Following on from yesterday’s post about immigration dishonesty, The Slog digs up the roots of Britain’s population explosion to find the entire political class guilty of dissembling dereliction and reality rejection. Top of the list of miscreants is Tony Blair….but the contemporary Labour/Islam alliance follows the appalling example he set.
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The story of how Britain’s immigration spiralled out of control after 1997 is perhaps one of the greatest examples of how blind Leftlib belief in experts can backfire.
In 2003, Home Office officials seized upon a report produced by Christian Dustmann, of University College London, in which it was estimated that – in the light of Poland’s access to EU free movement policy – around 13,000 Poles would arrive in the UK during 2004.
In fact, 430,000 turned up during the following three years…so the “expert” research was wrong by 91%.
All this was happening on Tony Blair’s watch – with the Home Secretary Jack Straw himself privately in constant panic that the issue would explode in New Labour’s faces. But by then, fear among the political class of being dubbed racist for raising the lack of control was so endemic, it ensured that there was barely a peep of opposition.
Blair himself displayed, from Day One, a blind belief in his own Leftlib faith. Tom Bower’s book, Broken Vows – Tony Blair: The Tragedy of Power, was published in March 2016. In this devastating account of border control negligence, Bower observed how Tony Blair insisted that “Immigration won’t be an issue – Immigration is good for Britain.” During a decade in power, the PM never changed his mind, but when he handed over to Gordon Brown, in excess of two million more migrants than the government expected had settled in Britain.
In total, Bower spoke to 200 people involved in senior posts during the immigration boom years. Three of the most important civil servants in his administration — Robin Butler, Richard Wilson and Andrew Turnbull — concluded that Blair was “never a suitable guardian of the public’s trust”.
With his full connivance, after 1999 more than 350,000 extremely dubious asylum-seekers (many of whom showed under examination an inability to speak their alleged ‘home’ language) were rapidly converted into economic migrants — complete with work permits and rights to benefits.
Officials were worried in particular about the inability of Islamic settlers to integrate, but Blair airily waved their fears away. The BBC refused any debate on the issue, endorsing Labour’s promotion of multiculturalism without question. Another academic “expert” – Sarah Spencer – was also a seminal influence on government immigration policy after 1997. But later, she grew to regret the laissez-faire attitude, admitting “There was no policy for integration. We just believed the migrants would integrate.”
Astonishingly, not even 9/11 or the 7/7 London bombings got through to Blair. There was a clamour to arrest two Muslim preachers advocating violence on the streets of London, but he followed Jack Straw’s advice, believing that the Muslim community must not be alienated. The Muslim Council of Great Britain consequently grew bolder, arranging demonstrations outside the premises of all and any media organisations that questioned Islamic intolerance. At one point in 2005, the MCGB demanded a Bill prohibiting all criticism of Islam even if it was accurate. Tony Blair was minded to pass the law, but this time his Cabinet colleagues pointed out that it was dynamite – and by definition, illegal under EU Law.
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The point here is not to “preach hate” – that may be the job of some Islamist clerics, but it’s not my way. On an economic basis, for instance, if we could swap 430,000 Poles for some of the drongos born in Britain, I’d be a happy man. But we can’t….and when it comes to immigration, Labour’s lalalalah approach to numbers is socially poisonous.
On Census night 2011, the population of England and Wales was recorded as 56.1 million, which had grown by 3.7 million in the 10 years since the last census, an increase of 7.1%. This was the largest growth in the population of England and Wales in any 10-year period since census-taking began in 1801. 56% of the population increase between 2001 and 2011 was due to migration.
To argue that a 7% overall UK growth in ten years would have zero effect on local council services, housing needs and demands on the NHS is up there with Josef Gobbels’ claim that all Jews are Communists: it’s insane.
It is time to stop hiding the Truth and start planning a socially sensible strategy.
Am I alone in thinking this? I am not.
Ipsos Mori has concluded that ‘the early [2000s] peaks in [immigration] concern
coincided with surges in net migration; the [preceding] period of relatively low concern about immigration was during a time of cyclical but relatively stable net migration’. There was another increase in immigration concern during 2012-13, after it became clear that the new ToryLib government had failed by a factor of over 85% to control the annual migrant inflow as promised.
Since then, Labour and Remainer apologists have argued that the doomsayers are wrong “because attitudes to immigration have softened”. The softening claim is indeed correct: in 2015, a staggering 2 in 5 Britons of all ethnicities thought migration should be reduced by ‘a lot’. By Spring 2018, the figure had fallen to 1 in 3. But the Leftlibbers are being economical with the truth here:
- The game-changer in that period was Brexit: assuming Britain would get back “proper” control of its borders, the electorate became less concerned. Full Brexit, however, is clearly not what we are going to get.
- Polls measure the relative importance of various issues, and the period concerned was one of increasingly acute economic and welfare austerity. In all the polls, anxiety about employment prospects rose, and immigration as an issue dropped into the background.
- Orwellian language manipulation has also, I suspect, played a part. In recent years, questionnaires have used the term ‘migration’ not immigration. The latter word carries with it more sense of permanence as opposed to transience; to many Brits, it carries less concern.
What the respondents to this study didn’t know, of course was that the real population figures for the UK might be hiding yet more incompetence in dealing with illegal immigration….and that immigration from beyond the EU has been enormous in the last three years.
