I’m not sure what policy Farage would adopt in power.
Certainly the idea of revealing a zero immigration policy together with a repatriation of illegals and legal who have failed to find work would be problematic politically at the moment.
But who knows how far the situation will deteriorate between now and the next election?
I have said before I wouldn’t be surprised if the government, police judiciary and media didn’t ‘gang’ up on Reform to get them banned in any future elections like they are trying in Germany with the AfD.
Although we have seen very large immigration in the last few years, and it is often remarked that legal immigration dwarfs illegal immigration, legal immigration is on average of higher quality.
Although not all are of high quality (by which I mean law abiding, productive, at least average intelligence) many of them are here as students which might suggest that they are at least among the best of the populations where they came from, others come from Ukraine, are white and will assimilate fairly easily (although Ukraine has relatively low IQ for a European country), Hong Kong and China (higher IQ than native population, low criminality, very high assimilation rates). There has also been a lot of Indian legal immigration in the last few years. I have find this quite noticeable living in London. It's not desirable but most of them are not criminals or crime prone.
With that as context, whilst I'm not denying that the sheer numbers are an issue, there are three specific problems stemming from immigration.
A refusal by many immigrants, principally Muslims, to assimilate. In many cases they actively disregard our culture and want to supplant it with their own, including with their religion. Criminality is also an issue, but not as much as for the second group below. High birthrates relative to the native population is an issue. Many of us will of course know Muslims who are assimilated - wear Western clothing, two kids only, don't wear their religion on their sleeves. They aren't a problem, but they are also a minority, and typically middle class where they come from.
Black British have high rates of criminality. I suspect that this is less the case for recent arrivals from Africa (Ghanaian dentists etc.), at least until recently when the 'refugees' started arriving in numbers.
Three - numbers are an issue as they place a strain on public services, and also, ethnic diversity, even if peaceful, make it hard for immigrants to assimilate, as there is no group to assimilate to in their area.
How do we make the undesirable immigrants leave? Well, firstly, by putting expatriation and the stripping of British citizenship on the table as punishment for criminal offenses. As the case of Shamima Begum shows, it is possible (she was judged to have Bangladeshi citizenship, so it was possible - it's against international law to strip somebody of citizenship if that leaves them stateless).
Now, more controversially, how do we get this to be effective? Reinstate sedition laws, and police aggressively. Call for Israel to be destroyed - criminal sentence and removal. Call for Sharia law - guilty of sedition, removal. Any crime - removal. Planning applications for minarets? Denied. You get the idea.
For those that can't be removed, we need policies to force assimilation. Islamic schools - banned. Give special subsidised mortages for non-members of an ethnic group to buy a house in the area where that group dominates. These could I suppose be considered part of Theresa May's 'hostile environment' approach, which has a lot to recommend it.
The answer is ‘not the politicians’. It is the dark forces behind the ‘establishment’, the globalists, Soros, Blair, the WEF. These are the people pulling the strings of Starmer etc.
You say you find yourself in the company of blood and soil nationalism, which I assume means ethnonationalism. But you go on to say it isn't desirable to return to 1950s demographics (i.e. 99.9% white). But isn't a return of this sort exactly what blood and soil nationalists want?
Further, if, having complained about garbage immigration, you then state that you don't want to return to 1950s demographics, it's surely incumbent on you to explain yourself, given that it's a pretty big and, arugably, somewhat counter-intuitive statement!
You say that you're in favour of voluntary repatriation involving a financial inducement. And, in addition, you mention "enforced deportations of immigrants who engage in criminal activity". ("Deportations" are by definition "enforced"!) But you're unclear as to whether deportation would include or is mainly aimed at immigrants who are British citizens.
You say "we don’t have the luxury of deporting third and fourth generation black immigrants who are increasingly feral". But if that feral behaviour leads to crime, and you support stripping the citizenship of immigrant British citizens who commmit crime so as to be able to deport them, then presumably we do indeed have that luxury?
You characterize Reform as middle-of-the-road civic nationalists. But I'd have thought that, in principle, civic nationalism might support the voluntary repatriation of immigrant groups who are unable or unwilling to integrate around a shared set of civic values.
Finally, I'd have thought that true blood and soil nationalists would regard voluntary repatriation for all immigrant British citizens (however defined) combined with complusory repatriation only for immigrant British citizens who commit (any? serious?) crime as something of a half measure.
