Comment
MATT GOODWIN
There is a conspiracy of silence on immigration from Labour & Tories – and it’s because of their utterly dismal record
What's the number one reason voters are switching to Reform?
ONE of the biggest issues at the General Election is also one that nobody in the ruling class wants to talk about: Britain’s intensifying immigration crisis.
Across the country, ordinary people tell me it is their third top issue, behind the economy and the NHS, while those who are Conservative inclined tell me this crisis is the most important issue of all.
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It is the number one reason why many people who voted Conservative in 2019 are refusing to vote at all, or are switching to Nigel Farage and Reform.
But you would not know any of this were you to listen to the two main parties.
Why? Because in both Labour and the Conservatives there is a strange conspiracy of silence — a point-blank refusal to go near this issue in case it throws light on their utterly dismal record or, instead, unleashes something in our politics they simply cannot control.
Just look at what they’ve done to the country.
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Whether this is about the shockingly high rates of legal immigration, which since 2019 alone have brought some four million people into Britain, or the utterly chaotic illegal migration crisis on our southern border, where the small boat invasion has brought more than 125,000 illegal migrants, this crisis has spiralled completely out of control.
It is making a total mockery of our claim to be a self-governing, independent nation which can control who comes in and out of the country.
It is alienating millions of ordinary Brits, eight in ten of whom say they want immigration to be sharply reduced.
And it is completely transforming our national community, our home, leaving it unrecognisable to many.
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Small boats
Consider this one fact. If we do not change course, then by 2036, according to the Government’s own estimates, our population will grow by another 6.5million people, 6.1million of which will be due to immigration. That is almost another London.
While Rishi Sunak and the Tories are currently being blamed for this crisis the reality is more complex.
Why?
Keir Starmer wants open borders - migrants will flood into UK, blasts Rishi Sunak in fiery rant
Because whether Left or Right, whether Labour or Tory, everybody in the ruling elite is complicit in mass immigration.
The elite obsession with increasing migration began under Tony Blair and New Labour, whose radical advisers openly admitted they wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.
In 2004 they opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the European Union, while simultaneously losing control of the asylum system and starting pointless for ever wars in the Middle East, which fuelled the global refugee crisis.
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Along the way, New Labour elites turned a blind eye to anything and everything that challenged the core assumption of the expert class — that mass immigration can only ever be positive.
They ignored the proliferation of Pakistani grooming gangs in northern England that prey on young, white British children.
They ignored clear evidence that mass immigration was suppressing the wages of native Brits.
And they ignored the large majority of Brits who repeatedly said they did not want their country to be changed in this way.
Whether Left or Right, whether Labour or Tory, everybody in the ruling elite is complicit in mass immigration
Why? Because, for the new elite, the celebration of “diversity” and multiculturalism became a new religion, something you simply cannot question.
To point to these problems, to even question the policy of mass immigration, as lifelong Labour Party voter Gillian Duffy discovered during her infamous encounter with Gordon Brown in Rochdale in 2010, was now considered “bigoted”.
This is why today, even though Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is ahead in the polls, very few British people say they trust Labour on immigration.
In fact, recently, just four per cent of Brits told me they had a “great deal of confidence” in Labour to reduce immigration. And they’re right to think this way.
I’ve yet to meet a single expert who thinks Labour’s “plan” for stopping the small boats will work, while everybody knows Labour MPs are not seriously interested in slashing net migration.
New Labour’s dire legacy on mass immigration, in other words, still lingers around today’s Labour like a bad smell. But it’s not just Labour.
While New Labour turned on the engine, David Cameron and the Tories, who promised to “lower the overall numbers”, then slammed down the pedal, pushing mass immigration to entirely new and historically unprecedented levels.
When Tony Blair had come to power in 1997 the average rate of net migration into Britain had been a moderate and manageable 37,000 people a year; by the time Cameron was forced into calling the Brexit referendum due to the disillusionment over immigration and our fraught relationship with the EU, it had climbed above 310,000.
Throughout the 2010s, in other words, around two million people were added to the population due to immigration alone, which now replaced natural births among British people as the main driver of our overall population growth.
And then, from 2019, came Boris Johnson’s government which, once again, contrary to all the talk about “lowering the overall numbers” and reshaping Britain’s economy around a high-skill, highly selective immigration system, did the very opposite of these things.
Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings liberalised the entire system, opening the doors to millions more.
Net migration spiralled to some 700,000 in the year ending 2022.
Paying the price
Some ten million people — one in six — here today were born outside of Britain. That’s around 16 per cent of the total UK population — more than the share in America, which has the largest number of foreign-born people in the world.
And while the ruling class repeat in robotic fashion that their new religion is only ever positive, the evidence now shows this to be misleading.
Few Brits would doubt that some high-skill immigration is positive, especially when it helps our creaking NHS.
But mass immigration on this scale, where, over the next quarter century, Britain would need 18 cities the size of Birmingham to make room for newcomers, is simply unsustainable.
You can have a stable and responsive politics, or you can have mass immigration. You can’t have both
It is also managed decline. Though neither our politicians nor cosy expert class in London will ever talk about it, as a university professor I can tell you there is a growing pile of evidence that shows this kind of mass, low-skill immigration from outside Europe is weakening Western economies.
It is directly fuelling the housing crisis by pushing up rent and house prices.
It is undermining people’s trust in democracy, leaving them with an understandable view they are being completely ignored and overlooked in favour of people who, to be blunt, are not British.
And it is driving public support for populist parties, from Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to Marine Le Pen in France.
In short, you can have a healthy, happy and prosperous society or you can have mass immigration.
You can have affordable and available housing or you can have mass immigration.
You can have a stable and responsive politics, or you can have mass immigration. You can’t have both.
Nobody in Westminster is willing to admit this.
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Because what we now have in this country is a ruling elite that is out of touch with the British people on this issue, which over the last quarter century delivered and presided over something the public neither asked for nor want.
And now, whether through rising apathy, with millions of people planning to stay at home and avoid the election, and others switching to populists, those elites are paying the price for their epic and historic blunder.
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