It is difficult to comprehend the true scale of the cover-up. Many of the facts are still disputed, making the whole affair murky, especially with regard to the precise numbers of people and sums involved. But what we know so far is this: the year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, an Afghan refugee threatened to publicize on Facebook an unencrypted spreadsheet containing personal data of thousands of Afghans associated with the NATO occupation of the country. The refugee had gained access to the confidential data because it had been accidentally distributed by an unknown UK official. The official had been trying to establish who was eligible for the Afghan relocation and assistance (Arap) scheme, which was established for Afghans who had worked with the UK military and were fleeing possible reprisals by the Taliban. Once UK state officials were alerted to the data breach, the government launched Operation Rubific, Britain’s largest covert peacetime evacuation — all under cover of a superinjunction that would muzzle the national press on an unprecedented scale.

Given that family members are eligible for both the Arap and ARR schemes, it is unclear how many Afghans have been and may eventually be relocated to the UK. Equally unclear is the full scale of the costs involved. At minimum, the scheme involves tens of thousands of people, and its costs run from hundreds of millions to possibly billions of pounds. It comes to light at a time when Number 10 has had great difficulty trimming the welfare bill by a comparable amount, and is apparently endeavoring to drastically cut immigration.

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War isn't in Britain's interests

By Kathleen Stock

Despite the uncertainty of the cost and headcount, plenty of facts are clear enough. Firstly, despite our elites’ routine and staggering incompetence, the UK state is evidently still capable of significant and costly logistical and infrastructural exertions when it comes to causes it deems worthy. Extensive state capacity is evident in the effort made to extract thousands of foreigners from one of the most unstable parts of the world, transport them thousands of miles, and provide them and their families with shelter, resources and security at significant financial cost — all while the UK itself is caught in the vice of economic stagnation, spiraling borrowing costs, and tremendous pressure on public spending. The state capacity that is so visibly lacking in the UK evidently exists; it is simply not put to the service of British citizens.

Secondly, it’s apparent that the UK state will go to extraordinary lengths to hide its activities from its own people. The superinjunction granted by the courts at the behest of the defense minister at the time, Ben Wallace, was the first of its kind in legal history in that it barred anyone, anywhere, from talking about the ARR scheme — and it was repeatedly shielded from press challenges. Since the scheme was uncovered, Wallace has publicly defended it, claiming that it is right that the UK helped its allies, whose lives were at risk from vengeful and cruel Islamist fanatics. But why didn’t he make this case at the time, justifying the decision to the British public in the same terms? Why take such repressive and extreme legal measures to cover up the mistake of an unknown civil servant? In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Kabul, could the UK government not have made the case to the British public that further Afghan allies had to be evacuated, without needing to draw the Taliban’s attention to a data breach?

The fact that the UK state went to such lengths to hide its decision can only invite suspicion. Of the Afghans resettled thus far, there are reportedly 16,156 who were on the spreadsheet in question. This is the equivalent of nearly a tenth of the Afghan National Army, which evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s summer offensive in 2021; it is nearly twice the total number of British forces ever deployed to Afghanistan at any one point; and it constitutes over a fifth of the current British regular army. Even discounting extended family members, the UK has resettled more Afghans than there were Afghan special forces or interpreters who worked with British units. How many of these individuals played a role in the war on terror in the Hindu Kush, which was rife with war crimes and corruption? Why does the UK state feel beholden to so many Afghans that it will risk the public fury of its own citizens to defend them? 

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Britain won't be Balkanised

By Philip Cunliffe

Even more significantly, the covert character of the ARR undermines its only meaningful justification. The best conceivable rationale for it is that aiding allies should help maintain the UK’s international reputation as a credible partner that will support its collaborators in any future military operation. Yet such a promise is only meaningful if it is publicly proclaimed and defended by political leaders. This week’s scandal will have the result that the UK state will have little if any credibility when making commitments to allies in future, as prospective collaborators will know that the history of the botched ARR will have left the British public suspicious, and less willing to support future such operations. This means that, from a strategic viewpoint, Operation Rubific is entirely self-defeating. It also prompts an unsettling question: why would the UK state feel the need to do such a thing unless it expected to be involved in nation-building endeavors on the scale of Afghanistan in the future?  

No less striking is the fact that no parliamentarian was willing to break with the government and bring a matter of vital national interest to the awareness of the electorate. This is despite the fact that the Tory government of the day was briefing members of the Labour opposition about the data breach. Even with the protection of parliamentary privilege — the right of MPs to publicly discuss matters in Parliament without fear of legal repercussions — nobody dared speak out. Leading opposition figures of the day, such as Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, have defended themselves by arguing that parliamentary privilege is not limitless. Jenrick has also argued that parliamentarians are bound by the Official Secrets Act.

In making such a claim, the two MPs have called into question the compact between rulers and ruled. For if parliamentary privilege does not apply to such an extraordinary case, what is the point of it? Both Braverman and Jenrick resigned from their government over its mishandling of migration, but nonetheless failed to raise the scope of the covert ARR from the backbenches. The whole point of parliamentary privilege is nullified if it is exercised only at the behest of government and the civil service. Not only are the constitutional and legal rules surrounding parliamentary privilege less clear-cut than Jenrick suggests, it also stretches credulity to imagine that a government would invoke the Official Secrets Act to arrest sitting members of its own party for bringing a matter of public import to public attention.

It seems that there was not a single MP who thought it in the national interest to draw attention to the rank incompetence of officials in the Ministry of Defense, or to question the scope of a limitless superinjunction, or to ask what measures were being taken to vet tens of thousands of veterans of a two-decade long war before they were allowed to settle in Britain. The odds are against the immediate cultural compatibility of this wave of Afghan immigration; Afghans are significantly over-represented in UK convictions for sexual offenses. In all, this suggests that we have few public representatives worthy of the name. What it suggests instead is that the UK is ruled by an elite state class, in which parliamentarians can hardly be distinguished from civil servants. Instead of having political representatives who imprint the will and interests of voters on the machinery of state, we have politicians who collaborate with the civil service against the interests of the public.

The fact that the UK state proceeded with this resettlement scheme on such a large and costly scale, despite Home Office officials fearing the possibility of riots once the scheme became publicly known, suggests pathologies that go deeper than the inability to encrypt spreadsheets or store confidential data securely. It indicates a globalist state that routinely prioritizes its international allies and commitments — extending even to defunct Nato puppet states — over any obligation to its own people. And it demonstrates that the globalist commitment to open borders extends far beyond human rights NGOs, decolonialist academics and business leaders, reaching deep into Britain’s civil service and political elite. How much longer can the UK state maintain its opposition to the national interest? What is certain is that this week’s scandal has accelerated the forthcoming clash between a globalist UK elite and a seething British nation.

So much of our political commentary is spent speculating about how these absurdist battles will play out. Will Keir Starmer’s judgement over Gaza be vindicated come election day? Will Rishi Sunak prove us all wrong? Is the Prime Minister showing courage or weakness in sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron? What we all seem to agree is that history will be the judge, that when the general election comes around we will have our answers. Somebody will win and somebody will lose; one will have ridden the tide of history and the other will end up as mere flotsam. But there are currents in politics pulling at events far below the surface, often more powerful than those we obsess about in our day-to-day coverage.

“The success of… movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure,” wrote Lord Blake, the great biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, who in his earlier career led the rebel alliance of romantic Tory ultras called Young England who worshipped the old aristocratic order. By any metric, Disraeli’s Young England failed politically. And yet, for Blake, these movements cannot be understood solely by their parliamentary success, but must be regarded “as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation”. The same is true today.

We must shake ourselves from the notion that victory and defeat are the only things that matter. There are other ways in which the course of a nation is affected, often with more profound consequences than what a leader says or does.

Britain’s relationship with Europe is the perfect such example. Between the Schuman declaration of 1950 — the foundational moment of today’s Europe — and Brexit, there were any number of apparently decisive moments which turned out to be less decisive than they first appeared. In 1971, the House of Commons finally voted to join the Common Market and that was that: a long-running drama came to a conclusion. Harold Macmillan, who had failed to lead Britain into the EEC the previous decade, waited in Dover to hear the news and lit a beacon to announce the historic turning point, which was then answered across the water in Calais. Four years later, the British public ratified the decision by a crushing margin in the country’s first ever referendum. The end.

As Robert Saunders captures in Yes To Europe, a triumphant Harold Wilson was hailed a political giant for his skilful handling of events. A cartoon in The Daily Express portrayed him parading in triumph through the streets of London, a Roman emperor in a chariot drawn by Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins with Margaret Thatcher throwing flowers from the sidelines. Behind him were the poor, huddled masses of Labour eurosceptics dragged along in chains. The Sunday Times summed up the wisdom of the day: “If politicians are to be judged by their ability in the end to get what they want, Harold Wilson is a great politician.” But politics has to be about more than this. While Harold Wilson got what he wanted, within a year he was gone, a broken man.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

We never seem to learn this lesson. In 1977, Professor Anthony King published the first history of the referendum campaign, painting the “Yes” victory as a triumph for the moderate political centre against what would now be called the populists. King speculated what might have happened had there been a No vote: it would have undermined Wilson and Callaghan while strengthening the Labour Left. As Saunders says of King’s argument: “Benn or Foot might have become leader, opening a fissure between ‘the moderate centre’ and the ‘extreme Left’. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams might have left to form a new party, carrying many of their most popular colleagues with them, all of which could have had the cumulative effect of banishing Labour from power ‘for at least a generation’.” But as Saunders puts it: “This, of course, was almost exactly what happened a few years later.”

By 1980, Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Thatcher had become prime minister. By 1990, Thatcher — who had campaigned for a Yes vote — had become euroscepticism’s first martyr. By 2000, the Conservative Party was preparing a “Save the Pound” election campaign and by 2010 its leader was vowing to veto the new European treaty if elected. And we all know what happened in 2020. The great current of history can move in the opposite direction from how it looks on the surface; a political riptide difficult to spot from the shore, but powerful nonetheless.

Sometimes political decisions move in one direction but the mood of a party or country moves in another. In retrospect, the Labour Right won their struggle with the Left in 1975, but were seen to have betrayed the soul of the party. Something similar happened for the Blairites after the Iraq war and for unionists after the Scottish referendum in 2014. Perhaps we are also seeing that play out now after the Brexit referendum of 2016.