Thus, perhaps what you're advocating might be characterized as (something akin to) a strong form of civic nationalism?
There are certainly Muslims who don’t want to live in an islamic state of the UK as there are Romanies who will leave as soon as the benefits end (all types of benefits).
My cup is usually half full and I imagine a country that has housing at low cost.
AI allow will allow people to enjoy a superior lifestyle and as a consequence the birth rate will steady.
Even so countries like France are so efficient (compared to the UK) they needed 1.5 million less staff - without AI, 3 years ago
We need an easily communicable policy that all in the center and on the right can support. Imagine protests with banners saying “Intelligent Immigration Referendum Now”.
Key principles. These are high level and details need to be worked out.
- Regular referenda to set numbers of different types of immigration.
-Referendum couched in terms of how many Birminghams (or other city) you want to import every year. Not numbers.
-US 1st amendment type protection for freedom of speech to discuss immigration.
-Any organization receiving more than 20% of its funding from taxpayers cannot campaign in the referenda.
-Option to vote to site an International Protection center in your own local area. This allows lefty do gooders to campaign to site a centre in their own leafy suburb.
-Organisations can collect signatures to have specific immigration provisions added to the vote. E.g. cutting welfare to people who do not pass an English language proficiency test.
I suspect opinion polling would support this, which makes the proposal sensible centre rather than far right.
Ideally, this should be implemented as a constitutional amendment, but if, like the UK, you don’t have a constitution, it should be a law.
"Religious leaders...should not incite their faithful to defy, challenge or actively oppose secular Government policies". A social order that followed that advice would not be worth defending.
Yes, immigration should be dramatically reduced and should be focused on receiving immigrants from countries and cultures that have financially succeeded and culturally integrated into the UK.
No immigrant should be eligible for benefits, housing, pension and if they do not keep full time work above £30k for under 30s and £40k for over 30s, then their work visa and resident status should be cancelled and they should be required to leave. This requirement can be changed for countries with which we have reciprocal arrangements.
You may find this view from America of interest (Joshua Trevino / Armas) [have edited for length so it fits the comment box]:
A much-remarked and deeply chilling aspect of the British regime’s social repression following the civil disorder and violence of early August is its pursuit of those who merely engaged in speech online. The various mechanisms of the regime have been crowing about the wave of arrests and jailing, including a Home Office posting that “[t]here's no place in society for armchair thugs.” But there is, of course: you just have to belong to the government or be one of its valued constituencies. If you are, then you can freely post apologetics for menace and violence . . .
Or you can be the Home Office itself, doing its best Westmoreland / McNamara light-at-the-end-of the-tunnel datum — but then there is no British Vietnam experience to ward them off it — with a plain old body-count metric, touted as a sort of success . . . “[y]et no arrests for the thousands of people who enter the country illegally each year.” But this is the point, and the discrepancy is meant to be noticed: the regime touts its activity specifically to illuminate the difference between that which it tolerates, and that which it represses. The appeals to consistency and accusations of hypocrisy are unmoored from the reality of British governance now. It would be hypocritical and inconsistent if the U.K. regime promised equal justice under law, for example, or punished only commonly discernible lawbreaking. It does neither. If the post-riot prosecutions confined themselves to generally agreed crimes like property destruction, assault, and so on, across all cohorts, then there would be few grounds for complaint and one could argue that it does in fact aspire to equal justice. What is actually happening is a vigorous prosecution of crimethink, mostly under the anodyne term “online offenses,” and unconnected with any demonstrable incitement or violence.
One chilling example comes in the sentencing of Julie Sweeney, a caregiver for her disabled husband, who will now spend fifteen months in jail for a rather sad and morally abhorrent little Facebook post. The judge acknowledged that she was, in effect, a nobody who posted in anger and endangered no one, and he further acknowledged that she was not racist. According to the BBC, “[t]he judge [further] said no one was suggesting that Sweeney would have taken part in any violence.” Yet she will be in jail for fifteen months, and her husband thrown to who knows what mercies, and why? Well, this is why, in the judge’s own words: “You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people.”
That’s it. She expressed regime-disallowed opinions, reacted incorrectly to the news, and so off she goes. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it looks as if this sort of thought policing characterizes about one in ten of the Home Office’s thousand-plus arrests. To re-use a phrase, it is done pour encourager les autres. The absence of a definable standard is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Julie Sweeney and a few hundred powerless nobodies with bad opinions are thrown against the wall to motivate the rest of the population to first, be silent, and second, to look to the regime for the permitted ambit of sentiment before speaking. It is Soviet stuff, but the Soviet Union does not exist, and the United Kingdom’s regime does.
