If criticising mass immigration can get you banned from Britain, free speech is dead
When Sir Keir Starmer visited the White House in February, he stoutly rejected JD Vance's claim that free speech is increasingly restricted in Britain. 'We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,' retorted our Prime Minister, 'and it will last for a very, very long time.'
This was of course reassuring to hear. Unfortunately, however, the Home Office appears to have missed the memo. Because it has just barred a French author from entering the UK to give a speech about the dangers of mass immigration.
Renaud Camus, 78, argued in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement ('The great replacement') that unchecked immigration in Western European countries is part of a deliberate plot by the powers-that-be, which will ultimately lead to these countries' indigenous inhabitants being 'replaced' by people of other cultures. Does the Home Office deem this to be an unacceptable line of thought? I can only infer that it does. Because in an email seen by the Telegraph, officials informed Mr Camus that his 'presence in the UK' was 'not considered to be conducive to the public good'.
This is an intriguing claim. Not least because I'm reasonably confident that there are at least some members of the British public who subscribe to Mr Camus's theory. Does this mean that the presence of these British people is not conducive to the public good, either? If so, what do our authorities propose to do with them? Should those British people be banned from Britain, too?
At any rate, I fear that the Home Office's decision to bar Mr Camus is liable to backfire. Such a draconian intervention will only reinforce his supporters' belief that he's right, and that those who rule us are conspiring to silence him. Indeed, news of the ban may well lead lots of people who had never previously heard of Mr Camus to take an interest in his theories, too. Better, surely, just to let the man speak, no matter how horribly problematic his opinions may seem. After all, how many people in this country would even have known about his proposed talk, if the Home Office hadn't prevented him from making it?
Still, perhaps some British voters will look on the bright side. How exciting, they will think, that the UK authorities have finally found a foreigner who they believe should not be granted automatic entry into our country. Nigel Farage could even call for a new bank holiday, so that, each year, the public can commemorate this historic occasion.
As for Mr Camus, I don't know whether he still wishes to visit. But if so, has he considered eschewing the Eurostar in favour of a dinghy? Then the authorities would welcomed him with open arms. And if, before setting sail from Calais, he remembers to bin his passport, he'll be able to stay for as long as he likes.
The caring side of the firing squad
Could the American public turn against capital punishment? A leading US academic believes so. Writing for the Guardian, Austin Sarat – a professor of political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts – notes that some US states have recently gone back to using firing squads to execute condemned criminals. This, he argues, represents 'a defeat for death penalty supporters' – because the firing squads will act as 'a vivid reminder of the brutality of state killing', and thus 'undermine the pro-capital-punishment narrative'.
Is he sure? Personally, I find it hard to imagine many ordinary Americans saying, 'I used to be in favour of executing this mass-murdering paedophile. But only in a soft, wholesome, lovely way, such as gently smothering him in his sleep with a bundle of kittens. Now I've discovered that executing people isn't necessarily very nice, I'm firmly against it. I'd hate to think that this mass-murdering paedophile might suffer.'
In any case, American firing squads can be surprisingly thoughtful. In 1996, John Taylor – a child-killer from Utah – was due to be executed by this method. On the appointed date, he requested, for his last meal, a pizza 'with everything on it': sausage, pepperoni, ham, mushrooms, hot peppers and extra cheese.
Having wolfed down his pizza, however, the child-killer complained that he had an upset stomach. What happened next was so blackly comic, it could have come from the pages of Joseph Heller. Because the guards went and fetched him some antacid.
This was wonderfully kind of them. After all, they could have said: 'Um, sir, we're about to shoot you dead. Literally minutes from now. So don't worry if your tummy's a bit queasy. It won't be hurting much longer.'
What a load of rubbish
Birmingham bin strike activists, we learnt yesterday, are planning to cause a political earthquake. Feeling let down by Labour, they want to form a 'real workers' party' – which would comprise Left-wing trade unionists, environmentalists… and 'Free Palestine activists'.