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Keir Starmer should have no hope

By Richard Vinen

While this week in Westminster was extraordinary, perhaps that’s not for the obvious reasons. Suella Braverman was sacked, the Tory right had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court, David Cameron returned and Keir Starmer saw off the Left of his Party. The centre is back in charge of both political parties and, by extension, the country. Whatever happens at the next election, there will be no great changes. Our relationship with Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, China and the United States will largely remain as is. We will maintain our nuclear deterrent, the rough balance of tax and spending, education and health policies. All will be well for those who prize macro stability.

But what is happening under the surface? Who is winning the battle for the soul of each party? First, let’s take the Labour Party. The obvious point is that Starmer has emerged from this week with his authority intact and his chances of becoming prime minister enhanced. His party is now even further ahead in the polls than it was before. As things stand, he stands a very good chance of not only being elected, but serving as prime minister well into the 2030s. All this can be true and important — and for it to also be true that having a third of your parliamentary party rebel on an issue of core judgement before you’ve even become prime minister is a warning of problems to come.

Should Starmer become prime minister, foreign policy will quickly intrude on his premiership. Donald Trump might well have already won the presidency or could do so soon afterwards. It goes without saying that a Trump presidency will present particular challenges for a Labour prime minister leading a pro-European, pro-Palestinian movement. Let’s remember that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza may still be raging in a year’s time — or even in five year’s time. The humanitarian crisis may be even more acute, the pro-Palestinian Left even more angry. Looking at the Labour party today, its foreign policy remains remarkably similar to what it might have been under Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair — and yet culturally the Left has become more more anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-European. These are not things Starmer can simply lead in another direction, only manage.

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David Cameron destroyed the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

On the Conservative side, it is hard to know where to start. There is more than a passing resemblance to John Major in the mid Nineties who, like Sunak, was more in line with establishment thinking than his own supporters’ instincts, and was forced into pathetic shows of nationalism to compensate for his overall failures of policy.

This week, Sunakism took control of the Tory party, with Cameron and other centrist figures brought into the cabinet. The prime minister’s Rwanda policy was then thrown out by the Supreme Court, who said it breached a whole array of international treaties that Britain had signed up to. In response, rather like Major’s doomed beef war with Europe, Sunak has gone to war to defend the policy, with the absurd notion that he will pass a law to simply declare the country safe. Like Major in the late Nineties, the likely result is that this will do little to ameliorate unhappiness within the Conservative Party or increase his chances of holding back the tide of support for Labour, which has declared its opposition to the scheme.

Perhaps the most important thing here is not whether Sunak will succeed or fail with his approach, but what will happen to the mood in the Conservative Party. From 1997 onwards, Britain’s place in the European Union seemed to grow ever more secure as Tony Blair triumphed signing up to one treaty after another, only for the Conservative parliamentary party to grow ever more sceptical until, eventually, the sceptics won.

Today, you have to wonder what is going to happen to Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. Suella Braverman has been kicked out of the cabinet, but will Suellaism eventually take hold of the Conservative soul? This will not be decided in a single election, or even multiple elections, but by trends working away under the surface, buffeted by events, stories, scandals and political groupings operating beyond the remit of mere leaders, lending Blake’s “imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics”.

Braverman may never become Tory leader. She may end up leading a faction in parliament that suffers defeat after defeat, like Bill Cash in the Nineties or Tony Benn in the Eighties. But that doesn’t mean her politics will die or Britain’s membership of the ECHR will remain secure. The same is true of the Labour Left, which will not disappear simply because Keir Starmer triumphs in 2024 or does not.

Politics is not some placid, obedient sea able to be parted by whichever Moses is in charge at that moment. It is tidal and choppy, issues, constantly being shaped not just by leaders and calculation, but by events, scandals, ideas and, yes, the losers of politics.

In the past four years, we have had six Home Secretaries (including Braverman twice), four Prime Ministers, and eight Housing Ministers; in the past seven years of great geopolitical danger, we have had seven Foreign Secretaries. At around a year, the lifespan of those holding the great offices of state is as evanescent as that of a caged hamster, and their labours just as futile. If every Government minister resigned today, and let the civil service run the country until Starmer’s formal assumption of power, nothing meaningful would change.

But still the play drags on. In a desperate act of political necromancy, Sunak summoned Cameron from his lush Cotswolds exile to mark the end of the Conservative populist experiment. The Brexit referendum, which the former prime minister called and lost, was as much a rejection of his own record as of the distant European Union: of his underinvestment in infrastructure and demolition of state capacity, his failure to manage immigration, his reshaping of the British economy as a pliant provider of services to Chinese, Russian and Qatari capital, and of his misbegotten adventure in Libya, still collapsing African states like dominoes to this day. 

Through their pursuit of austerity, the Cameron and Osborne dyad created our current penumbra of decay and underinvestment. Britain’s trajectory of relative decline makes any town even in notionally prosperous southeast England visibly poorer and more neglected than a town of corresponding size in Poland or East Germany. In real terms, British workers are still worse paid than when Cameron came to power. 

Arguably then, Cameron did more than Blair to midwife 2020s Britain in all its squalid dysfunction. His was perhaps the last period when the unintended consequences of the Blairite revolution could have been painlessly undone; instead, he bedded them in, cementing Blair’s destructive post-1997 innovations as sacrosanct pillars of the eternal British constitution. The dismal calibre of Tory politicians we suffer today is the direct result of the selection procedures Cameron introduced, in an effort to weed out conservative thought from representation in the Conservative Party. Like Cummings’s recent appearance as a humble penitent before the Covid enquiry, subjecting himself to the mercy of a system he once wished to overthrow, Cameron’s return to Westminster is the symbolic endpoint to the Brexit revolution: whether or not the system is capable of reform, the Conservative Party is not the vehicle to achieve it. 

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Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Reform of the British state should have been carried out quietly, with an air of unruffled competence just as Blair achieved, in an administrative revolution imperceptible to surface-skimming lobby journalists. Instead we were given years of shrill noise, breakneck Westminster gossip, and inaction. As a result, through its own dysfunction, the Conservative Party has managed to place all British conservatives in the role of dissidents: increasingly hostile to institutions of the state — the police, the judiciary, border guards — that are in other European countries seen as the bedrock of conservative order. 

How many times must we write the same obituary? The effigies to be sculpted may change with ever-increasing rapidity, but the cause of death remains the same. The Conservative Party was a victim of its own electoral success: in constructing a ruthless vehicle for achieving power, it forgot that power is merely a temporary means to achieve lasting ideological ends. It is doubtful that it is in the interests of British conservatism for the Conservative Party to survive the next election, but if it does, it must use its time out of office to define its core aims and how to achieve them if ever granted power again.

The useful analogy, perhaps, is with America’s distinct but parallel attempt to ride the populist wave of discontent. The Trump administration, in its first iteration, was similarly chaotic, facing similar hysterical opposition from an ideologically hostile press and equivalent internal sabotage by dissident state functionaries. There too, at the end, public officials took care to signal their opposition to their notional political masters and their loyalty to the incoming regime. But where America differs from Britain is the overall vitality of its organised conservative movement.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

As the likelihood of Trump returning to power grows, American conservative ideologues have spent the past few years devising a comprehensive strategy for effective governance. The Project 2025 strategy centres on the parallel belief that “the federal government is a behemoth, weaponised against American citizens and conservative values”, a politicised deep state which serves in practice to stifle Republican rule. An entire waiting cadre of loyal officials has been recruited, trained and motivated to reform American governance at every level from the first day of the second Trump administration. Whether or not the results will be positive for the country, experience of political failure has given the Republican Party a purist ideological zeal, a theory of governance and a desire to impose its will entirely absent from their British equivalents. Where Republicans recruit and nurture loyal conservative footsoldiers, the Conservative Party weeds them out like unwanted gatecrashers at a garden party: the results are as we see.

The ongoing Tory civil war, reignited first in the letter from the New Conservatives accusing Sunak of betraying the Red Wall realignment, and then in Braverman’s poisonous dissection of the Prime Minister’s failings, is surely no longer a campaign to win a last few dismal months in Downing Street, but instead a battle for what comes next: either a vision for a new iteration of the party, harder-edged and keener to win, or the opening salvoes of a new Right-wing force in British politics. Perhaps the Conservative Party’s surviving remnants, dusting off the rubble of defeat, will follow their American equivalents in political exile by addressing the causes of their failure directly, and by devising a strategy for governance underpinned by a meaningful conservative philosophy. But the causes of popular dissatisfaction remain as livid as ever, the popular mood more febrile, and the desire for radical change grows ever more insistent. 

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Will Dominic Cummings destroy Westminster?

By Aris Roussinos

The brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has been theorised as a case of catastrophic success for the terrorist group, and much the same could be said of the Conservative Party’s current term in office. The 2019 election was a victory from which the Conservatives may never recover: they have been buried beneath their own landslide. The voting public granted the Tories the opportunity to remake Britain in their image, and unfortunately for us they succeeded. 

But as well as euthanising Braverman’s ministerial career, events in the Middle East remind us, through the very existence of the state of Israel, that even the most unlikely sounding political visions, undertaken in the least propitious circumstances, are eminently achievable. As Herzl famously declared: “If you will it, it is no dream.” The demands of the British public for a stable, secure and prosperous nation are not impossible to satisfy. For all its relative decline, Britain retains vast untapped potential waiting to be unlocked, requiring only sufficient political vision, will and discipline to do so. In ridding ourselves of the Conservative Party, we may yet birth a vigorous and reformist British conservative movement. 

Just over a year ago, Sunak claimed his mandate to govern came from Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019, a victory that was, he insisted, “not the sole property of any one individual” but that of the entire party. “And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto,” Sunak declared triumphantly outside No 10. “I will deliver on its promise.” 

Within a year, Sunak had junked it completely: corporation tax was hiked to 25% and HS2 scrapped. Sunak then spun these moves as part of a new mission to end the “30-year political status quo” which he wasn’t a part of. Then, a month later, he sacked Suella Braverman and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary.

In terms of short-term political tactics, there is a certain logic at work. The story — for a day or two at least — is no longer about the former Home Secretary or the “hate marches” that have so divided the Conservative Party since the mass slaughter of Israelis on October 7. But what are voters supposed to make of it all? Is Sunak still out to end 30 years of political failure? Or just the past seven years of failure since Cameron was last in office? 

The reshuffle reveals the terminal nature of the crisis now facing this Government. These are its dying spasms. A year ago, Sunak tried to resuscitate the Johnson coalition by appointing Braverman Home Secretary. The gambit inevitably failed. Johnson’s coalition was gone by the time Sunak took charge, killed by Partygate and Truss’s mini-budget. Sunak then tried the hopey-changey thing, but voters hated it, with polls at the weekend predicting a landslide defeat for the Tories worse than in 1997. Now Sunak seems to be trying to rebuild the Cameron coalition that was upended by Brexit. But Cameron’s coalition is also long gone. 