(In another Soviet parallel, the regime has convicted two twelve-year old children, one of whom was described by a judge as being “more involved in the violence and disorder than any other defendant I’ve seen coming through these courts, adult or child,” which is self-evidently absurd but also characteristic of regime-exhortative hyperbole. The Communist Chinese express their admiration.)
There is a type of American conservative who looks at this sort of thing and reacts with a studied complacency: this could never happen here, they will say, or we would resist if it did. But neither proposition is accurate. It does happen here, at a comparatively low level for now — and it is unresisted. The mechanisms and lessons learned of the various regimes are shared and refined among them, and we are therefore deeply wrong to view the U.K. with smug complacency.
>
As has been stated here previously, when the time comes that the United Kingdom follows through on its threats to request extradition of Americans for thoughtcrime, it is probable that a progressive-dominated White House and its apparatus will view the request favorably. This will be especially likely when the target of the request is an irritant to, or opponent of, both regimes: for example Elon Musk. This is not to say that lack of a public profile will be salvific: the American regime knows the logic of pour encourager les autres equally well.
In publishing the macro-scale numbers on its roundup of criminals and dissidents alike, the U.K. regime is not merely echoing the aesthetic of Robert McNamara: it is literally engaging in the McNamara fallacy, which is an analytic error that excludes qualitative factors in favor of quantitative ones. Quantity has a quality all its own — this is evidently the regime reasoning, which counts on sheer numbers, speed, and pitilessness to yield its intended effect. This may in fact work, and the odds are in its favor: contrary to the mythos of insurgency, there are plenty of examples of its suppression. This is especially true when the insurgency fails to generate a sufficiently expansive and durable coalition, fails to attract an elite cohort, and fails to withstand regime action. All these are obvious failures of U.K. — or more properly, English — right-populism, which has only a limited window of time to rectify them. It is less true of American right-populism, which does have a coalition and an elite niche, to an extent; whether it is robust versus the regime will be tested in full if Kamala Harris ascends to the Presidency.
Let us pause here to observe the total failure of meaningful elements of the British ruling apparatus to support that right-populist tendency — which is significantly large, as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election — as evidence that its self-styled Conservative Party is essentially useless. An opposition that remains mute while the regime conducts a national persecution of its base is no opposition at all. The jury is out on Reform.
Per the McNamara fallacy at hand, note that the regimes in both the U.K. and the U.S. entirely neglect those qualitative factors: the moral battlefield. (An appeal to rule-following and quiescent conformity, or else, is hardly this.) Partly this is a reflection of relative power: the regimes simply don’t feel the need to. Partly it is aesthetic revulsion: the regimes genuinely hate their opposition. (There will be a separate essay someday on elite negative reactions to a visible member of a regime-disapproved cohort: a Southerner or a Texan, for example. There are British analogues.) Partly too it is perceptual narrowing, in which it becomes literally impossible for the regime to conceive of viewing the world in any way other than its own. Again, this may not matter. But it may, and if the neglect of the moral contest translates at some point into a moral loss for the regime — a nonzero probability, especially as it came to power weeks ago on the basis not of positive endorsement of itself, but negative rejection of its opponents — then the next round of this, which is sure to come, must see evermore-cruel efforts if the regime is to prevail.
The cycle is well known.
A few notes at the end here. The first is that Britain has, it seems, had serious problems with civil unrest across the past half-decade. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which was a go-to data source on civic violence during the summer-2020 insurrection in the United States, has a very interesting writeup on U.K. rioting now. Within that interesting writeup is this interesting bar chart, which shows that the 2024 level of British violence is well and recently precedented. Only with the critical mass of the “far-right” coded incidents does the regime swing into full punitive mode, mass-arrest tweets and all. The alert reader will discern why.
Malign American influence is visible here, by the bye: much of the 2020 violence was BLM-inspired, a testament to the U.K. left’s longstanding reflex as intellectual copycats of American progressivism. (This is a well-worn phenomenon globally. The incoming Mexican President is a signal example: Mexico is drowning in blood, and her major social achievement to date has been the promotion of transgenderism. This doesn’t reflect Mexican concerns: it reflects the concern of a Mexican elite sharply focused upon the American-left milieus to which it seeks access.) This cultural and ideological fixation also means the American regime could actually positively affect British-regime treatment of British citizenry if it chose, for example with a simple inclusion of the U.K. as a country of concern in some State Department human-rights report. It won’t happen of course: a conservative regime won’t think to do it, and a progressive regime won’t dream of criticizing what it wishes to do itself.
