What To Do About Immigration? Reform Must Spell It Out

TRISTRAM LLEWELLYN JONES

TWO British problems that no one, not even Sir Keir Starmer, is any longer pretending they cannot see, are uncontrolled mass immigration and the absence of a party with an effective policy to deal with it. Last year’s record net migration figure of 906,000 sent Sir Keir scuttling for his lectern. Yet first Brexit and now this July’s strong showing for Reform UK at the General Election were the result of people wanting immigration dealt with and Britain restored to a country they are happy with.

We are bound to hear a lot about immigration in the run-up to the May council elections. But will it be more than hot air? Starmer’s own Labour MPs have no confidence even in his ability to set a target. Kemi Badenoch has only got as far as admitting the governments she was part of got it wrong on immigration. Which is why we need to hear, again and again, exactly what the Reform Party plan to do about immigration.

Their manifesto pledged a ‘freeze’ on all non-essential immigration (whatever that means); an Employer Immigration Tax, requiring employers with foreign workers to pay a higher national insurance rate (exemptions available for health and social care sectors and very small businesses) and finally a five-year residency and employment requirement for migrants to claim benefits in the UK.

Not exactly tough. Since then Nigel Farage has said that Starmer’s plan to stop the cross-Channel boats by smashing the trafficking gangs won’t work. He has committed to leaving the ECHR and said ‘the only deterrent is deportation’. It is, he said, a national security crisis.

Spelling that out means going all the way back to September 11, 2001. I was a Boeing 737 captain at Heathrow and flying passengers three days after the Twin Towers attacks. The airline had rapidly to adjust to new security measures that took time to settle down. Multicultural open-access Britain was struggling. Security guards had to spend time searching every bag when the likely suspects were from the Middle East. Yet when I called a specialist security team to search my Boeing 737, I was stunned when a minibus full of Afghans arrived! You couldn’t make it up. Wider security procedures were working, however. Just before I closed the doors on one flight two Middle Eastern passengers were hauled off for questioning after they were flagged as being on the FBI no-fly list.

In the years which followed the phrase ‘the war on terror’ was everywhere. On July 7, 2005 suicide bombers attacked London and Islamic terrorism had arrived in Britain. In 2006 radical Islamic preacher Abu Hamza was jailed for seven years for sermons inciting murder and racial hatred and was finally extradited to the US in 2012. Back then there was a sense that Britain had to be tough on Islamic extremism.

Then in 2010 Labour’s Equality Act, its parting gift to the nation that Theresa May put the bow on, gave state protection to any ‘religious or philosophical belief’, in effect enshrining multiculturalism into law. What followed in the next 13 years were 9.96 million legal immigrants, many with beliefs that fundamentally threaten democracy.

Since 2014, added to that there’s been the constant influx from cross-Channel boats, at least 147,884 illegal immigrants since January 2018 the ones we know about.

This is a matter of numbers and beliefs – many people with ideology and culture completely at odds with Britain potentially adding to extremists and sympathisers already in our midst. TalkTV recently reported that we now have preachers using hate speech as violent as Abu Hamza operating in mosques in Britain. These days, however, it is ignored.

The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast of an annual net migration averaging 315,000 in the medium term means enough legal and illegal immigrants to create a city the size of Leeds and Bradford combined by the next general election. Where is the supporting infrastructure when it is already creaking at the seams?

Mass immigration on this scale, and in such a short period, has sent our country into uncharted territory. Even were it possible to integrate, either in the short term or even in one or two generations, the pattern of existing almost partitioned communities – immigrants moving in and locals heading out – makes it unlikely. With little inter-marriage, breaking down racial and cultural barriers is hard work. But this is highly risky. Not least now with the government inserting into already pressured communities young men of fighting age who have entered illegally.

British people have been given no choice in this. Put up and shut up is the policy for them. Denmark’s Social Democrat Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and her centre-right predecessor Lars Løkke Rasmussen are more sympathetic. They, with Sweden, have become Europe’s anti-immigration champions – assimilation and crime reduction as well as deportation policies to maintain a socially cohesive society.

It should be easier here. We nominally have a closed border with the EU into which migrants pour; Denmark does not. Why can’t we immediately clamp down on generous welfare? Denmark makes it known to ‘would-be’ immigrants and asylum seekers that nothing is guaranteed. We, by contrast, advertise abroad the welfare benefits they will be able to claim here. Denmark also has restrictions on family dependants, and quick deportations. Even those who get accepted don’t get anything free. They have to work before they are eligible.

Sweden has not just cut net migration but reversed it: the number leaving now exceeds the number arriving and this has been done under existing EU law. They are also looking at paying £25,000 for immigrants to  repatriate voluntarily – a lot of money in a third world country. Banning imported brides by first and second generation immigrants, first cousin (practised by between 38 and 59 per cent of British Pakistanis) or otherwise, is another critical policy.

The mood is shifting in America too now it has elected Donald Trump. Denmark, Sweden and America are a template for us and we should follow suit.

Reform UK is the only party likely to have the guts and vision to do this. But it needs to commit to withdrawing from the International Court of Human Rights so that our own Supreme Court cannot be overruled; to repealing the UK Human Rights and Equality Acts so our problems can be dealt with under British common law.

We have never been totally free to discuss the full effects of immigration, which is part of the problem, so all laws which limit freedom of speech and preclude open discussion on policy need to be lifted. The Home Office must also fully publish all migration-related data by default. Reform UK might also warn that anyone coming to the UK before the next general election will not be given the right to remain if they are still on a visa at the date of the election.

None of this will happen with either Labour or the Tories. Reform UK is literally the only game in town. Nigel Farage indicated recently that only culture, not demographics, mattered. The truth he must know is that it is impossible to disentangle the two, especially when new migrant flow continues unchecked. In many areas there is every sign that Labour’s plan is to push the rights of indigenous Brits to the margins and they have five years in which to do it.

This problem we have is entirely due to policy and laws enacted under the counter and without our consent. What’s needed now is for democratically endorsed policy and law to deal with immigration and to restore Britain. We have not lost. What has been done can be undone.

I finish where I began. We need a party and a policy. Reform UK is the only one capable of dealing with the whole problem of immigration and Nigel Farage’s route to No 10 depends on showing exactly how he will do it.

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This article (What to do about immigration? Reform must spell it out) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Tristram Llewellyn Jones