And the war for the future of the Conservative Party has begun.

For the Conservative Left, Cameron’s appointment to Foreign and Braverman’s sacking from Home is long overdue. “The fanatical fringe we call the Tory hardline Right will be the death of modern Conservatism unless Tories wake up to the reality that these people are not the party’s friends,” Matthew Parris wrote in The Times on Saturday, urging Sunak to sack Braverman. The most obvious option for Sunak would have been Kemi Badenoch, who also shares similarly “sound” views about cultural issues, but does not carry with her the same sort of melodrama. Had Badenoch been promoted to the Home Office, there would at least have been a semblance of intellectual coherence about this reshuffle. As one senior Tory who is fond of Cameron put it to me yesterday: “This isn’t a strategy, it’s about shafting your enemies.”

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Don't be fooled by the march for peace

By Giles Fraser

The political story here, then, is simple: Sunak defenestrating the Right of the party. It is, in a sense, Sunak’s coming-out party: the moment he reveals his real politics. He will now fight the next election as a moderate, liberal conservative. The problem for Sunak is that while Braverman might easily be discarded, Suella-ism will prove much harder to get rid of. Ultimately, she is expressing a feeling about modern Britain that is shared within the Conservative Party — beyond the fringes of its hard Right.

In many respects, Braverman’s downfall is her own fault: she botched her attack on the police in The Times, failed to clear it properly with No. 10, went too early and failed to use the power of her office to achieve concrete results. Braverman is far from the first Tory Home Secretary to take on the police; she is just the least successful. Theresa May, remember, took them on in 2015 and won. 

At the heart of Braverman’s attack on the police is a much more interesting ideological shift taking place in the Tory party, and one, whatever its faults, that has a far more coherent story to tell about British politics over the last 13 years than Sunak has yet to come up with. Her story is this: the Conservative Party has failed. It won elections, but failed to change the country. Yes, it took Britain out of Europe, but — and here is the essence of Suella-ism — the Blob remains in charge: the courts remain all-powerful, schools promote their own ideology, police declare that “jihad doesn’t mean jihad”. It is time, she insists, to take back control.

One fundamental mistake people make with politics is to constantly seek to dismiss people they don’t like as a throwback to some distant era. As such, Braverman is a modern-day Enoch Powell, or little more than the latest incarnation of the Tory party’s unchanging, loopy hard Right. But far more interesting is to see politicians for what they are: expressions of the Britain that exists now, with all its anxieties, paranoias, prejudices and complexities. Keir Starmer is not Harold Wilson — he is the leader of an altogether new Labour party, representing a new coalition of voters, which is why he is finding the crisis in Gaza so challenging. Likewise, the concern for those who so obviously loathe Braverman should be that she is touching a nerve about today’s Britain.

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Hard truths about Britain's immigration crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I have felt a sense of gnawing unease that something fundamental has changed in the country since October 7, and perhaps even in the West; as if we’re living through some kind of great national argument where things are being said that cannot ever be unsaid, images seen that cannot be unseen. The Braverman battle with the Met is part of this national row, but only one part of it. 

In the four weeks since Hamas’s orgy of slaughter, we’ve had four mass demonstrations in London, all in support of Palestine, which, taken together, amount to the biggest display of antisemitism in Britain since the Thirties, even though the vast majority of protesters were not hate-filled. In response, unlike France, we’ve had no mass display against antisemitism or sense of outrage at the hostages currently being held in Gaza, only a mob of nationalist hooligans rampaging around London looking for a fight. I can well understand why, for many Jews, this has been a far more profoundly unsettling moment than I can ever comprehend.

The images that I have found most unnerving over the past weeks are the little acts of social breakdown that now seem to be bleeding through everyone’s Instagram reels and Facebook accounts: the thugs in balaclavas surrounding the one lone man brave enough to stand with a placard likening Hamas to Isis; the fights breaking out in train stations; the racists on buses asking if passengers are Jewish; the placards calling Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak “coconuts”. Even the degree of violent, elemental loathing for Braverman which seems to be considered fair game hints towards something darker underneath. “She’s fucking gross,” spat the comedy-commentator Jonathan Pie in one of his recent videos. “Full of hate and bile and lies; just lies and filth; utter filth that comes out of that monster’s mouth.”

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Rishi Sunak's pointless revolution

By Tom McTague

We’ve lived through moments of murderous trauma before, of course: 9/11, 7/7, Charlie Hebdo, Lee Rigby, the Bataclan. But have any been quite as psychologically successful as this one in revealing quite so much division, quite so quickly? Each of the previous terrorist attacks brought about a moment of cohesion. The opposite has happened here. Part of this seems to be the nature of the violence that was on display. September 11 was purposefully cinematic in its scale; October 7 in contrast was made for the mobile phone: genocidal snuff pornography, its depravity the point. A pogrom designed to divide — and so it has.

It would take a brave soul to believe that the removal of Suella Braverman and the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary can somehow whisk us back to a time before the division, when common sense and level heads reigned. This wasn’t true then and isn’t now. If she wants to win the Tory leadership, Braverman is going to have to explain why she achieved so little in office. But whatever happens to Braverman herself, the Tory liberals are going to need a better story to explain their own failure if they are to defeat Suella-ism in the long term.

Was Suella Braverman’s speech on Tuesday so outrageous? Was her suggestion that “many” asylum seekers pretend to be gay “homophobic”, or “dog-whistling”, or an “insult to refugees”? Did it have echoes of Enoch Powell?

Not really. For anyone who’s been paying attention to Europe’s immigration crisis, the only surprising thing about her speech was that it has taken so long for a politician to air the unsavoury truth about the mess in which we now find ourselves, and how we can possibly fix it.

Braverman wasn’t making a political point when she observed how Britain’s broken asylum system creates huge incentives for uncontrolled illegal migration, which, inevitably, has a serious “impact on social cohesion”. She was merely stating the truth. Once upon a time, this was an argument acknowledged by the Left. I’m old enough to remember when the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argued that “both our immigration and asylum systems make people destitute by design and need urgent reform”. It was this July.

What might that reform look like? Braverman made two recommendations that, seen in the clear light of day, don’t seem particularly radical. The first was that Britain should consider removing itself from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an unaccountable legal factory housed in Strasbourg which issues more than 4,000 judgements a year. Given Britain’s recent and historical aversion to being ruled by unelected European institutions, withdrawing from the ECHR would hardly be out of character. The same can be said of Braverman’s suggestion that the United Nations’ Refugee Convention, which came into force in 1951, might merit a rethink.

And yet, after the speech, the deluge. Sir Elton issued a stern statement that he was “very concerned” by what she said about gay migrants, believing it would legitimise “hate and violence against them”. Many on the Left denounced what they saw as Braverman’s betrayal of her background as the daughter of immigrants. Even a number of her fellow Conservative MPs criticised her “alarmist” rhetoric.

Yet perhaps more surprising is the support she received. Many in her party concede that Braverman has a point. Even The Times, not known for its xenophobic bigotry, admitted in its leader column that “she is right to ask the questions that need asking”. For many, this is simply a matter of history. The world, after all, has changed since the Cold War era in which the Convention was conceived. Mass immigration is no longer defined by those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but those fleeing from less stable countries whose cultural norms clash with modern Western values. Trust me: I would know.

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Affirmative action's fatal flaw

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It is hard to exaggerate the intensity of despair felt by those who reside in failed and failing states ravaged by conflict, poverty, natural disasters and the disorder that accompanies political corruption. Consider the tragedies that unfolded this month in Morocco and Libya; the never-ending civil strife in the Congo and Eritrea; the breakdown of Syria; the regression of Afghanistan into Taliban rule. Every man, woman and child who risks their lives to escape the place they call home deserves all the support and sanctuary they can get. It is pointless to wrangle about whether the despair driving people out of their homes is, as stated in the Convention, caused by political persecution or social discrimination or even a bleak economic outlook. There is nothing progressive about that.

Yet none of this is an excuse for ignoring the very concrete problems raised by mass immigration. The most obvious is one of scale: the sheer volume of people determined to flee their homelands and relocate permanently to Europe and America. The figure of 780 million people mentioned by Braverman may even be on the small side: surely reason enough to doubt the usefulness of the Convention.

The net effect has been to increase human suffering by empowering networks of people smugglers who con vulnerable populations into paying them thousands of pounds. Far from being empowered by reaching the promised land, too many migrants find themselves dehumanised even further. Consider the scenes in Lampedusa this month, where more than 2,000 migrants arrived by dinghy in a single day; or the streets of southern Europe, where starving migrants beg for food. If this is the utopia built by the ECHR and the Convention, is it one worth maintaining?

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Biden's false border victory

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This is the question Britain and Europe face. And in answering it, perhaps surprisingly, it becomes clear how, far from being an extremist, Braverman isn’t extreme enough. For if we accept the reality she describes, the solution isn’t “reform” of the Convention — but “withdrawal”.

Just as with the ECHR, the Convention is evidently unfit for purpose. And just as with the ECHR, the Convention cannot be fixed by elected politicians. Yes, British representatives can make suggestions and seek to work with other signatories on changes favourable to all. But they don’t have the power to revise, review or reform those treaties. What they do have, though, is the option to leave if it doesn’t work for them, to shift power away from supranational institutions to the British state.

As Lord Sumption wrote this week, Britain faces a simple question: “How we should make law for our society? And does this particular way of making law have any democratic legitimacy?” The answer, I suspect, depends on where one falls on the political divide of our time: do you favour the inhumane reality of our fractured world — or the power of democratic rule to change it?

Of course, when she became Prime Minister three months later, she attempted no such thing, perhaps reasoning that leaving the EU was quite enough work for the moment. Still, the question has not gone away. The Government says that it remains committed to UK membership of the ECHR, but, as the Channel crisis continues, its commitment seems to be waning.

Earlier in the year, Rishi Sunak, was reported to be considering contesting the next election on a commitment to withdrawing from the ECHR if the European Court of Human Rights were to find his new immigration legislation incompatible with the Convention. Only this week, Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration, said that the Government would do “whatever is necessary” to stop “the small boats”, clearly implying that this included withdrawal from the ECHR.