This is dispositive in the long run: not the nature of a country’s regime, but the nature of its people.
We have skills shortages, an aging population, and a low birth rate and this is the basis for immigration. Repatriation is nonsense, where do you draw the line, first second third generation Irish Indian French with dual nationalities or 100% born in the UK but with a 'forrin' sounding name. Where do you send them? For what crimes? and given the disdain for other countries people will be screeching that these criminals do their 'time' here in the UK as they will walk free as soon as they arrive in their destination countries.
We have three choices
1) Stop all migration immediately causing chaos in business, universities going bust, massive skills shortages etc etc general armageddon
2)Heavily invest in technology enabling/allowing tech and Ai to replace workers and gifting unlimited power to the owners and controllers of the tech. Think usual dystopian film scripts etc
3)Addressing the shortages progressively through education, financial incentives for families, and of course housebuilding.
Finally, with regard to divided communities, I just don't see it on my travels around Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Yes there are denser concentrations than others but I do business with anyone and it's fine. Look at the last conservative PM & Ministers. If you really want to see divided communities in the UK refusing to integrate, take a walk around Belfast.
Thanks as ever. Talk about the facts changing - it might be too late for a lot of former groovy liberals to change their minds.
What's most striking about this is the sudden nature of it, I know we've been in six figure immigration for quite a few years but it's absolutely EXPLODED in very, very recent times and it would appear that a decision was made to open the floodgates when it was easier to tighten, even slightly.
The problem with any 'voluntary repatriation' policy might be the sheer cost of it. The incentives would need to be substantial to attract the bites - and fraud in this area (i.e. people taking the money and contriving a way to stay illegally) is a real concern.
Only a dictator would be able to force this through. I think we might end up with one eventually, after the economic collapse.
(Whilst it's fun to demonise Starmer as a dictator, he's more of a technocratic manager.)
I’m not sure what policy Farage would adopt in power.
Certainly the idea of revealing a zero immigration policy together with a repatriation of illegals and legal who have failed to find work would be problematic politically at the moment.
But who knows how far the situation will deteriorate between now and the next election?
I have said before I wouldn’t be surprised if the government, police judiciary and media didn’t ‘gang’ up on Reform to get them banned in any future elections like they are trying in Germany with the AfD.
It’s a crazy world - who would have thought?
Although we have seen very large immigration in the last few years, and it is often remarked that legal immigration dwarfs illegal immigration, legal immigration is on average of higher quality.
Although not all are of high quality (by which I mean law abiding, productive, at least average intelligence) many of them are here as students which might suggest that they are at least among the best of the populations where they came from, others come from Ukraine, are white and will assimilate fairly easily (although Ukraine has relatively low IQ for a European country), Hong Kong and China (higher IQ than native population, low criminality, very high assimilation rates). There has also been a lot of Indian legal immigration in the last few years. I have find this quite noticeable living in London. It's not desirable but most of them are not criminals or crime prone.
With that as context, whilst I'm not denying that the sheer numbers are an issue, there are three specific problems stemming from immigration.
A refusal by many immigrants, principally Muslims, to assimilate. In many cases they actively disregard our culture and want to supplant it with their own, including with their religion. Criminality is also an issue, but not as much as for the second group below. High birthrates relative to the native population is an issue. Many of us will of course know Muslims who are assimilated - wear Western clothing, two kids only, don't wear their religion on their sleeves. They aren't a problem, but they are also a minority, and typically middle class where they come from.
Black British have high rates of criminality. I suspect that this is less the case for recent arrivals from Africa (Ghanaian dentists etc.), at least until recently when the 'refugees' started arriving in numbers.
Three - numbers are an issue as they place a strain on public services, and also, ethnic diversity, even if peaceful, make it hard for immigrants to assimilate, as there is no group to assimilate to in their area.
How do we make the undesirable immigrants leave? Well, firstly, by putting expatriation and the stripping of British citizenship on the table as punishment for criminal offenses. As the case of Shamima Begum shows, it is possible (she was judged to have Bangladeshi citizenship, so it was possible - it's against international law to strip somebody of citizenship if that leaves them stateless).
