On Immigration: William Clouston or Robert Jenrick?

William Clouston (for those who don’t know) is leader of the Social Democratic Party and an intelligent and thoughtful conservative who ought to be a prominent and influential MP (not just Chairman of Corbridge Parish Council). Not many people will have read a short article of his, “The erosion of social solidarity” in the most recent issue (no. 64) of Bournbrook magazine, but anyone who has will recognise that he is a (if the word can still be used) ‘patriot’, and also a decent and humane man. Like the vast majority of (can we say?) ‘native Britons’, he thinks that the uncontrolled immigration we have (can we also say?) suffered in the last twenty years or more has the consequence that the country could descend into “civil conflict” — presumably between the natives and the immigrants. His patriotism (if we can call it that) is evident in such remarks as, “It’s assumed that people from backward and misogynistic cultures — on settling the magic soil of Europe — will shed these characteristics. It’s assumed that culture does not migrate. … It’s assumed that importing many who are clearly hostile to our culture will have no adverse consequences.” Etc. So, again, like most native Britons, he wants to end “our addiction to mass immigration”.

But, being a decent and humane man, there are things he won’t do as well as things he will. He wants us to have “a national border worthy of the name”; he would stop the flow of illegal migrants across the channel by detaining them on Ascension island; and he’d go further: “deport illegal migrants and foreign criminals — all of them. Because that’s the rule of law.”

But, being the decent and humane man he is, fearing civil conflict and — it seems — not recognising that “the rule of law” he appeals to is part of the culture the backward and misogynistic are hostile to, that is as far as he would go: no “summary suspension of civil rights”, no “arbitrary removal of British nationality”, no “forced deportations”, i.e. (as, for honesty’s sake, he might have said) he would — whether content with it or not — rather leave undisturbed as citizens of this country the vast majority of the backward and misogynistic who “denigrate and misrepresent its history” and are hostile to its culture. To do otherwise would be to descend into “Völkisch ethnic nationalism”, than which, presumably, nothing could be worse, not even our having to share the country and power over its future with a large and growing minority who (can we say?) hate it in the form in which both we and they know it.

It seems to me that he can only reconcile his patriotism with his decency — square that particular circle — by not looking at the worst possible outcomes — the worst outcomes I mean for us — full in the face. His “Völkisch ethnic nationalism” is meant to make us recoil from the possibility of British death camps but, as undeniably severe as suspending people’s civil rights, removing their nationality and forcibly deporting them would be, it is hardly the same as murdering them en masse. Nor should such measures be simply ruled out, right from the start, as if incompatible with civilised life. The British state isn’t pacifist. It arms itself as if ready to go to war. How much milder forcibly deporting people is than bombing them. (Don’t mention Iraq.) Compared with what the Germans actually did to Jews and others, how civilised it would have been merely to deport them.

Compare Clouston on illegal immigrants with Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Chancellor, on what he calls ‘Islamists’ (Telegraph, January 10). Jenrick too thinks mass immigration a disaster: “Mass migration and the abject failure of integration that has flowed with it … this disastrous experiment with mass migration.” But Jenrick makes plainer than Clouston just what is at stake and — if only by implication — how much wider ought to be the range of things we might do about it than anything Clouston would contemplate. As Jenrick sees it, the political problem that somehow has to be dealt with isn’t limited to illegals and criminals but includes what he calls ‘Islamists’, who “— unrespecting of British institutions of law and order, violent or openly threatening violence — now have such a foothold that the police do not know how to assert control and maintain order. They believe they would be overwhelmed if they tried to enforce the law. They are too defeatist to try.”

He gives some examples:

West Midlands Police banning Jewish away fans from a football match because they feared the wrath of local armed Islamists. Then they lied and blamed the Jewish fans.

in the aftermath of October 7 in London and elsewhere, the police made a myriad of excuses for their inaction in the face of the hate marches … They refused to be honest and concede the scale of the Islamist challenge was too big to confront.

In the summer disturbances of 2024 the police in Birmingham said they let the ‘community’ “police itself”.

In 2023, after a 14-year-old autistic boy scuffed a copy of the Koran in the school playground, a press conference was called in which a senior West Yorkshire Police officer and the boy’s mother were forced to placate the “community” by explaining that the boy had learned a terrible lesson and was to be punished by the police — who found it necessary to plead with the local Islamists in order to protect the boy and his family …

the almost paramilitary display we saw in Tower Hamlets recently — men in uniforms, an Islamist version of the Black Shirts of almost a century ago.

the school teacher driven out of his home, and still in hiding, because he showed an image of Muhammad in a religious education class.

the Islamist gangs out in force at our last general election, intimidating political rivals to get their preferred extremist candidates elected.

the shameful scene in Parliament in 2024 when the Speaker had to apologise for forcing an unconventional vote on Gaza, just to protect MPs from a baying mob of protesters outside

And, of course, such examples could be added to: the thirty schoolchildren, e.g., who, asked by their teacher in April 2024, who hated Britain, all shot up their hands “with immediate, absolute certainty”. (See, perhaps, https://dukemaskell.substack.com/p/supressio-veri.)

What all such examples tell is that, except in spelling, Jenrick’s so-called ‘Islamists’ are nothing like Islamic State terrorists or, by their own standards, especially ‘extremist’ at all. If he is right that it is “the scale of the Islamist challenge” (my italics) that makes it too big to confront, his so-called ‘Islamists’ must in the main be people that he would call — but for the various dangers involved (including to his own political career) — ‘Muslim’, perfectly ordinary members of their own mosques and other civil associations, people who are, no doubt — when their religious beliefs are ‘respected’ as they think they ought to be — perfectly law-abiding. But there’s the rub. The laws they would abide by are not ours. Here, given our very different way of life, including 1500 years or so of Christianity, their beliefs can only be so ‘respected’ by their threatening violence if they are not. Either they adapt their ways to ours or we adapt ours to theirs. And if they use or threaten force to make it the latter, then the British state should use or threaten its superior force to make it the former. It is, as Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, a question of which is to be master, that’s all.

And why does Jenrick speak of ‘Islamists’ rather than use the ‘M’ word? Because, for all his forthrightness, he feels the same fear he accuses the police and media of. His very use of the word illustrates the scale of the challenge to be confronted — something hardly to be attempted by stopping the boats and deporting criminals.

Duke Maskell

---

This article (On immigration: William Clouston or Robert Jenrick?) was created and published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Duke Maskell