Why our immigration obsession is bringing about the ruination of Britain
Driven by anti-immigration sentiment, Brexit has damaged the UK economy and Reform UK’s plans for a crackdown would inflict even more pain
In 2016, the British Election Study published word clouds showing the main motivations of Remain and Leave voters in the Brexit referendum. By far the biggest factor for those who wanted the UK to stay in the European Union was “economy”; for Brexiteers, it was “immigration”. We all know which won the day.
If Remainers thought that the one benefit of leaving the EU would be that immigration would no longer be such a driving force in British politics, they were mistaken. Under Boris Johnson, net migration rose to 944,000 in the year to March 2023, partly because of the decision to provide a refuge for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers.
Offering sanctuary to people fleeing Putin’s war machine and communist tyranny – while also allowing people to come to work and study here – was unquestionably the right thing to do, but such a large number perhaps made some Leave voters feel betrayed. Did Boris the Brexiteer not understand what it had all been about?
Clearly, adding nearly a million people to the population every year would have been untenable, but that was never actually going to happen. It was always going to be an anomaly. In the year to June 2024, net migration fell to 649,000 and then to just 204,000 in the following year.
‘National emergency’ over ‘invasion’
Yet, judging by Reform UK’s current popularity in the polls and the Conservatives’ full-scale adoption of a Reform-like stance on the issue, immigration still looms large in the word clouds of many voters.
Nigel Farage’s party is preparing to spend a vast amount of taxpayers’ money to confront what they describe as an “invasion”, if they become the next government.
They plan to set up a UK Deportation Command – compared by critics to ICE in the US – whose mission will be to “track down, detain and deport” up to 288,000 people a year. They would also leave the European Convention on Human Rights and “disapply” the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention”. Their claim that Britain faces a “national emergency in which uncontrolled immigration undermines public order” echoes Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
READ MORE: It took 30 years, but the European question destroyed the Tories. Now Labour could be next
The torture convention includes an article which says no country shall “expel, return... or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”, so could present an obstacle to some deportations.
The idea of forcing someone to go to a country where they will probably be tortured, possibly to death, for no other reason than they are a foreigner strikes me as immoral. People who vote for this to happen may find themselves confronted by some pretty gruesome accounts of the consequences.
ICE-style clashes on the streets
Reform has dismissed suggestions that UK Deportation Command would cause ICE-style chaos on UK streets. However, speaking about their plans on Monday, the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf could have explicitly ruled out the idea that Deportation Command officers would be armed rather than saying that “we would not expect UK Deportation Command to carry weapons”.
Anyone who has seen the documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street, about protesters who stopped an attempted deportation in Glasgow, will realise the potential for clashes, the potential for a cycle of violence to develop.
The consequences for protesters could be severe as Reform, which claims “Britain is lawless”, is planning “zero tolerance policing”. This would see “saturation stop and search affecting up to one-in-five people in high crime areas”; five new ‘Nightingale’ prisons built within 18 months (named after the temporary Nightingale hospitals set up during Covid); and the introduction of life sentences for people who commit more than three “serious” offences.
Given Reform regards immigration as a “national emergency”, would interfering with Deportation Command as it hunts down immigrants be considered a “serious” matter?
Some of these fugitives may turn out to be people who currently have “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK, which Reform plans to scrap. So they could be people living peacefully, paying their taxes, contributing to the economy, doing jobs that British citizens don’t want, and performing valued and necessary roles.
Doubling down on Brexit folly
The benefits of membership of the European Union were considerable and the UK economy is struggling as a result of losing them. A paper published in November – written by Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, a senior economist at the Bank of England, Dr Pawel Smietanka, of the German Bundesbank’s research centre, and others – estimated the effects of the Brexit vote.
They concluded that, by 2025, the UK’s GDP had fallen by 6 to 8 per cent, investment by between 12 and 18 per cent, employment by 3 to 4 per cent and productivity by 3 to 4 per cent.
This is contributing greatly to the general sense of public discontent. Unfortunately, it also seems to be persuading people to back Reform, whose promise of a comprehensive crackdown of migrants is effectively a doubling-down on Brexit that will actually make the country’s problems even worse.
A report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that while net-zero migration could result in an increase in GDP per person, it would weaken headline GDP growth and “materially worsen the public finances, leaving the budget deficit around 0.8 per cent of GDP (around £37 billion) higher by 2040”. That could also be £37bn of higher taxes or spending cuts.
Of course, some people simply dismiss ‘expert’ reports. It is an attitude that led the country astray over Brexit and may well do so again. Unless the country gets our collective head out of the ‘immigration’ cloud and confronts economic reality, the UK faces further decline and, ultimately, ruination.
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