Now, more controversially, how do we get this to be effective? Reinstate sedition laws, and police aggressively. Call for Israel to be destroyed - criminal sentence and removal. Call for Sharia law - guilty of sedition, removal. Any crime - removal. Planning applications for minarets? Denied. You get the idea.
For those that can't be removed, we need policies to force assimilation. Islamic schools - banned. Give special subsidised mortages for non-members of an ethnic group to buy a house in the area where that group dominates. These could I suppose be considered part of Theresa May's 'hostile environment' approach, which has a lot to recommend it.
I have said it before and I will say it again|: who runs runs Britain?
You get that for which you vote.
Personally, I will be the leaving the UK and others can pay - hope they have the money, because they are not getting mine!
The answer is ‘not the politicians’. It is the dark forces behind the ‘establishment’, the globalists, Soros, Blair, the WEF. These are the people pulling the strings of Starmer etc.
Too much of this is unclear.
You say you find yourself in the company of blood and soil nationalism, which I assume means ethnonationalism. But you go on to say it isn't desirable to return to 1950s demographics (i.e. 99.9% white). But isn't a return of this sort exactly what blood and soil nationalists want?
Further, if, having complained about garbage immigration, you then state that you don't want to return to 1950s demographics, it's surely incumbent on you to explain yourself, given that it's a pretty big and, arugably, somewhat counter-intuitive statement!
You say that you're in favour of voluntary repatriation involving a financial inducement. And, in addition, you mention "enforced deportations of immigrants who engage in criminal activity". ("Deportations" are by definition "enforced"!) But you're unclear as to whether deportation would include or is mainly aimed at immigrants who are British citizens.
You say "we don’t have the luxury of deporting third and fourth generation black immigrants who are increasingly feral". But if that feral behaviour leads to crime, and you support stripping the citizenship of immigrant British citizens who commmit crime so as to be able to deport them, then presumably we do indeed have that luxury?
You characterize Reform as middle-of-the-road civic nationalists. But I'd have thought that, in principle, civic nationalism might support the voluntary repatriation of immigrant groups who are unable or unwilling to integrate around a shared set of civic values.
Finally, I'd have thought that true blood and soil nationalists would regard voluntary repatriation for all immigrant British citizens (however defined) combined with complusory repatriation only for immigrant British citizens who commit (any? serious?) crime as something of a half measure.
Thus, perhaps what you're advocating might be characterized as (something akin to) a strong form of civic nationalism?
I agree with what you write.
There are certainly Muslims who don’t want to live in an islamic state of the UK as there are Romanies who will leave as soon as the benefits end (all types of benefits).
My cup is usually half full and I imagine a country that has housing at low cost.
AI allow will allow people to enjoy a superior lifestyle and as a consequence the birth rate will steady.
Even so countries like France are so efficient (compared to the UK) they needed 1.5 million less staff - without AI, 3 years ago
We need an easily communicable policy that all in the center and on the right can support. Imagine protests with banners saying “Intelligent Immigration Referendum Now”.
Key principles. These are high level and details need to be worked out.
- Regular referenda to set numbers of different types of immigration.
-Referendum couched in terms of how many Birminghams (or other city) you want to import every year. Not numbers.
-US 1st amendment type protection for freedom of speech to discuss immigration.
-Any organization receiving more than 20% of its funding from taxpayers cannot campaign in the referenda.
-Option to vote to site an International Protection center in your own local area. This allows lefty do gooders to campaign to site a centre in their own leafy suburb.
-Organisations can collect signatures to have specific immigration provisions added to the vote. E.g. cutting welfare to people who do not pass an English language proficiency test.
I suspect opinion polling would support this, which makes the proposal sensible centre rather than far right.
Ideally, this should be implemented as a constitutional amendment, but if, like the UK, you don’t have a constitution, it should be a law.
"Religious leaders...should not incite their faithful to defy, challenge or actively oppose secular Government policies". A social order that followed that advice would not be worth defending.
There are some secular policies that must be opposed, but I think Pete had a narrow number in mind.
Yes, immigration should be dramatically reduced and should be focused on receiving immigrants from countries and cultures that have financially succeeded and culturally integrated into the UK.
No immigrant should be eligible for benefits, housing, pension and if they do not keep full time work above £30k for under 30s and £40k for over 30s, then their work visa and resident status should be cancelled and they should be required to leave. This requirement can be changed for countries with which we have reciprocal arrangements.
