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Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, long thought of as one of Rishi Sunak’s closest allies in Parliament, hinted yesterday at a row with the Prime Minister. He had a plan to reduce immigration ready ‘last Christmas’, he said. Why didn’t Sunak take it anywhere? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Paul Goodman.
Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’. Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said
On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to the UK. The Kindertransport – the word refers both to the means of transport and to the overarching programme – has always been regarded as a symbol of British generosity towards those in peril and seeking asylum. But it was all rather more complicated, as Andrea Hammel sets out to show. There have been innumerable
Bank on it Does the August bank holiday actually celebrate anything? – When bank holidays were first established in 1871, the August bank holiday fell at the beginning of the month, allegedly because it was an important week for cricket in Yorkshire, the home county of MP Sir John Lubbock, who introduced the parliamentary act creating bank holidays. – It was moved to the Monday after the last Saturday in August as an experiment in 1965, largely because early August coincided with the annual factory closure, and many workers were on holiday then anyway. – In 1968 and 1969 the holiday fell in September, so in 1971 it was fixed
Yesterday, 1,295 people arrived in the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats. That is the highest daily total since current records began being kept in 2018. More than 6,000 people entered the country this way in the first three weeks of August and more than 22,500 in the first eight months of the year. That is almost double the numbers seen at this point last year. From a video of the latest arrivals, there seem to be quite a number of young, fit, unaccompanied men. As an immigration liberal – someone who believes in safe, sustainable, legal immigration – it continues to baffle me that my fellow liberals
Identity politics Sir: Your lead article (‘On board’, 12 August) highlights numerous issues related to refugees, but does not offer much in regard to why this country is a magnet for economic migrants. You state that this is a rich country. How can this be the case when government debt is 100 per cent of GDP? Further, when we cannot provide adequate services in healthcare, education and housing, why should we take in migrants who cannot make an immediate contribution to the country’s tax base? The reasons that this country is so attractive are, firstly, the English language, which we can’t do much about. Secondly, we have an easily accessible
Small companies will face massive fines for not checking the papers of everyone they hire. Landlords will be put out of business for renting rooms to anyone without permission to be in the UK. With its Rwanda policy stalled, and with the numbers of illegal immigrants still at record highs, the government has a big new idea for trying to stem the numbers of people coming into the country. It will get small businesses to police the system. The only trouble is, that will damage the economy, and we will all suffer from that. The government’s latest big idea for controlling immigration is to make it a lot harder for
There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme Court confirms the Appeal Court’s controversial view that the long-delayed Rwanda policy is unlawful. Way back in 2005, the Conservatives made a commitment in their manifesto that ‘asylum seekers’ applications will be processed outside Britain’. In the run up to that year’s election, Mark Reckless, then a researcher at Conservative Central Office, conducted a scoping
Prigozhin’s example Sir: Educationalists and policy advisers have long been concerned with identifying alternative routes of upward social mobility. The career of Yevgeny Prigozhin provides an illuminating example of precisely this (‘Crime and punishment’, 1 July). Instead of spending years swotting away at A-levels and business studies degrees, Yevgeny opted for hands-on commercial experience by running a hotdog stand in a big city. He was quick to recognise the value of physical fitness in the pursuit of ambition by engaging in regular training at a local gym. Networking was always high on his agenda, and he soon became close friends with an employee of the state intelligence agency who eventually
Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his
After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into the country, the anticipated stampede across the southern border doesn’t seem to have occurred. No worries, then? Behold the miracle of social adaptation. Before the handy illegal immigrant ejection seat was retired last week, illegal entries from Mexico had risen to 11,000 per day – if sustained, more than four million per year, and that’s after 2.3 million southern border apprehensions last year. The record-breaking influx had already become a stampede, and apparently people can get used to anything. As for why the ever-escalating surge of visitors for life, obviously
How should Rishi Sunak govern? Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his MPs have plenty of views on the matter at the moment – and many are keen to air them publicly. In the face of disappointing local election results, a couple of hundred members of the pro-Boris vehicle the Conservative Democratic Organisation gathered in Bournemouth over the weekend (James Heale writes about the event here) where its members reminisced about the Johnson days and critiqued Sunak. Tonight Sunak is due to host a coronation garden party for all MPs, but ahead of that charm offensive a number of ministers and MPs are heading to the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for
Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense of public opinion, Truss is an economic liberal with a swot’s enthusiasm and a swot’s grasp of human instincts. In short, the Tories have swapped a lazy dissembler for an ardent geek. It’s not all they’ve swapped. The communitarian shift that began under Theresa May has been set in reverse and libertarianism has regained the
Be prepared Sir: The advice of Jeremy Clarke’s Aunty Margaret that he ‘must “get right with the Lord” as a matter of the gravest urgency’ in the light of his cancer diagnosis is spot on. I say that not just because I’m a vicar, but because I have sat at innumerable bedsides of people in the last days of their lives and have often found myself thinking: ‘You really should have prepared for this a long time ago.’ But by then they were too sick, too tired or too drugged up to think straight about spiritual matters and I have always felt that I would be intruding if I forced
The last-minute halting of the first flight to Rwanda is humiliating for Boris Johnson’s government. An urgent interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights prompted a domino effect of domestic court orders that ended with the plane returning to base without passengers. The ECtHR’s order came down to three factors. First, that evidence from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and others suggested asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda ‘will not have access to fair and efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status’. Second, that the High Court had found ‘serious triable issues’ in the government’s decision to treat Rwanda as a safe third country on the grounds that
Priti Patel’s first go at deporting migrants to Rwanda is turning before our eyes into one of those answers from the TV quiz show Pointless – when you see the on-screen counter drop remorselessly towards zero. At the time of writing, the counter for the number of migrants to be flown out to Rwanda is down to seven – from an original list of 130. While Home Office officials continue to insist their chartered plane will take off tonight with at least some migrants on board, other parts of government do not seem so sure. So we could still be about to witness a completely pointless answer. There is no
The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices are beginning to loudly bark above the polite murmur of the older interlocutors. But the conversation carries on. One of the longest-standing participants in this national conversation is the Church of England; indeed, perhaps only the Crown has been part of it for longer. The traditions of Toryism and liberalism are comparative newcomers, Labour even
On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail. The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job. We cannot have a situation where groups feel they can
This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem north Oxford. It is a social polemic disguised as fiction. Maggie Gee’s concerns are topical: migration, global warming, ‘the virus’, colour prejudice and first nations. The Red Children will be selective in its appeal. Strange red people with large heads suddenly appear in Ramsgate, and stand about naked on the seafront The plot is a surreal fantasy set on ‘the edge of England’, in Ramsgate, where Gee lives. Strange red people with large heads turn up suddenly and stand about naked on the seafront looking out to the Channel or
The purpose of Brexit was to strengthen Britain’s ties with both the world beyond Europe and with Europe itself, but in a more democratic way that carries popular support. It was clear to Boris Johnson and to the Leave campaign that the EU ideal of free movement of people, an idea forged in the 1990s, had become difficult to reconcile with the reality of the contemporary world. High-skilled immigration made more sense than low-skilled, they thought, and a new system was needed to deal with 21st-century challenges while strengthening national cohesion. Johnson’s critics, naturally, portrayed the supporters of Brexit as xenophobes and knuckle-draggers who were afraid of the modern world