The Supreme Court will soon hear the Government’s appeal in the Rwanda litigation, and the Government may well prevail. The Court of Appeal’s recent judgment, which held that removing asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda would breach Article 3 of the ECHR, is open to serious question, and the Supreme Court under Lord Reed’s leadership is a much more legally disciplined institution than when he took over from Lady Hale in January 2020.

If the Government’s appeal succeeds, the litigants will proceed to the Strasbourg Court, which may eventually find against the UK. But more immediately, well in advance of any final judgment, an anonymous judge of the Court may indicate “interim measures” under Rule 39 of “The Rules of Court”, which would instruct the UK not to carry out removals until some later date.

The Strasbourg Court’s Rule 39 practice is incompatible with the text and structure of the ECHR and should be firmly rejected: the Convention confers binding force on final rulings of the Court, but not on “interim measures”. Section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 seems to recognise this, providing ministers with the power to decide whether or not to remove a person from the UK despite an “interim measure”. This is an oddly framed power, and it is a miracle that it was ever enacted. Between government lawyers and the law officers, it is very difficult for the Government even to put before Parliament legislation that the Strasbourg Court might in the end disapprove.

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By Anthony Broxton

This points to a wider problem with ECHR membership. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty provides that whatever the King-in-Parliament enacts is law. Legislative freedom is the centrepiece of the Westminster model and it is for Parliament, in conversation with the people, to decide freely what the law should be. However, membership of the ECHR and subjection to the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court means that Parliament’s freedom to legislate is exercised under a cloud: deliberation within Parliament is often distorted by reasoning not about the merits of proposed legislation but about its compatibility with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The problem has been vividly apparent in relation to the Government’s various attempts to address lawfare against UK armed forces.

Strictly, Parliament is free to enact whatever legislation it sees fit, even if this is incompatible with the UK’s international treaty obligations: it is crystal clear that legislation which is incompatible with a treaty remains valid law, which everyone, including civil servants, is obliged to obey. Still, there are very good reasons for the Government to be slow to propose, and for Parliament to be reluctant to enact, legislation that would place the UK in breach of its international obligations. The UK’s reputation matters: so too does international order.

The problem with the ECHR, then, is not that it is an international treaty. The problem is that the Court has made it into a dynamic treaty. Rather than simply upholding the terms agreed by the member states, the Strasbourg Court has, since the Seventies, said that the ECHR is a “living instrument”, the meaning of which changes as the Court decides a succession of cases and divines a changing European consensus.

Deploying this approach, the Court has remade the Convention, imposing far-reaching new obligations on states and driving its own vision for social, moral and political reform across Europe. Most strikingly, the Strasbourg Court has invented a whole new European law of immigration and asylum which has no foundation in the text. But the Court’s case law distorts legislative deliberation and government policy-making across the field, including in relation to welfare policy, social policy, penal policy, counter-terrorism, military action, housing, taxation and press freedom.

There is, as a result, a vast gap between the express terms of the ECHR and the case law that the Strasbourg Court now applies. Enthusiasts for the status quo routinely overlook this.

In a nicely executed piece of Guardian agitprop in 2016, responding to Theresa May’s call to leave the ECHR, Patrick Stewart features as a new Prime Minister railing against Europe’s assault on British sovereignty. At one point, he asks his cabinet: “What has the ECHR ever done for us in return?” Nothing, reply his ministers, apart from providing the right to fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom from torture, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery and so on.

The response is absurd because the protection of rights and freedoms in the UK long predates the ECHR — we do not owe fair trials or the abolition of slavery to the Strasbourg Court. The sketch itself recognises this when it goes on to say that the British drafted the Convention to help Europe sort itself out.

In any case, the problem is not with the terms of the ECHR, but with the Strasbourg Court’s departure from them. This is revealed by what the sketch’s writers left out. At one point, Stewart mocks David Cameron’s remark about feeling “physically ill” at the thought of introducing votes for prisoners. But the sketch does not include prisoner voting in its litany of “what the ECHR has done for us”. Nor does it mention that the Strasbourg Court invented a right to prisoner voting, a right which the member states did not intend to create.

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By Peter Ramsey

The UK Parliament, in response, refused to change the law to comply with the Strasbourg Court’s 2005 ruling. Yet 12 years later, the Committee of Ministers, which monitors compliance with judgments of the Strasbourg Court, gave the UK a clean bill of health — a fudge designed to obscure the fact that the UK had not changed its legislation as the Court demanded.

Principled defiance of the Strasbourg Court is therefore an option. With Parliament’s support, the Government could refuse to comply with judgments that brazenly misinterpret the text of the ECHR and thus depart from the terms that the UK, like other member states, agreed. The Supreme Court made the case for such defiance in 2015, in a judgment about the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, which is also inclined to exceed its jurisdiction. Still, it is much easier for Parliament to refuse to amend or repeal legislation that the Strasbourg Court has denounced than for the Government to propose new legislation that it fears the Court will denounce.

Whether in relation to the Channel crisis or more generally, the Government should not use membership of the ECHR as an excuse for failing to propose legislation that in its view is necessary and justified. Rather, it should recognise that leaving the ECHR would restore Parliament’s freedom, on behalf of the British people, to decide what our laws should be. Crucially, this is not a party-political matter, even if it looks set to become one. Bringing the Strasbourg Court’s jurisdiction over the UK to an end would strengthen parliamentary democracy, regardless of which party forms a government and enjoys a majority.

If you live at the periphery of a large English city, you’d be forgiven for thinking that no one does honesty boxes anymore. Even where I live, at the outer edge of the capital’s blast radius, a relatively high-trust English society is on its way to a markedly more Londonesque state of atomisation. A little town that until just recently recorded a handful of crimes every year now has county-lines graffiti in its alleyways, a persistent shoplifting problem and, as of late, a bevy of hard-eyed young women who hang about in the market square and get into men’s cars. Local police, if they ever put in an appearance, seem either unable or unwilling to do anything.

Why my town and not one in Norfolk? What is the difference between these two areas, such that in one the default is to trust strangers, and in the other to view them with increasing suspicion? The most obvious answer is also an uncomfortable one by modern moral standards: population turnover. While rural Norfolk doesn’t change very fast, my town has more or less doubled in size in a decade, largely swelled by people forced out by the capital’s ever-intensifying competition for housing.

I’m not suggesting no one should ever move house. But when a lot of people do in a short period of time, how does it affect the social fabric? A stable and tight-knit community isn’t sufficient to deliver high levels of interpersonal trust, but it’s probably necessary. A fluctuating community, by contrast, with a large proportion of individuals who don’t (or don’t yet) have longstanding ties to the area and one another, is unlikely to be one in which people leave their doors unlocked, or sell raspberries via honesty box.

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The lost boys of England's youth hostels

By Mary Harrington

Why is London pricing families out at this rate? It’s not just that the capital’s outsized cultural and economic draw sucks in workers from all over the country. Our national birth rate is well below replacement, and has been since 1973. But Britain’s population is still growing rapidly: it is just that 60% of this growth is via immigration, which has increased Britain’s foreign-born resident population from 4.6 million in 2001 to 10 million in 2021.

Almost a third of that immigration has been into the capital, which is now the most ethnically diverse part of Britain. In respectable society, this is framed as a feature rather than a bug: the Mayor of London, for example, is fond of telling us that “Diversity is our strength”. The consensus across government, media, NGOs and the urban educated classes is that ongoing high immigration is good, and anyone who disagrees is morally beyond the pale. And for beneficiaries of the resulting economic growth, this must seem self-evident. London is wealthier than my town, which is wealthier than rural Norfolk. Who gives a stuff about honesty boxes?

Quite a few people, as it turns out. Many who recall growing up in more stable communities dislike the sense of lower social cohesion that research shows accompanies rapid social turnover. From this perspective, it may be tempting to ask: who is the our in “Diversity is our strength”? But to the extent that population turnover is driven by immigration, expressing disquiet is to court moral untouchability. Excluded from polite discourse, then, views curdle online into paranoid narratives in which the issue is not social trust but race animus. In this view, mass immigration is a malign conspiracy by elites to abolish the native population: the so-called “Great Replacement”.

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Why the nation state failed

By Mary Harrington

The truth, however, is both more banal, and more dispiriting. The so-called “Great Replacement” describes a dynamic that has some basis in fact, in the sense that the native-born proportion of the population really is declining relative to immigrants, and this is happening with active support from the political class. It’s just that this isn’t an elite conspiracy: we’re all implicated.

Overall, internet conspiracists notwithstanding, Britain remains one of the least racist countries in the world. I’m willing to bet most average Brits approach assimilating strangers in much the same way as my town does: if you pitch in and seem nice, you’re welcome. The ethnic makeup of local schools is roughly in line with the national average, and while social trust has declined as the town has grown, this hasn’t come with obvious racial tensions.

But this is what “assimilation” looks like. “Diversity”, on the other hand, is the kind of segregation you get when the pace of demographic change is too rapid for newcomers to assimilate. And a majority of Brits, despite being broadly welcoming to strangers, do indeed think this is the case.

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The Conservative case for revolution

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps the most high-profile proxy for the tensions this produces is the debate over “small boats”. This smouldering political bin-fire ignited again this week, as asylum seekers were photographed boarding the Bibby Stockholm, a floating accommodation barge commissioned to house them. Furious responses ranged from horror at this “floating concentration camp” to local fury at its unwanted presence.

This is only the latest episode in an ongoing public psychodrama over Channel migrants, whose main plot now concerns the Tories’ Illegal Migration Act, a bill that aims to grant the Government power to immediately deport migrants arriving illegally by small boat, either to their home state or to Rwanda (or perhaps Ascension Island). This bill is fiercely opposed by NGOs and progressive politicians, and supported by more than half of British citizens.

Numerically speaking, however, both the bill and the issue it addresses are sideshows. The number of migrants entering Britain by small boat — 45,755 in 2022 — may seem high. But relative to 2022’s overall net migration figure of 606,000, this is a small number: around 7.5%. In turn, though, these comparative figures explain why the small boats debate occasions so much sound and fury: it is a proxy for the growing perception that, regardless of what the electorate wants, the political class has no interest in controlling migration of any kind, whether legal or otherwise.

A key reason for the Brexit result, especially among working-class voters, was a desire to return control over immigration to Britain’s elected government. The expectation was that politicians would then respond to the popular wish for a reduction in numbers. But despite our Home Secretary’s hardline posturing on asylum seekers, her hints at exiting the European Convention on Human Rights, or the moral outrage this all engenders from progressives, events since indicate that the Tories have zero desire to do this.

