals is that language creates reality as we perceive it. One way to change society, therefore, is to adjust, reinvent and supervise the words we use. This is why hyper-liberals have always placed such inordinate importance on reality-denying pronouns, and why they cancel with zeal those who use ‘inappropriate’ language.
The legacy of this postmodernist belief can be seen in the way our institutions are still eager to jump on the woke bandwagon. The other week, the Royal Yachting Association issued new guidelines decreeing that ‘man overboard’ is discriminatory against women and nonbinary people, and that ‘person in water’ should be used instead. Now NATO has issued a fresh manual stating that ‘airmen’ is offensive, with ‘air-force personnel’ to be used as an alternative. NATO’s reason for issuing this new guidance is to ‘challenge unconscious bias’ and ‘raise awareness of how language affects our behaviours and attitudes’.
Of course, the language we use does affect and constrain the way we think. George Orwell famously recognised this. His twin preoccupations, however, were how the suppression of certain words curtails our ability to think freely, and how manipulative euphemisms seek to refashion reality for political ends. And on both counts, that is precisely what hyper-liberals have always done.
Still, that is not to say that words can reinvent reality entirely. This is a utopian fantasy. While words help to mould thought, they do not create thought or shape the way we see the world. Such linguistic determinism, which has its origins in mid-20th-century anthropology, has been debunked by Steven Pinker, a stout defender of Noam Chomsky’s theory of the universal, automatic innateness of language. In this view, our brain structure overrides the influence of the particular language we grow up in.
As Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct (1994):
‘In much of our social and political discourse, people assume that words determine thoughts… But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes, because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere.’
Those sentiments ring just as true as they did when they were written over 30 years ago. Institutions still mostly go along with hyper-liberal absurdities because they assume everyone else thinks the same.
Making murder respectable
Sometimes it’s the smallest words in the English language that you have to look out for. Among the most pernicious is that innocent-looking conjunction, ‘but’.
Ever since the war on free speech began in earnest in the 1990s, when some started to deem it necessary to protect the feelings and identities of people from hurtful or offensive words, it’s been used in the following way: ‘I believe in free speech, but …’ Or: ‘People should be allowed to say what they like, but…’ In other words, ‘but’ in this context is a pretext to a clause in which the speaker issues heavy or even contradictory qualifications on the right to free speech.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, it’s been employed by some liberals in a similarly equivocal and dishonest manner. The new patter has become: ‘Of course murder is wrong, but…’ Or: ‘No one should be killed for his political beliefs, but…’ This is followed by words to the effect of ‘he shouldn’t have been making such inflammatory speeches’, or ‘he was stirring up hatred’. Basically, ‘he was asking for it’.
Beware the word ‘but’. Either you believe in free speech, or you don’t. Either you believe murder is wrong, or you don’t.
Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.
This article (How ‘do-gooders’ are fuelling the migrant crisis) was created and published by Spiked Online and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Patrick West
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