I wouldn't have expected to see this final group included in a 'real workers' party' – if only because none of them seem to have jobs. During normal working hours, 'Free Palestine activists' tend to be far too busy vandalising buildings and blocking traffic. Thus preventing 'real workers' from getting to work.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
37 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Labour is still spending £2.2bn a year of foreign aid on UK hotels for asylum seekers - despite vowing to end the practice
The government is spending around £2.2billion a year of foreign aid on housing asylum seekers in hotels in the UK. Figures released by the Home Office show Labour only managed to reduce its spending on official development assistance between 2024/25 by around £1million, the BBC reports. That is despite the party's election manifesto pledge to 'end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds'. Official development assistance (ODA) is known at the UK's overseas aid budget and is used to promote the economic development and welfare in developing countries around the world. The Home Office is allocated a portion of this money to support refugees and asylum seekers shortly after their arrival into Britain, of which a large amount is spent on their accommodation. At the end of December 42,000 asylum seekers were in Home Office 'contingency accommodation', including 38,000 in hotels, a report National Audit Office (NAO) showed last month. This includes 735 people being housed in large accommodation sites built by the previous Conservative government, including former RAF base Wethersfield, in Essex, and Napier former barracks in Kent. Previous figures show the government spent around £2.3billion of Home Office ODA on asylum accommodation in 2024/25 while around £2.5billion was spent in 2023/24, when the Conservatives were in power. Last month, it was revealed that asylum accommodation - including hotels - will cost the taxpayer £15billion over 10 years. Data from the National Audit Office (NAO) showed that contracts originally forecast to cost £4.5billion over a decade from 2019 are now expected to run to £15.3billion over same period. It means that on average the taxpayer will spend £4,191,780 a day on housing asylum seekers over the life of the contracts. A separate breakdown from the NAO showed overall costs in 2024-25 were £1.67billion. That amounted to £4,567,123 a day on average, or £3,172 a minute. The report also found that asylum hotels 'may be more profitable' for companies holding the contracts than other types of housing. The Home Office awarded the contracts to three suppliers – Clearsprings Ready Homes, Mears Group and Serco – which operate two or three UK regions each. They are responsible for finding a range of self-catering accommodation for asylum seekers who are dispersed across the country, and for sub-contracting hotels for tens of thousands of migrants coming across the Channel by small boat. The report found Clearsprings is now set to be paid £7.3billion over the 10 years from 2019 to 2029, the NAO said, while Serco is expected to get £5.5billion and Mears will receive £2.5billion. Earlier this year it was reported that Deputy pm Angela Rayner wants the Government to terminate contracts they have made with private companies to house migrants. In its election manifesto, Labour vowed to 'hire additional caseworkers to clear the Conservatives' backlog and end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds'. But, despite the pledge, the Home Office is yet to set a definite end date on migrant hotels as it does not want to commit to 'arbitrary targets'. The only vague timeframe given by the department was by Matthew Rycroft, the department's top civil servant, in February. He told MP's that the aim is to get to 'zero by the end of the parliament', leaving open the possibility migrant hotels could stay until August 2029. A Home Office spokesperson said: 'We inherited an asylum system under exceptional pressure, and continue to take action, restoring order, and reduce costs. 'This will ultimately reduce the amount of Official Development Assistance spent to support asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. 'We are immediately speeding up decisions and increasing returns so that we can end the use of hotels and save the taxpayer £4bn by 2026.'
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
The truth about the 1984 miners' strike
On 6 March 1984, I found myself smack-bang in the middle of the largest industrial dispute in post-war history. As the son of a fifth-generation miner whose bedroom window looked out onto Pye Hill Pit in Selston – the remote Nottinghamshire mining village I called home – I couldn't help but be caught up in the miners' strike. And over its 363 days, I watched with bemused anger as a series of nods, winks, slights of hand and outright lies were fashioned into a hard and fast history. On one side we had the National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) principled president Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, fighting to save British mining. On the other side, Nottinghamshire's moneygrubbing scabs, intent on murdering Old King Coal – aided by Margaret Thatcher and the rozzers. Admittedly, the media didn't spell it out quite so plainly, but there were enough headlines and emotion-heavy images to make sure we all got the message.
New Statesman
4 hours ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