Quite the opposite. Even while posturing on asylum seekers, the Government opened new asylum routes, liberalised student visas, scrapped foreign recruitment restrictions, and amended the list of “shortage occupations” eligible for simplified visa applications to include hospitality and construction workers. In other words, having won two general elections with a promise to deliver Brexit — a promise heard as a tacit pledge to protect British workers from foreign competition — the Tories appear as committed as the administration they succeeded, and the EU they campaigned to leave, to doing the exact opposite.

In London, the result is a pressure on housing that has been escalating for my entire adult life. Even young urban graduates, a group long associated with high openness and liberal views, are beginning to make the connection. Why, they ask, is the country’s most expensive real estate housing its “least productive” residents? Why should the unemployed get social housing in central London, while young working graduates queue for house viewings and languish in mouldy Zone 6 bedsits? Should those on benefits be pressured to move to Middlesbrough?

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that those who have grown up in a world of waning social trust, and graduated into cut-throat resource competition, should be giving the London housing debate an increasingly Darwinist edge. A prudent social democrat might read such sentiments as a warning signal. For while it’s clearly possible to justify large-scale immigration on progressive grounds, a wealth of studies shows that mass immigration undermines social solidarity, which in turn reduces public support for generous welfare policies.

But in practice, progressives only ever argue for more, faster. And even the Tories just offer empty pledges, plus controversial but largely symbolic gestures such as the Rwanda plan.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

So, is mass immigration a sinister elite conspiracy? Not really. The Tories are indeed profoundly two-faced on the issue, while Labour are enthusiastic accelerationists. Yet this is simply the consequence of Britain’s structural reliance, for both the economy and the welfare state, on continued economic growth. In practice, in a low-productivity economy such as Britain’s, this means population growth. And since Britain’s native population has been below replacement for decades, leaders must either level with the electorate about the need to trim our sails, or else grow the economy (i.e. the population) by other means.

In other words, the so-called “Great Replacement” is really the Great Contraception, seen from the other end of the telescope. And the only way to avert it would either be to reverse the Great Contraception — a policy which, even in considerably less liberal polities such as Hungary, has had mixed success so far — or face the social and political blowback from a painful economic adjustment.

Would such an adjustment be worth it? Perhaps for a leader such as Viktor Orbán, whose nation has a robust public consensus at both elite and popular levels on the importance of national identity. But in a post-imperial Britain deeply ambivalent about its history and identity? I doubt anyone but a hardline restrictionist would continue supporting such a brutal trade-off once the cuts really started to bite. And from the perspective of a political class that never needed honesty-box culture anyway, and whose peer group largely views cultural conservatism as low-status, the proposal would surely seem absurd: a repugnantly parochial breach of their duty to keep the economy growing, in the interests of national wellbeing.

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Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

Faced with both demographic decline and a need for growth, then, our leaders are hopelessly addicted to the growth-like economic effect of continued mass immigration. We can expect them to continue chasing this high, whatever they say, while praying that symbolically punitive proposals directed at Channel migrants will be enough to mollify any mutinous sections of the electorate. No doubt the hope is that the chickens of housing scarcity, angry young graduates, deteriorating social trust, faltering quality of life, and mounting nativist resentment will come home to roost on someone else’s watch.

At the core of the gulf between elite and popular views on immigration lies the intractable problem of the Great Lack of Self-Replacement. Responding to this, what looks from one perspective like the political class tearing up the social contract looks from our leaders’ perspective like upholding it. And the tragedy is that both views are true.

In Delaware the following day, Joe Biden did his best to keep up the act, opting to go for a bike ride near his beach house. When he bumped into a gaggle of reporters, he broke into a laugh and told them that post-Title 42 America is clearly “much better than you all expected”. Everything was still going smoothly. Nothing to see here.

To some extent, Biden and Harris can be forgiven for displaying a certain level of self-satisfaction. Today marks one week since Title 42 expired, and the expected surge of migrants is yet to materialise. Quite the opposite, in fact. The number of illegal crossings seems to have dropped; short-term bed capacity appears to be increasing; the country’s southern borderlands have not descended into anarchy. As the media has enjoyed pointing out, America’s immigration crisis appears to be waning.

Except, I suspect, it isn’t. Overshadowed by the gleeful coverage in recent days was one story that, more than any other, hints at the chaos to come. On Friday, footage from the Central Processing Center in El Paso showed an alarming level of overcrowding. The site, according to Texas Congressman Tony Gonzalez, has a maximum capacity of 1,000 migrants; on Friday, there were 6,000.

This hardly came as a surprise to those, such as Gonzalez, for whom the border crisis is a matter of everyday politics. America’s immigration numbers have been soaring for months: as of Friday morning, the Border Force had more than 24,000 migrants in custody — twice the average daily number last November.

The more significant problem here, however, is more complex than a straightforward numbers game — and it extends beyond the practicalities of the border issue. Of course, stories abound of governmental and administrative failure on either side of America’s crossing with Mexico. There’s the smartphone app required to apply for asylum that often doesn’t work, the arbitrary nature of the decisions over who is allowed through, and the inhumane conditions that plague so many migrant centres.

But the real failure of America’s immigration system only becomes apparent once those hurdles are cleared. When an illegal migrant is detained in the US, they have to appear before an immigration court before they can be deported. And at present, the average waiting time between an arrival and the issuing of a “Notice to Appear” before a judge at one of the country’s 66 immigration courts is four and a half years. As Art Arthur, a former immigration judge, recently put it, the system is “well past broken”.

So in terms of remedying the greater problem — of the administrative dysfunction that underscores the entire system — the recent reduction in numbers change nothing. As a recent investigation by RealClear revealed, it doesn’t take much to overwhelm the current programme. In Atlanta, there is a four-year waiting time for just 1,757 people; Baltimore’s court is “mostly booked” with fewer than 3,500 cases.

And even if these backlogs were miraculously cleared, it is uncertain whether terminating Title 42 will stem the future flow. According to federal records, ICE had already eased off using it in the months before it expired: in the second half of 2022, a monthly average of just 4,000 migrants were expelled under the programme. Overall immigration continued to increase and America’s creaking system continued to flounder. In other words, scrapping Title 42 was a smokescreen — a distraction that provided cover for a failing political class that has given up solving a decades-old problem.

Nor is this incapacity unique to America — if anything, it is a feature of almost every modern Western democracy with high levels of immigration. Last year, for instance, an unprecedented surge saw Canada’s population increase by one million for the first time. Next week, it looks to be the turn of the United Kingdom, with a government report set to show migration doubled last year.

The case of the UK is particularly instructive, not least because “being tough on immigration” has frequently been viewed as a vote-winner for the Conservative Party, especially since Brexit. Even today, the country generally views levels as too high. It has been striking, then, to watch the British Right attempt to explain away the current crisis at its first National Conservatism conference this week.

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By Ioan Grillo

During her keynote speech, home secretary Suella Braverman failed to address whether the dramatic rise in 2022 might have something to do with her own party’s inability to devise a successful immigration policy during the 13 years that it has been in power. Instead, she suggested that British workers should be trained to fill shortages among occupations such as lorry drivers and fruit pickers.

If that seems like an obvious alternative to importing foreign labour, that’s because it is: in 2020, the Conservative Government launched a campaign to recruit more UK-based workers for seasonal farm roles — but the programme was scrapped a year later after too few people signed up. Braverman’s proposal has been tried and failed. Just as with Biden and Harris, the poverty of imagination is astounding: in America, they hail the expiration of a mediocre immigration policy as a victory; in the UK, they simply recycle rejected ones.

In the coming weeks, it is not inconceivable that Britain and America’s immigration crises will be framed as polar opposites. On one side of the Atlantic, a smiling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will assure voters that the immigration crisis is over; on the other, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will try to convince voters that their glossy “new” policies will make sure it is over soon. But for all the optics, the truth is that both sets of leaders find themselves in a similar situation. With an election year coming, they each sit proudly atop two creaking immigration systems that they are unable to fix but will have to defend against a fired-up opposition. Perhaps then it will finally become clear that everything isn’t going smoothly.

It is true that one nationalist group, Patriotic Alternative, promoted the Knowsley protest, and politicians who resort to inflammatory language to distract from their own failings deserve to be called out. But can these angry demonstrations really be blamed on a few bad apples, agitated by politicians and a generalised culture of racism? Or should they be seen as the symptom of a much deeper malaise, which has its roots in the impact of immigration on British working-class communities?

Uneasiness over immigration in the UK has been simmering below the surface for some time. Over the past few years, much has been written about the way in which anti-immigration attitudes among the British softened significantly after the EU referendum, despite the number of immigrants remaining broadly unchanged between 2016 and 2019. This left some baffled: it was the opposite of what they might have expected following the victory of a campaign which had been variously described as fuelled by racism, fascism and xenophobia. But in fact, it simply revealed the liberal elites’ ignorance of the real dynamics driving the Brexit vote.

Of course, the reason many people voted for Brexit was to lower immigration. There were both cultural and economic factors affecting this, the result of the very high and sustained immigration which took place under the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments. However, it was also about sending a message to the country’s political establishment: citizens had been signalling their desire for stricter border controls at every election, only to be ignored. In this sense, immigration became the main focus of Brexit’s promise of greater popular sovereignty; not because of xenophobia or racism, but because it was where the political void between rulers and ruled had crystallised. It was mainly about accountability and democracy, not race or hatred of foreigners (which explains why the Leave vote had strong support among ethnic minorities as well).

This is why attitudes to immigration relaxed after the referendum: Leavers felt that they now had greater control over immigration. Or so they thought: since Brexit, the Conservatives have ushered in a system that, if anything, is even more liberal than before. As the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory points out, while the new system is more restrictive for EU nationals, who previously enjoyed freedom of movement rights, for the rest of the world “the policy reflects a notable liberalisation”. And we are now beginning to see the effects of this.

According to Home Office figures, there were 2.6 million visas granted in the year ending September 2022. While this represents an 18% decrease compared with 2019, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022, far higher than the previous record of 330,000. Work-related visas in particular rose to almost 400,000 — 80% higher than before the pandemic in 2019, and the highest number of work visas issued in any 12-month period since the data series began in 2005. Meanwhile, as a result of Brexit, the source of immigration has also begun to change in profound ways: net EU immigration has fallen steadily since 2016, while non-EU immigration has increased — mainly from countries such as India (worker visas are up 90%), the Philippines (93%), Nigeria (399%) and Zimbabwe (1,500%). This means that immigration is becoming more culturally, ethnically and religiously distinctive.

