Will Badenoch blow her one chance?

I think Kemi Badenoch is going to blow it in September. For over a year now she's been saying she won't just announce things and won't set out policies until she's had a close look. That's a respectable position, but she's running out of road. She needs to address the ECHR issue, and she will, and I'm quietly confident she will come up with more or less the right answer. It's her broader approach to immigration that will end it for her.

The first signal was earlier this month when she brushed off any suggestion of a burka ban. She was right to say it would be difficult for the police to enforce and there are other things we can look at such as Sharia courts and sectarianism and first cousin marriage, but Badenoch underestimates the significance of the burka. The burka, and in fact, male Moslem attire, is them giving us the middle finger. It is a rejection of any obligation to integrate.

This is where it gets serious. I've been listening to Badenoch closely when she talks about integration. Most recently she has flirted with Danish style anti-ghetto laws. She said "I think we need to move from passive to active integration".

She says these words but I don't think she has any feel for what that means in practice. anti-ghetto laws are something you employ to stop ghettoes and parallel "societies" taking root. We're about forty years too late to that party.

The Bradford “Pakistani” community, for instance, is made up overwhelmingly of the Mirpuri diaspora, which occupies self-sustaining ghettoes where they mostly form the majority. The denizens do not mix with outsiders at a social level; they have their own social structures (baradari) which serve to provide a framework for their own governance, independent of the host nation structures.

Many retain their home languages, which are often spoken in their homes – where many wives don’t speak English at all – and increasingly in the streets and public buildings. More on that here.

There is no realistic way to break up these ghettos, not least since they've been buying up the real estate for decades, and what isn't sold to them voluntarily, they will take steps to 'encourage' people to sell. Substantial numbers of Mirpuris moving into a white area can depress property prices by as much as 60 percent because they behave like animals. There's a reason we have yet to understand the scale of grooming in Bradford and it's because it is a Pakistani mafia run city.

You cannot speak of integration because they do not want to integrate, there is nothing discernibly English left to integrate into, and native English people, for good reason, don't want to be anywhere near them.

Anti-ghetto policies might have prevented this had we implemented them from the outset, but now we have cities like Birmingham and Manchester which are largely conurbations of squalid ethnic ghettoes.

Much has been written on how multiculturalism has failed, and how we're sleep-walking into ethnic balkanisation, but in policy terms, there is now little that can be done to address this. Again, we've left it too late. We can certainly stop funding ethnocentric NGOs and charities but the diasporas are now well established and self-sustaining. They control local politics and are able to divert funds to their own communities.

There is no way to softly encourage integration. You're not going to get elderly Pakistani men to stop wearing pyjamas and start speaking English unless you force them to. You're not going to stop Pakistanis conducting their community affairs in a foreign language unless you force them. You have to shut down the mosques where hate preachers operate (which is probably most of them). You're going to have to order foreign owned shops to replace their signs with English signs. You're going to have to ban the burka. And they will resist all of that. They will riot. They are not going to integrate willingly. They simply do not want to.

It's got this bad because no government wanted to pick a fight. They resigned themselves to having lost this battle - and public policy ever since has been about managing race relations, even if that means two-tier policing and a soft-touch approach when dealing with ethnic sensitivities. And now we have a tinderbox of ethnic tensions, and we are only ever a Southport style atrocity away from another outbreak of riots. There is nothing any community cohesion quango can do about this. You simply cannot integrate entire districts of low IQ primitives.

In September, all eyes will be on Badenoch to see if she is serious. She could very easily knock Reform out of the game if she is, because there is nothing even close to serious policy from Reform. If, though, she is going to prattle on about integration we will know she has not understood the scale and urgency of the problem, and is dabbling in half-measures. That will be the end of it for her.

If she is to save her party from extinction, the bare minimum required of her is to reverse the Boriswave. She must call it by name, sack Priti Patel and anyone else who had a hand in it, and she must put remigration on the political map. She needs to look very closely at the policies set out by Douglas Carswell (and me, obviously).

That is the measure by which we will know whether she is serious. We have arrived in this miserable predicament because no PM has been willing to pick a fight on immigration. If Badenoch shrinks from that calling, she is no different to the rest, and there is no reason to entertain her leadership any further.