You may find this view from America of interest (Joshua Trevino / Armas) [have edited for length so it fits the comment box]:
A much-remarked and deeply chilling aspect of the British regime’s social repression following the civil disorder and violence of early August is its pursuit of those who merely engaged in speech online. The various mechanisms of the regime have been crowing about the wave of arrests and jailing, including a Home Office posting that “[t]here's no place in society for armchair thugs.” But there is, of course: you just have to belong to the government or be one of its valued constituencies. If you are, then you can freely post apologetics for menace and violence . . .
Or you can be the Home Office itself, doing its best Westmoreland / McNamara light-at-the-end-of the-tunnel datum — but then there is no British Vietnam experience to ward them off it — with a plain old body-count metric, touted as a sort of success . . . “[y]et no arrests for the thousands of people who enter the country illegally each year.” But this is the point, and the discrepancy is meant to be noticed: the regime touts its activity specifically to illuminate the difference between that which it tolerates, and that which it represses. The appeals to consistency and accusations of hypocrisy are unmoored from the reality of British governance now. It would be hypocritical and inconsistent if the U.K. regime promised equal justice under law, for example, or punished only commonly discernible lawbreaking. It does neither. If the post-riot prosecutions confined themselves to generally agreed crimes like property destruction, assault, and so on, across all cohorts, then there would be few grounds for complaint and one could argue that it does in fact aspire to equal justice. What is actually happening is a vigorous prosecution of crimethink, mostly under the anodyne term “online offenses,” and unconnected with any demonstrable incitement or violence.
One chilling example comes in the sentencing of Julie Sweeney, a caregiver for her disabled husband, who will now spend fifteen months in jail for a rather sad and morally abhorrent little Facebook post. The judge acknowledged that she was, in effect, a nobody who posted in anger and endangered no one, and he further acknowledged that she was not racist. According to the BBC, “[t]he judge [further] said no one was suggesting that Sweeney would have taken part in any violence.” Yet she will be in jail for fifteen months, and her husband thrown to who knows what mercies, and why? Well, this is why, in the judge’s own words: “You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people.”
That’s it. She expressed regime-disallowed opinions, reacted incorrectly to the news, and so off she goes. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it looks as if this sort of thought policing characterizes about one in ten of the Home Office’s thousand-plus arrests. To re-use a phrase, it is done pour encourager les autres. The absence of a definable standard is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Julie Sweeney and a few hundred powerless nobodies with bad opinions are thrown against the wall to motivate the rest of the population to first, be silent, and second, to look to the regime for the permitted ambit of sentiment before speaking. It is Soviet stuff, but the Soviet Union does not exist, and the United Kingdom’s regime does.
(In another Soviet parallel, the regime has convicted two twelve-year old children, one of whom was described by a judge as being “more involved in the violence and disorder than any other defendant I’ve seen coming through these courts, adult or child,” which is self-evidently absurd but also characteristic of regime-exhortative hyperbole. The Communist Chinese express their admiration.)
There is a type of American conservative who looks at this sort of thing and reacts with a studied complacency: this could never happen here, they will say, or we would resist if it did. But neither proposition is accurate. It does happen here, at a comparatively low level for now — and it is unresisted. The mechanisms and lessons learned of the various regimes are shared and refined among them, and we are therefore deeply wrong to view the U.K. with smug complacency.
>
As has been stated here previously, when the time comes that the United Kingdom follows through on its threats to request extradition of Americans for thoughtcrime, it is probable that a progressive-dominated White House and its apparatus will view the request favorably. This will be especially likely when the target of the request is an irritant to, or opponent of, both regimes: for example Elon Musk. This is not to say that lack of a public profile will be salvific: the American regime knows the logic of pour encourager les autres equally well.
In publishing the macro-scale numbers on its roundup of criminals and dissidents alike, the U.K. regime is not merely echoing the aesthetic of Robert McNamara: it is literally engaging in the McNamara fallacy, which is an analytic error that excludes qualitative factors in favor of quantitative ones. Quantity has a quality all its own — this is evidently the regime reasoning, which counts on sheer numbers, speed, and pitilessness to yield its intended effect. This may in fact work, and the odds are in its favor: contrary to the mythos of insurgency, there are plenty of examples of its suppression. This is especially true when the insurgency fails to generate a sufficiently expansive and durable coalition, fails to attract an elite cohort, and fails to withstand regime action. All these are obvious failures of U.K. — or more properly, English — right-populism, which has only a limited window of time to rectify them. It is less true of American right-populism, which does have a coalition and an elite niche, to an extent; whether it is robust versus the regime will be tested in full if Kamala Harris ascends to the Presidency.