On top of this, we have also witnessed a significant increase in the number of migrants and asylum-seekers entering the country illegally. More than 2,300 migrants have crossed the Channel on small boats so far this year, according to official figures; over 1,000 migrants arrived in the first two weeks of February alone. Overall, in 2022, a record 45,728 people arrived in the UK, almost 90% of whom were adult men — an astonishing 2,000% increase over pre-pandemic levels.

And crucially, a disproportionate number of asylum seekers are being housed in some of the poorest areas of the country, with local councils and residents having no say in the matter. North East and Red Wall areas are housing respectively 13 and 7 times as many asylum seekers as South East England. Knowsley itself is the second most deprived borough in England, suffering severe problems of unemployment, ill health and child poverty. All this is driving a renewed stiffening in attitudes towards immigration compared with the past few years.

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By Jacob Furedi

So, perhaps it’s unsurprising that, according to the UnHerd Britain data released today, a majority of Britons think immigration is too high, with 34% strongly agreeing with the statement. Interestingly, the results are more or less the same across all socioeconomic groups, though as one might expect, opposition to immigration is particularly high in the country’s poorer areas: Midlands, Yorkshire and North East England.

What does this tell us about Britain? What is driving this change in attitudes to immigration? Are we to believe that 34% of the country is racist? There is very little evidence to support the claim that engrained xenophobia is to blame. Rather, the country has become incredibly more tolerant and less racist over the past decades. If one thing is clear, it’s that racism is definitely not on the rise. A 2019 EU survey ranked the UK as the least racist in the 12 Western European countries surveyed, while a recent poll showed that a majority of Britons believe that immigrants have had a positive effect in several areas, such as the NHS, the arts, and start-ups. This highlights the fact that one can be opposed to high immigration levels, while at the same time being positively predisposed towards immigrants. Hence past surveys have shown it isn’t just the majority of the white working class that wants to see immigration levels reduced, but the majority of respondents of non-white ethnicity (whether UK-born or not) as well.

Aside from the resentment over the clear betrayal of the Brexit mandate, could there be legitimate concerns about the impact of the recent wave of immigration, especially of the illegal kind, on local communities? More often than not, those who expose themselves to great personal risk to enter the country illegally are fleeing from horrendous situations: war, poverty and persecution. But this also means they are more likely to come from disproportionately lawless societies. It is not unreasonable, then, for people to be concerned by the sudden arrival into their communities of undocumented young males they know little about.

It is well-known, for example, that Albanian gangs are involved in very serious organised criminality in the UK, be it drug smuggling, human trafficking, or prostitution — and Albanians made up almost half of all boat arrivals in 2022. Then there’s the issue of the potential abuse of women: the protests in Knowsley, for instance, were sparked by a video circulated on social media appearing to show a young refugee aggressively propositioning a local 15-year-old girl for sex. We don’t yet know the veracity of the footage, but we do know that government and social services have historically ignored the abuse of thousands of white working-class girls by grooming gangs out of a fear of appearing racist. Justified or not, it’s not difficult to see why locals would express concern at the hint of any predatory behaviour going unchecked.

The usual progressive response is that much of the working-class resentment against immigration has to do with government mismanagement, with the growing material and existential precariousness of the working class, and with the erosion of communities caused by decades of neoliberal policies. This is certainly true. However, in this context of top-down class warfare, immigration, though not the main cause of the impoverishment and marginalisation of native workers, can easily become an exacerbating factor.

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By Peter Ryan

Not only is immigration used to drive down wages but, in a context of welfare retrenchment and austerity, it can cause increased competition over scarce and declining public resources and infrastructure. This is why, historically, trade unions and the Labour Party were generally anti-immigration. It also explains why, even among those favouring lower immigration overall, 76% favour more high-skilled immigration — which would make no sense if people were primarily concerned about stopping immigration altogether.

That said, opposition to immigration isn’t all about economics. It also has to do with the fact that the majority of voters, unlike the globe-trotting cosmopolitan elites, continue to view themselves as national citizens who want to live in a community with some sense of a shared collective identity. Indeed, several studies show that, for most people, national identity remains the strongest form of collective identity around the world. A country’s national identity may be, to a large extent, an “imaginary” construct. It may also be hard to pin down, encompassing customs, culture, history, language, religion and social mores. But it exists and has very “real” effects, creating common bonds among members of — and giving rise to — a territorially defined community.

To deny the existence of the latter is, in effect, to deny the existence of society itself. All that’s left is a bunch of individuals who happen to share a piece of land. Indeed, democracy, as the term implies, presupposes the existence of an underlying demos. The latter is also crucial in generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to sustain the welfare state. Leftists used to understand this. As the Marxist scholar Paul Hirst wrote in 2005: “Unregulated migration would undermine both citizenship and welfare rights. This would threaten democracy, which depends on the notion of a national community”. Contemporary progressives, on the other hand, like to vilify the nation-state as intrinsically fascistic. But modern concepts of national identity are still incredibly “progressive”, in the traditional sense of the word, based as they are on transcending individual particularities — sex, race, biology, religion — to create cultural-political identities rooted in participation, equality, citizenship and representation. Yet, crucially, this isn’t open-ended: a society is by definition demarcated by borders and a relatively stable membership. While national identity is constantly evolving, the pace of that change is everything.

And here we get to the crux of the matter: anxiety over immigration is not primarily driven by racism or xenophobia, or even by an opposition to immigration per se, but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration. This is why studies have shown that the strongest Leave-voting areas had experienced the fastest increases in immigration, not the highest absolute numbers of arrivals. When the national community perceives the pace of change to be too fast, it naturally, instinctively reacts against the breakdown of social cohesion.

This is not an argument against immigration or the evolution of a country’s national identity. It is an argument for respecting a national community’s right to have a say in the pace and form that such evolution takes. We have an obligation to try to welcome as many people as possible who are escaping hellish situations — many of which happen to be caused by Western interventions. But it’s ultimately up to the people who live in the receiving country to decide how this should happen. It’s called democracy, and our politicians, as the weekend’s protests demonstrated, disregard it at their own peril.

I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

I’m here to find the hordes of marauding Albanians the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, claims are entering the UK from France under false pretences. “Many of the arrivals this year have been from Albania, so we are working closely with the Albanian government to encourage returns and processing cases and removals as swiftly as possible,” she said over the weekend. “[They are] making spurious claims that they are ‘modern slaves’, despite paying thousands to come to this country. This abuse of our system has to stop,” she concluded.

I arrive in Calais in the late afternoon and find a strip of restaurants, all neon and twinkly and even more depressed. I need to sit down and work, and for that I need WiFi. “Désolé que nous n’ayons pas de WiFi,” I’m told when I enter the first restaurant, which seems odd, but never mind. I try next door. “We have WiFi, sir, but we have no space,” the young waiter says with a smile, extending his arms to indicate the sweep of the restaurant. I follow his gaze across rows and rows of empty tables. A burst of emotion floods my chest and face: first confusion, then a sudden gust of hot shame and, finally, rage. The urge to punch his smirking face is immediate.

I understand that he has looked at me with my scruffy, bearded, Middle Eastern appearance and decided two things: first, that I am a migrant; and second, that he does not want me in his establishment. He could have just lied and said there was no WiFi, but no. It was his casual cruelty that I found most overpowering.

I walk out into the night and look back at the restaurant’s Moroccan name, marvelling at the cognitive dissonance. The sea is a gloopy mass in the moonlight. It’s time for bed.

***

Early the next morning, I head for the Zone Marcel Doret — an industrial area in the city’s outskirts where migrants can be shoved somewhere less obtrusive. Industrial complexes loom; the skyline is a vista of gesticulating cranes. The rain is insipid.

On a side street, I stumble across a row of tents pitched up tightly on the pavement. They are the same shade of blue as those handed out by humanitarian organisations from Congo to Lesbos. Here, though, they are more canopies than full tents, extending down from the fences to which they are attached, weighed down on the road by plastic jugs filled with water.

I call into one and, after some shuffling, a smiling face pops through the open flap. The man inside is from Afghanistan. I speak to him in Persian, assuming he’ll understand at least some of it. I ask him if there are any Albanians here. He looks confused, shakes his head, and then points to a tent across the street: “Talk to them. They are Iranian in there.”

Two men of Middle Eastern appearance are walking down the street. They’re dark and scruffy — like me. I suspect they wouldn’t be served down the road either. Hasan and Mahmoud are from Egypt. They arrived two weeks ago fleeing, they claim, persecution in Cairo.

Across the road more smiling faces appear from a tent opening. “Salaam Khoobeed? Man David Hastam, Madar-am Irani-e val-e farsi-am khoob nist.” (Hi, how are you? I’m David, my mother is Iranian, but my Persian is not good.) They cluck with courteous delight at my attempts to speak their language, as Iranians always do.

One man is middle-aged, with greying hair. His friends grin shyly and give me an incongruous thumbs up from beside him in the tent. Mehdi is from Tehran and claims he is fleeing the Mullahs. Life, he explains, was no longer bearable under the oppressive regime. Like everyone else here, he and his friends are hoping to get to the UK. What does he think of Calais? “Khoob nist.” (“Not good.”)

As I leave, Hasan calls out to me. “Can you help?” When I first started my career, I would have said that by talking to me he was publicising his cause, which might help bring about political change. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know; I know it probably won’t make any difference, and I refuse to patronise him with a lie. Instead, I hand him my Diet Coke and give him €10. I also give him my email and tell him to contact me if he makes it to England.

I drive back to the city centre in silence. In the middle of a square by the water I see a huge white marquee with a red rim. Yellow lights flicker in the gloom. I get out of the car and walk towards the entrance. “Calais Ville,” reads a small banner. A tattooed man is squatting on his haunches by the entrance, smoking. He sees me and stands up.

I ask what it is. “A circus,” he says with pride. With animals? “No,” he replies with a smile, “it’s a grand human spectacle.” A streamer flag flutters limply in the wind. I feel like weeping.

***

When the so-called Calais jungle was demolished in October 2016, more than 8,000 people lived there. Today, the locals tell me that Calais has “only” 3,000 migrants. Now, if you want to visit a big camp, you need to go 40km up the road to Dunkirk.

Jules is a Calais native, and doesn’t hold back as we drive to Dunkirk. As far as he is concerned, the migrants need to leave for the UK as soon as possible. To start with, they overwhelmingly speak English (French, he explains, is much harder to learn); and second, you need fewer papers to live and work in the UK.