That particular issue went from being an easily dismissed urban myth to apparently hard consumption-based fact, when in 2007, a pr bod at Tesco leaked to The Independent that, based on food consumption figures, there were at least eight million more people resident in Britain than records showed. At the time, I rang two old food clients of mine plus one other adland chum close to another food retailer: all three said they couldn’t put a figure on it, but yes – the census was definitely underestimating the real population. Since then, I am told that – during parliamentary submissions about market size and planning permissions – Tesco have repeated their calculation that the real UK population is close to 80 million.
The simple truth is that nobody knows – least of all the Home Office – so, in the delightful venacular of Scottish Law, the case remains Not Proven. But you do worry when a Home Secretary by the name of Theresa May admits in 2013 that “there are 15,000 Jihadists at large in Britain, but we don’t know where they are”.
What is clear is that, since moving into Number Ten, Mrs May is as clueless about immigration controls as she was in 2010. This time, the concern related to non-EU migration statistics.
Three weeks ago, the ONS announced that fully 283,000 people migrated to the UK of which 261,000 did not originate in the EU. Nine years ago, the Tories promised to cut immigration “to the tens of thousands per annum”. Today, rejecting free movement in the EU looks pretty irrelevant if 92.3% of incomers arrive from elsewhere.
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Ultimately, in discussing immigration figures, there are five considerations: first, do the cultures involved seem likely to integrate? Second, is the current population increase sustainable given our infrastructure and natural resources? Third, do they have skills we really can’t develop from our own pool of unemployed? Fourth, are the figures we have reliable? And fifth, do we have a humanitarian responsibility?
These I would answer as follows. Most seem likely to integrate successfully if the numbers don’t become overwhelming; Islamics do present a problem, and thus far their community is not handling the situation well.
No, Britain is already overcrowded in a small land area with a massive food imports deficit: in terms of a model for the future, the current immigration rate is dangerously out of control.
Such stats as we have collected suggest (no more than that) EU arrivals are more likely to have relevant work and social skills; with a UK unemployment figure (itself ludicrously under-recorded) at 1.6 million, and the average wage £500 less than it was in 2010, it seems an investment win-win to massively reduce immigration and start targeted retraining….better late than never.
The figures we have for employment, inflation and total population are all doubtful, and the entire political class is complicit in the obfuscations involved.
And finally, yes I do believe compassion must play a role in migrant considerations, but for the time being at least, the urgent must overtake the important. Until every last female SPA State Pension has been reimbursed and guaranteed for the remainder of their lives – and the genuinely disabled given a decent welfare break – those victims must come first: we have been uncharitable at home, so that’s where our compassion should begin. That is, after all, the first duty of every Nation State government.
So the final judgement in the case of Watson v Robinson et al has to be, is the defendant an unalloyed preacher of hate, or are his concerns about cultural cover-up justified?
These are the facts:
- The Quilliam report, Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation: Dissecting Grooming Gangs, written by Haras Rafiq and Muna Adil, claims that 84% of grooming gang offenders are Asian, the majority “of Pakistani origin with Muslim heritage”
- The statistic is based on the prosecution of 58 grooming gangs since 2005.
- Two further gang prosecution cases involving 37 Muslim men have since been achieved in Huddersfied and Oxford. Four more are onging and subject to press reporting constraints.
- 1500 women were abused by the Rotherham grooming gangs, and the enquiry into this atrocity found that the Home Office knew of their existence in 2002, but failed to act.
- In 2018, female Labour MP for Bradford West Naz Shah, a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, retweeted a post telling Rotherham sex victims to ‘shut their mouths for diversity’.
- In 2018, Rotherham Labour MP Sarah Champion received a flood of death threats and hate mail from largely Muslim constituents for criticising the blind eye in certain parts of the Muslim community towards rape gangs. She was branded a bigot, an Islamophobe, and a racist. Corbynistas called for her to be expelled from the party. She was fired from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. Rotherham’s branch of Momentum and senior members of the town’s Council of Mosques have since combined to try and get her removed as Labour’s candidate for the next general election.
- In the 2017 General Election, exit polls suggested that 85% of Muslims in Britain voted Labour.
If you were a member of the I am Tommy brigade (and I stress again, I’m not) you could be forgiven for wondering why their hero gets banged up, banned from social media and arrested at the drop of a hat for pointing out an obvious reality, whereas Labour Party councillors and MPs plus Islamic community leaders perverting the course of justice seem to be immune from the felt-collar experience.
61 grooming gangs in a single decade, and Mayor Khan’s sole response to it is, “Britain has an Islamophobia problem”. Wrong again, Mr Mayor: Britain’s Islamic population has an integration problem, an attitude problem, and seriously anti-social behavioural problems.
Ethnicity – “race” in oldspeak – is a Red Herring used by everyone from David Lammy via Momentum to the MCGB as a smokescreen to hide cultural elements of Islam that are incompatible with British liberal democratic values.
Tom Watson has shed several stones in weight over the last few years: he’s done it largely via the tactic of giving up sugar. Now he’s an anti-sucrose fanatic, he is campaigning for everyone else to be the same. He won’t rest, in fact, until he’s decimated the confectionery industry.
But this is what ideologues and religious fundamentalists do: they ban, they burn, they censor, they accuse, they cover up, they spin, they lie….and above all, they refuse to accept democratic defeat. From Blair to Corbyn via Watson, Khan, Jones and Shah, their first loyalty is never to The People: it is solely to hegemenous victory for their delusional catechism.
It matters not a jot whether the High Priests insist we worship globalism, monetarism, socialism, Islam, EU federalism or feminism, the goal is always the same: the triumph of systemic coercion over individual self-determination.
The Slog 