Let us pause here to observe the total failure of meaningful elements of the British ruling apparatus to support that right-populist tendency — which is significantly large, as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election — as evidence that its self-styled Conservative Party is essentially useless. An opposition that remains mute while the regime conducts a national persecution of its base is no opposition at all. The jury is out on Reform.
Per the McNamara fallacy at hand, note that the regimes in both the U.K. and the U.S. entirely neglect those qualitative factors: the moral battlefield. (An appeal to rule-following and quiescent conformity, or else, is hardly this.) Partly this is a reflection of relative power: the regimes simply don’t feel the need to. Partly it is aesthetic revulsion: the regimes genuinely hate their opposition. (There will be a separate essay someday on elite negative reactions to a visible member of a regime-disapproved cohort: a Southerner or a Texan, for example. There are British analogues.) Partly too it is perceptual narrowing, in which it becomes literally impossible for the regime to conceive of viewing the world in any way other than its own. Again, this may not matter. But it may, and if the neglect of the moral contest translates at some point into a moral loss for the regime — a nonzero probability, especially as it came to power weeks ago on the basis not of positive endorsement of itself, but negative rejection of its opponents — then the next round of this, which is sure to come, must see evermore-cruel efforts if the regime is to prevail.
The cycle is well known.
A few notes at the end here. The first is that Britain has, it seems, had serious problems with civil unrest across the past half-decade. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which was a go-to data source on civic violence during the summer-2020 insurrection in the United States, has a very interesting writeup on U.K. rioting now. Within that interesting writeup is this interesting bar chart, which shows that the 2024 level of British violence is well and recently precedented. Only with the critical mass of the “far-right” coded incidents does the regime swing into full punitive mode, mass-arrest tweets and all. The alert reader will discern why.
Malign American influence is visible here, by the bye: much of the 2020 violence was BLM-inspired, a testament to the U.K. left’s longstanding reflex as intellectual copycats of American progressivism. (This is a well-worn phenomenon globally. The incoming Mexican President is a signal example: Mexico is drowning in blood, and her major social achievement to date has been the promotion of transgenderism. This doesn’t reflect Mexican concerns: it reflects the concern of a Mexican elite sharply focused upon the American-left milieus to which it seeks access.) This cultural and ideological fixation also means the American regime could actually positively affect British-regime treatment of British citizenry if it chose, for example with a simple inclusion of the U.K. as a country of concern in some State Department human-rights report. It won’t happen of course: a conservative regime won’t think to do it, and a progressive regime won’t dream of criticizing what it wishes to do itself.
This is dispositive in the long run: not the nature of a country’s regime, but the nature of its people.
We have skills shortages, an aging population, and a low birth rate and this is the basis for immigration. Repatriation is nonsense, where do you draw the line, first second third generation Irish Indian French with dual nationalities or 100% born in the UK but with a 'forrin' sounding name. Where do you send them? For what crimes? and given the disdain for other countries people will be screeching that these criminals do their 'time' here in the UK as they will walk free as soon as they arrive in their destination countries.
We have three choices
1) Stop all migration immediately causing chaos in business, universities going bust, massive skills shortages etc etc general armageddon
2)Heavily invest in technology enabling/allowing tech and Ai to replace workers and gifting unlimited power to the owners and controllers of the tech. Think usual dystopian film scripts etc
3)Addressing the shortages progressively through education, financial incentives for families, and of course housebuilding.
Finally, with regard to divided communities, I just don't see it on my travels around Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Yes there are denser concentrations than others but I do business with anyone and it's fine. Look at the last conservative PM & Ministers. If you really want to see divided communities in the UK refusing to integrate, take a walk around Belfast.
Thanks as ever. Talk about the facts changing - it might be too late for a lot of former groovy liberals to change their minds.
What's most striking about this is the sudden nature of it, I know we've been in six figure immigration for quite a few years but it's absolutely EXPLODED in very, very recent times and it would appear that a decision was made to open the floodgates when it was easier to tighten, even slightly.
The problem with any 'voluntary repatriation' policy might be the sheer cost of it. The incentives would need to be substantial to attract the bites - and fraud in this area (i.e. people taking the money and contriving a way to stay illegally) is a real concern.