He tells me how tough it is for the migrants to get to the UK. “It‘s almost impossible for them to get through the Eurotunnel because of all the border controls — and without papers, forget it,” he says. This is, of course, where the people smugglers — or the passeurs, as they call them here — come in. They lurk in almost all the city squares between Berck Sur Mer and Calais. What they charge varies, he says, but it can be up to €15,000.

Each night, the French police sweep the squares in their helicopters. The passeurs send lookouts to monitor the police’s activity; when the officers leave, senior gang members descend to find new customers. He continues. “Most of the migrants are not political refugees like they claim; they are here to work.”

We pull up to the Dunkirk jungle. The early morning drizzle has morphed into a downpour and to my right I see a small, sodden hell. A tent village floats on a brown mass of sludge. Near the entrance, a sign saying “Drinking Water” has been pinned to what appears to be a tower of large, stacked crates. Around the perimeter slouch several tents, all of which appear to have differing functions. To my left, people are lining up in one to receive essentials from what appears to be an NGO. Nearby are various men sitting among crates of plastic water bottles — clearly another drinking station. To my right, volunteers are unloading goods from the boot of a car to a group of waiting Ethiopians.

I make my way over to a canteen tent. Steel pots of tea whistle; a colossal vat, which I know from my travels in the Middle East can only contain rice, bubbles with bovine contentment. Here, I meet Ali, and his two friends. They are Kurds who made the trip from Erbil. They arrived two weeks ago and have been in the camp ever since.

“I want to go to England to work,” says Ali. “Back home there is no money.” I ask him how he intends to get across with no papers and he becomes coy. “We will try,” he replies. We both know what he means — an illegal crossing. He insists I have some rice and Kurdish soup. I thank him in Kurdish (“Spas”), which brings a smile to all three men. Amid their protests I tuck €20 under the vat.

I then meet my first Albanian. Michi is a fit-looking man in his mid-20s from a village near Tirana, and he has been in Dunkirk for only a few days. Michi explains he will speak candidly if I give him a pseudonym and take no photos. He tells me that many people from home are being encouraged to make the journey to the UK for the chance of a better “economic future”. What this actually means is to work in the drug trade. “Everyone knows what to do when they get here,” he tells me. “We know that there will be people here to meet us and to tell us how to get to the UK.” Michi knows that his fellow countrymen control large parts of the hard drugs trade in Britain, and there will always be work for young men like himself.

As an Albanian, Michi can enter the EU for up to three months without a visa. Then it’s just a matter of getting to Britain, either by calling a number that does the rounds among the Albanian diaspora in Dunkirk and Calais or by turning up at one of the places in Dunkirk that, again, everyone knows. “I’ll cross soon,” he tells me. “It will cost a lot, but hopefully in the type of ‘business’ I’ll be working in I can make it back quickly,” he says with a slight laugh.

That laugh stays with me as Jules and I drive back to Calais. As the child of migrants, my sympathy for most of these people is inescapable. When I met Mehdi, I could not help but think about how my own family once made the journey from Iran to Europe. But it was on a plane and not an illegal fishing boat, and they ended up not in a tent by the side of the road but in a house they bought in North London. There was no justice to that — it was just plain luck.

Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse. She warned of a looming “invasion”. What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.

But she is not wrong when she says Albanians are coming over — often illegally and under false pretences — to engage in criminal activity.

Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially. But numbers, increasingly from non-EU countries, are huge and growing. This is dangerous — not just for the political impulses it spurs, but also for the fear it unleashes. This is exactly what Braverman is trying to tap into with her clumsy rhetoric.

In Britain, her incompetence manifests as chaos: in Dover, where migrant centres have been firebombed; in London, where migrants have been dumped alone in the streets; and in Westminster, where the Government shows no sign of solving this crisis. Out here in France, however, the chaos is different. It’s more subdued, but it’s there. The migrants keep arriving, often totally legally; and they keep crossing to Britain, often totally illegally. The French try to stop them, but know they cannot. The people smugglers have won.

Outside Calais, painted onto a small building, is mural of a sea monster with “Bienvenue à Calais” scrawled next to it. “It’s a mural welcoming visitors to our lovely city,” he says with a sigh.

Ever since Britain voted to leave the EU, countless politicians have tried to place immigration at the heart of public debate. Perhaps they think that tackling the issue is a guaranteed way to make their name and advance their career. What few realise, however, is that it is a career-killer.

What are we to make of this? Are we simply to conclude that immigration is an unsolvable problem, fated to forever curse Britain’s unfortunate Home Secretaries, from Jack Straw through to Braverman? It often seems that way. But such fatalism is not helpful. Immigration is a political problem like any other, and can be solved like any other, even if it happens to be a particularly tough one.

Perhaps the real challenge isn’t actually immigration itself, but a lack of political willpower. After all, the immigration issue is not going away any time soon. If anything, it is likely to get worse. Africa and the Middle East contain more than 1.5 billion people, many of whom live in areas rife with political instability and will be the hardest hit by the looming global economic recession related to the war in Ukraine. Nearly all these regions are on Europe’s periphery.

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To put it simply, many, many more will likely make their way to Europe in the very near future. This will mean more political polarisation and extremism in Europe, as those frustrated by politicians’ failure to control their nation’s borders seek radical, even violent, solutions. If there has ever been a time to reverse decades of incompetence on immigration, it is surely now.

What, then, can be done? For a start, instead of hollow tough-talking and tinkering around the edges with frivolous, impractical plans like the Rwanda scheme, politicians need to address the underlying issues that have allowed this crisis to flourish. And the most obvious place to start would be completely replacing the underlying, outdated legislation that is at the root of so many of the UK and Europe’s immigration woes.

The UK, for instance, remains a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which, along with its 1967 Protocol, the UN’s refugee agency calls “the key legal documents that form the basis of our work”. What the UN fails to mention, however, is that its legislation dates from the Cold War, and was originally devised as a short-term Eurocentric solution to a post-war problem: to help those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Its architects never envisioned a world of mass, global migration from poorer, less stable countries whose people follow very different cultural norms, many of which clash with modern Western values (women’s rights, for one). The 1951 Convention is, in other words, decades out-of-date. Its authors could never have conceived the scale of today’s migrant crisis.

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Yet the 1951 Convention is just one example of international legislation hampering British attempts to control its borders. There are many others. As the Joint Committee on Human Rights found last year when examining a proposed bill to give the UK government more power to criminalise and turn back migrants crossing the Channel:

“As a signatory to international treaties governing maritime law, including the SOLAS and SAR conventions and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea… the Joint Committee finds that Government proposals to ‘pushback’ migrants attempting to cross the Channel in small boats is likely to see the UK act in contravention of its international obligations.”

The bill passed, but as the above shows, it is unlikely to be effectively implemented. At present, then, it is impossible for the immigration crisis to be solved, for the simple reason that any effective new laws will clash with other legal obligations. Indeed, it is because of the UK’s membership in the European Convention on Human Rights that the Rwanda scheme failed: at the last minute, the ECHR ruled that the UK could not deport migrants to Rwanda. This is not to say that the Rwanda plan was a suitable solution, but rather that if progress is to be made, a fundamental conflict has to be resolved — and the only way to achieve this is for the UK to revisit its legal obligations and amend or even abandon them completely.

In today’s climate, of course, this will prove tricky, if not impossible. Braverman’s position is increasingly unstable: as last week’s attack in Dover demonstrated, she has lost control of her brief and shows little sign of regaining it. In the short term, at least, it is unlikely that she will have the parliamentary support to push through a complete overhaul of the UK’s legislative commitments. All of which means that Rishi Sunak has little choice but to step in. This is no longer a battle he can afford to delegate. For immigration is a career-killer — and if it’s not warded off soon, Braverman is unlikely to be its only victim.

This year, in Birmingham, it was more 28 Days Later. The list of absent MPs, led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, stretched back to London. “There’s nobody here,” one member who attended the last 12 conferences mourned. “It feels deserted.” Twelve long years. We have tasted every philosophical flavour of Conservatism: David Cameron’s bougie-patrician, nudge theory-driven paternalism. Theresa May’s fretful Home Counties authoritarianism. Boris Johnson’s giggly One Nation boosterism. All gone. 

We have watched iteration after iteration of big ideas guru try to stir the Tories’ heavy dough. We have seen Steve Hilton pad around Downing Street in his bare feet, intent on squeezing the entire civil service into Somerset House. We have seen Nick Timothy celebrated as an intellectual, for his beard as much as his brain. We have seen Dominic Cummings somersault from blogger, to Rasputin, to blogger again. How many of their plans — other than Cummings’s Brexit, which he was swiftly bereaved of after squabbling with Johnson’s wife — have actually stuck to anything? They’ve all gone. 

We are left with Liz Truss, and Kwasi Kwarteng, both anonymously described as “dead” before anyone even arrived at New Street station. The Prime Minister’s “growth plan” has to work, and quickly. Labour’s poll-lead is as large as 33 points. Young conservatives filled Birmingham’s bars, happily blabbing that they will vote for Keir Starmer in 2024. “A 1997 wipeout might be the best we can hope for,” said one spad. 

It really might be. For four days the Tories behaved like demons ambling across a tortured Hieronymus Bosch landscape. They squabbled and scourged and scratched at each other; so insular; entirely twisted up within their own canvas, seeming to forget that the rest of the country could see the black paint they were smearing everywhere. They fought over the Chancellor’s 45p tax cut U-turn; they fought over benefits; they fought over Suella Braverman and Michael Gove. 

“We are CONSERVATIVES,” boomed Kwasi Kwarteng during his Monday afternoon keynote. But the truth is, after 12 contorted years, none of them are sure what a conservative is anymore. Was Kwasi Kwarteng a conservative? Here was a man who was probably happiest picking through the back stacks of the London Library, cheerfully collecting obscure books on economic theory, shouting lines that could have been written for a dumbo libertarian congressman from Alabama. 

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Was Kemi Badenoch a conservative? Yes, said Conor Burns, MP for Bournemouth West. He suggested she was “the future of the party” and understands the need to “move beyond Instagram posts about free trade agreements”. Was Jacob Rees-Mogg a conservative? He floated around the fringe like a page torn from a Max Beerbohm essay, bantering about sending his children up chimneys, and thundering about a “return to common law principles”. The members loved him, they have always loved him, and as ever, they confused his impotent sarcasm for Wildean drollery. “What is my job?” he mused rhetorically at one event, and I was worried that someone might tell him: nobody knows anymore.

