Stopping the boats is only half the battle. We must also restore British values

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2 days ago

At church on Sunday, we were asked to pray for refugees. I admit that, for the first time, I hesitated. Over the weekend, we have watched helplessly as hundreds of illegal migrants crossed the Channel with impunity. Even John Healey, the Defence Secretary, found these scenes 'pretty shocking'. The monthly Universal Credit bill for households with at least one immigrant is now almost £1 billion. Our streets are disfigured by imported crime and conflict. It isn't easy to be a Good Samaritan when you feel that your country is no longer your beloved home, but a fairly insalubrious hotel.
Indeed, the anger engendered by what I call border anxiety puts at risk everything that fills us with patriotic pride – our ancient laws and liberties, our tolerance and sense of fair play and, yes, our kindness to strangers. Successive governments have been elected to control migration, but have proceeded to do the opposite.
Simultaneously, we have dismantled or denigrated our own culture, our values and our traditions. The result is that we cannot integrate those who are already here, because we are losing the sense of what it means to be British. Unless we believe in ourselves, all we have is anarchy in public and parallel societies in private.
The rage provoked by feelings of betrayal over uncontrolled migration is shattering the British political system, which the rest of the world used to envy and imitate. Yet it is fatal to our civility to give in to that rage: 'Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.' Instead of the fabled stability of our two-party parliamentary democracy, we seem now to be succumbing to a Continental-style chaos of four, five or more factions. A forest fire of fury has annihilated the old parties in France, Italy and other European nations. Why should Britain be immune?
Fissiparous parties held together only by hostility are, ironically, prey to foreign powers. In Poland, the presidential election was overshadowed by the fact that the nationalist Law and Justice candidate, Karol Nawrocki, went to the Oval Office mid-campaign to pay homage to Donald Trump. Her master's voice, the US Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, flew to Warsaw to insist that 'Karol… needs to be the next president of Poland', while denouncing his liberal rival, Rafal Trzaskowski, as 'a train wreck of a leader'.
Trump's emissaries had already intervened in the German election earlier this year: both Elon Musk and J D Vance endorsed Alice Weidel, leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. When the German authorities accused the nationalist AfD of extremism, Washington protested again in the name of 'free speech'. Meanwhile, the AfD has made no secret of its pro-Putin sympathies – and the feeling is mutual, especially since the new conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has emerged as a staunch ally of Ukraine.
We don't want to see British politics dominated by the White House or the Kremlin. Nor do we want every other urgent issue – from defence to the deficit – to be subordinated indefinitely to migration. We need to reach a new consensus on how to deter or deal with illegal migrants as soon as possible. Undesirables who come here to commit crimes or exploit our generosity must be deported. Likewise, legal migration must be curtailed, citizenship earned and rules strictly enforced.
Above all, we must rediscover the world we have lost: in which our history is not a tale told by ideological idiots, but the stirring narrative of a nation of pioneers, entrepreneurs and saviours. We worry about immigrants, but forget about the half a million emigrants we lose a year, many of them young families despairing of a society that has lost its own plot.
Three of my four grandchildren are growing up in Poland, a land that has endured an incomparably harsher past than our own, but which celebrates its culture and inculcates old-fashioned good manners. No wonder it is predicted that the Poles will overtaken Japan in GDP per capita next year and will one day surpass Germany and the UK too.
Given the polarisation of British opinion on immigration ever since the 1960s, achieving a robust consensus may seem a remote prospect. Yet it is actually well within our grasp. As I wrote here recently, Denmark has done exactly that with its Social Democrat-led coalition under the formidable Mette Frederiksen. She has demonstrated beyond doubt that banishing border anxiety, while restoring confidence in cultural identity and the nation state, do not need to be demonised as a 'far-Right' crusade.
Ms Frederiksen is indubitably a woman of the centre-Left, but she is first and foremost a Danish patriot.
There are many grounds for doubting that Sir Keir Starmer is about to follow Ms Frederiksen's example, but one of the strongest is the electoral calculus. Labour's elites are wedded to the notion that their voters, who include millions of migrants and their descendants, would desert them if they adopted the Danish model. They are not entirely wrong – many Labour MPs do face threats from Lib Dems, Greens and especially Islamists – but this is a test of the Prime Minister's statesmanship. Ms Frederiksen's predecessor, Helle Thorning-Schmidt (the wife of Stephen Kinnock MP), failed that test and lost. She is a historical footnote, while Ms Frederiksen is widely emulated.
Equally, Reform UK is guilty of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We must beware of belittling the huge contribution that those from overseas have made to this country. It is no accident that the last two Conservative leaders have had migrant backgrounds. There are many like them who are intensely proud of this country and have no time for those who claim asylum but are really gaming the system. It was Rishi Sunak, not Sir Keir, whose measures, passed before he left office, have halved the net migration numbers.
Hence Kemi Badenoch is the politician who most deserves to be trusted to achieve a new settlement on migration. Her formula is the right one: to end the automatic path to British citizenship and introduce a legally binding cap on annual immigration. If any leader can lay the spectre of border anxiety to rest, it's Kemi.
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