23-07-2025
Labour's grotesque lies about illegal migration are finally being exposed
Sir Keir Starmer is the worst possible Prime Minister at the most inauspicious of times. The lies, double-standards and moral blackmail fuelling our illegal immigration crisis threaten to tear this country apart, and yet Starmer stands frozen, unwilling as well as incapable of rising to the challenge. He is a cardboard cutout of a prime minister, an ideological automaton at a time when the public craves leadership, reassurance and change.
If he truly wanted to defuse tensions, and if he were even a half-decent politician, Starmer would make the trip to Essex and, like de Gaulle addressing the crowd in Algiers in 1958, tell the law-abiding middle class protesters in front of the Bell Hotel in Epping that he understands them.
He would order the transfer of the asylum-seekers to a better location. He would condemn extremists and agitators of all hues, far-Right as well as far-Left, and insist that all violence is intolerable. He would rebuke Essex Police, the wokest police force in the most Right-wing county, for escorting pro-migrant protestors to the Bell, stating that he opposes any notion of two-tier justice or treating one side of the debate better than the other. He would express his distaste at the booking of a four star hotel in Canary Wharf to house migrants, and demand cheaper pop-up sites be found.
In the real world, we must make do with Starmer's platitudes and untruths. Why did his social media account claim that 'we will stop at nothing to tackle illegal migration' when that is the very opposite of what Labour is doing? Starmer refuses to pull levers that might work: his priority is not stopping the boats but maintaining the human rights orthodoxy at any cost.
Yes, Starmer would love it were something to turn up and immigration, legal and illegal, were to drop – he may even get his way if Rachel Reeves bankrupts Britain – but he has no desire to pro-actively do anything radical about it.
The PM refuses to pull out of the ECHR or of the UN Refugee conventions, he is wedded to the obsolete principal of non-refoulement and he scrapped the Rwanda scheme. He won't consider jailing illegal arrivals. He will never take truly drastic action towards the people traffickers.
This newspaper revealed last week that a High Court judge, in a case brought against the Foreign Office by an Afghan living in the UK seeking to bring relatives to Britain, that 'family members' did not have to have a 'blood or legal connection' to the applicant. Down that road lies madness.
Starmer's ludicrous, ECHR compliant plan for a ' thousands in, fifty out' pilot plan with France won't work, if it is ever signed off by the EU. He tells people smugglers he 'will destroy your business model, piece by piece', at the very time they drop off yet more boatloads. His idea to crack down on illicit activity is to 'share asylum accommodation locations' with food delivery services 'so they can take action if riders are staying there.' Downing Street officials believe that Britain's social fabric is 'fraying at the edges', and yet the best the Government can do is to demand greater integration and the restoration of trust, as if that were easy. Laughably, the Prime Minister reportedly believes that his policy to improve school attendance is already improving community relations. None of this is even close to being commensurate to the scale of the crisis.
In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy, Thomas Sowell, the African-American economist, explained why politicians like Starmer lose touch with reality and end up despising their electorates.
Sowell, who to her credit Kemi Badenoch often cites approvingly, divides the world into groups: the anointed elites, those we now call the woke Blob, ego-crazed idiot-savants who believe that simplistic social engineering can solve all of the world's problems, and followers of the 'tragic vision', who have the humility to understand the complexities and trade-offs inherent to human societies.
The anointed include Labour, the Corbynites/Greens, Lib Dems and the many wet Tories. Followers of the 'tragic vision' include Reform, sensible Tories (including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Jacob Rees-Mogg) and the 53 per cent of the public who tell YouGov that immigration is one of the most important issues facing Britain.
The anointed are sure they know best, and don't react well when their grand schemes to 'save humanity' – the ECHR, the Human Rights Act or open borders – go wrong. Much of this is narcissism: these elites don't care as much about the downtrodden as they do about feeling good about themselves.
The anointed, Sowell explained, operate by picking a 'mascot', a marginalised group, to champion, such as small boat migrants, while simultaneously demonising a 'target', such as ordinary 'normies' who believe immigration has gone too far.
The anointed are above all dogmatic. Their beliefs are not susceptible to auto-correction, to Popperian falsification, to feedback from reality: they simply dismiss all contrary empirical evidence. They consider themselves to be well-intentioned and morally superior, so any criticism of their axioms must be dismissed as false consciousness, prima facie evidence of racism.
So deranged, so deluded are these elites that they cannot conceive that their critics could genuinely, for non-xenophobic reasons, worry about filling hotels in residential areas with young men with no passports and no real known identity, and the risk this could pose to young girls. They can't accept that voters might genuinely be affected by housing and public services shortages exacerbated by mass migration (in a world of sluggish supply), and not be merely driven by prejudice. They cannot understand that putting up migrants in costly hotels, at a time when taxes are at record highs, is insulting to millions. They fail to comprehend why, in this context, the fact that a school banned a 12-year old girl from wearing a Union Flag dress on Culture Celebration Day, could be considered a provocation.
Starmer and Labour will never change, and neither will the rest of the anointed class. The only answer is to replace them. I have a feeling that the next election will be called sooner than many believe.