From the rubble, two conservative visions began to emerge. First, there was Michael Gove’s. He moved sprucely around the conference, making what political journalists call “interventions” and firing what the armaments industry describe as “missiles”. Watching Gove at an UnHerd event on Tuesday afternoon, you could sense how good it was to be out of this government. He looked relaxed; in his conversation he rippled widely over Michael Oakeshott and Malcolm X, Hamilton and Dad’s Army, Lord Salisbury and TS Eliot. He did not have to say Truss was shambolic — or as she was constantly referred to everywhere here by Tories, a “dud”. When he said the party could only win the next election if it returned to the “bedrock” 2019 manifesto, the point was made. The British people were “Boris Johnsonian”, said Gove. They wanted strong national institutions, strong borders, and “no flights of ideological fantasy”. There was his vision. It was coherent, though until Truss goes, it will be ignored.

The other vision was Suella Braverman’s. Unlike Gove, the Home Secretary spoke to the party, not the country. And she won this conference — the proof was in all the applause she was lavished with. On the fringe, Braverman performed a complex pirouette that managed to undermine both the 45p tax rebels and the Government. Gove and the rebels were “airing dirty laundry in public” — they had staged “a coup”. And Truss and Kwarteng, she implied, had been too weak to stand up to them. Braverman’s vision was Norman Tebbitism, rebooted for the culture wars, performed with jarring sweetness and enthusiasm. “My delight,” she said on Tuesday, “is annoying the Left”. “My dream,” she said, “is to see a front page of the Telegraph with a picture with a flight taking off for Rwanda… I’m proud of the British Empire.” “Good girl,” purred a pension-age man in mustard corduroys sat next to me.  

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Away from the pride, and delight, and dreams, Braverman’s outlook for Britain was bleak. Here was a country where the “PC Brigade” had infiltrated every institution of national life, the schools, the courts, the companies. Here was a country where drug use destroyed lives, where police took the knee, where pronouns proliferated all over emails, where migration was a flood, where men pretend to be women despite having penises, where nonces get more protection from the law than decent, hard working people. The liberal establishment hung over us all, a thickly overgrown canopy, and only Braverman had a machete sharp enough to hack it away. “We simply cannot go on like this.”

But as with every other whinge and complaint at this conference (and they were legion), the instant thought was: isn’t this your mess? Haven’t you been in charge for 12 years? Why should you be trusted to clean it up? Anyway, Braverman had a solution. Build a new Royal Yacht, and smash a bottle of champagne on its pristine hull. The members adored this, and they adored her, just as they had adored Truss last year in Manchester. 

And how was the members’ new Prime Minister working out? Well.“This is the Institute for Economic Affairs’ world now,” said one lobbyist. “You’re just living in it.” Rationalise taxation by cutting it. Shrink government budgets. Put a smile on the face of wealth creators. Economic growth at all costs. (“Yeah,” a CCHQ worker told me sarcastically one night, “because we never gave any attention to growth before Truss came in”.) 

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By Wednesday morning, the situation felt terminal. When Truss brought the curtain down on conference, you could hear the ideological barrel being scraped, perhaps for the final time by this party. Truss described her ideas with simple, repeated words. Growth; delivery. She found her conservatism in the back of a cupboard in Tufton Street. When Truss said she would web Britain with superfast broadband, as Cameron, and May, and Johnson before her had promised, you were left wondering what any of these governments had actually achieved. The “new era” she heralded was making the same promises the others had. 

What Truss said hardly mattered. A consensus already enclosed her, as tall and bleak as prison walls. The Prime Minister was a dud and her plan would fail. Her colleagues said this, the press said this, even the members were saying this. The conference’s bitchy, scattergun in-fights were a series of ribbon-cuttings for the next leadership contest. 

One night I bumped into Gary Sambrook, MP for Birmingham Northfield. I asked him how he thought it was all going. He looked momentarily stunned. A colleague intervened. “Remember what you said earlier Gary?” He did not seem to remember. “That this is the best conference you’ve ever been to?” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he said. It would have been cruel to ask him to tell the truth, for it was all around us, and had been for days.

Later that evening, he tells her: “I’ve done some maths — we can just about afford to buy a gardenless 1.5 bed flat in Catford and have a baby, if we reduce our food budget.” And they’re the lucky ones. And yet, is that all his country has to offer them? Britain’s answer to anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner today is, unfortunately, yes. The formerly normal aspiration to settle and start a family is out of reach for swathes of young people. A fundamental compact between conservative principles, and the party that is supposed to represent them, has been broken.

The next leader of the Conservative Party faces an economic emergency with few obvious solutions. Public finances remain in a dire state following an almost continuous stream of crises. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that the government has already spent as much as it did during the Financial Crash to support households through the current squeeze on living standards. House prices are a national disgrace, far exceeding historical trends on affordability and requiring decades of saving for average couples to even afford a deposit for a first home. Homeownership among the young has dwindled.

Britain tends to think of itself as an equal partner to countries such as France, the Netherlands and Germany in terms of incomes and living standards. This is a collective fantasy, which hasn’t been true for well over a decade. The reality shouldn’t be shocking, yet it remains so: Britain’s incomes and living standards have fallen far behind what were its peer nations only 15 years ago. “Across European countries, only households in Greece and Cyprus saw a worse performance between 2007 and 2018 than the UK,” found the Resolution Foundation. On its third consecutive Tory prime minister, and about to select its fourth, Britain isn’t working.

Does this seem like the time for a middle of the road party leadership candidate offering more of the same, a contest in which candidates simply take turns to outbid each other with Boomer-pleasing tax cuts? Or does a radical programme with a fresh-faced advocate need to step forward? The Tory party no longer has the theatrics of Brexit or a disruptive global pandemic to distract from these systemic, structural failings. The tide has gone out, the party isn’t wearing any knickers, and nobody is impressed by what there is to see.

Because the reality is that Britain’s national religion is no longer Anglican Christianity. It isn’t even the NHS. It is Pensionerism. Britain is a care home with a navy. And as the Baby Boomer cohort of voters ages, it is vital for the party’s long-term survival, not to mention morally just, for the party to begin mending the structural underpinnings of society that enable people to establish themselves and build families.

Brexit aside, if British conservatism is defined by anything, it is its reverence for community and continuity over radicalism and state interventionism. Asset ownership is vital for the maintenance of these values — increasing the country’s housing stock is a means to a conservative end. People who own houses invest in them for the long run and want them protected. These values express themselves in everything from taking care of a front garden, seeing it as a community as much as a personal asset, to favouring low levels of asset taxation on something “earned”.

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Graduates face a marginal tax rate of at least 50%. They are expected by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to exercise restraint when looking for pay rises, even in the face of nearly two decades of pay stagnation. Family homes are completely out of their reach. Ask yourself, how does this look compared to the comfort of homeownership and the 10% growth in the state pension, under the triple-lock policy, that shields pensioners from the same fate? Are we really all in this together?

Yet all attempts to reform this growth-killing inequity end in failure, such is the strength of the homeowner-pensioner lobby. Despite free enterprise fitting hand-in-glove with Conservative ideological orthodoxy, housing remains a market throttled by the state, with severe supply restriction enforced via irreformable planning forcing prices up. This has deleterious effects across swathes of public policy, from living standards, to fertility, to climate change.

Is it any surprise that productivity and post-housing cost income growth doesn’t exist in a market where any wage rises go straight to existing landowners in higher rents and prices, rather than resulting in an increased supply of houses? If increases in productivity don’t raise living standards, where is the incentive to increase productivity? Scaling this huge challenge must be the immediate, urgent priority of the next Conservative leader.

It’s been done before — look back to Margaret Thatcher’s reforming governments. But while Thatcher wielded the sword and cut through the Gordian knot of Britain’s public sector businesses and unions in the Eighties, she did this with the tailwinds of North Sea oil and gas revenues and entering government afresh, not 12 years into Conservative rule.

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Thatcher could even be said to have redistributed — a word we associate solely with the Left of politics — housing towards council housing tenants. She recognised that without homeownership, the facts of life ceased to be conservative. Nobody could imagine a Conservative government today redistributing housing wealth towards the young, regardless that much of it was ‘earned’ through planning restriction and loose monetary policy. It seems unlikely that any of today’s leadership candidates would — or could — wield such a sword as she did.

There is an obvious solution to all these structural problems: growth.

It is encouraging to see Sajid Javid identify growth as one of the key planks of his campaign for leader and for him to state that housing is a supply side issue, but less so to see Jeremy Hunt reflexively spouting a ludicrous unfunded promise to “cut all taxes”. Yet another demand-side reform. But Hunt’s reasoning is tragically logical: the next leader will not win the votes of members by attacking the party’s own base — which has become substantially older in recent years — over the lack of planning reform, the biggest cause of Britain’s anaemic growth record. What is required therefore is a dose of the dryly titled ‘policy entrepreneurialism’.

To win — and win properly, not just squeak into office just to prepare for election defeat in two years’ time — the next leader must shout from the rooftops about growth, while investing in clever innovative policy solutions. Seek softer community buy-in with policies that could encourage development while benefiting residents like Street Votes. Be radical. Call for the permanent abolition of Stamp Duty. The Treasury will fight you, but a universally-hated tax that increases market friction by preventing the elderly moving out of large family homes is a politically feasible housing policy reform. There’s £3.31bn in annual economic growth up for grabs!

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Build more houses, but be smart about it. Building is impossible in Chesham and Amersham? You’re a Conservative government with sky high prices in Labour-dominated, youthful cities! Ignore Chesham and Amersham. Build in the cities with the strongest price signals and if current residents don’t like it, let them vote even more Labour, or move away. Enabling growth in the productive cities will give you tax revenues to spend on public services, or enable you to cut taxes responsibly from their current postwar high.

The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe according to the OECD. The cost of subsidising childcare to a level closer to the European average could bring more women into the labour force, thereby increasing economic growth while solving sex-based social inequality. Isn’t this win-win?

But already in this contest we see Suella Braverman open her candidacy with cheap promises to leave the European Court of Human Rights. This kind of policymaking would neatly follow on from the return of voluntary imperial measurements, and the probably unworkable Rwanda refugee policy. Meanwhile Sajid Javid, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss have all pledged to lower fuel taxes, an astonishingly regressive proposal that benefits the richest first while ignoring the pressing need for climate action. The party must learn: throwing red meat to the crowd doesn’t put red meat on the table.

Without Brexit to focus on, the Government has lost its sense of purpose. The next leader must be a strategist, cerebral, and yet still a salesman. Someone who recognises that there’s more to winning than winning itself, and declinist managerialism — that a far greater prize is changing peoples’ lives and your country, for the better.