It’s seems to me pretty obvious that the liberal elite are missing the point about Priti Patel’s new immigration policy launched last week.
They’re wrong in a myriad of ways. Most acutely, liberals are defending a system which has kept working people poorer and less able to cope with the global marketplace because it has suited them and their own self reverential cosmopolitan laissez faire materialist attitudes whilst it will be a “Right wing, populist” Conservative Government allegedly populated by crazed disaster capitalists, which will see real terms wage increases and new skills and opportunities through training and automation, for huge numbers of what hitherto have been described as the “working poor!” Who’d have thought it?
The Whitehall timeservers are even now using every trick in the book to traduce and undermine The Home Secretary for having the temerity to insist that they do the job they’re paid to do and respect the electoral mandate given to the Conservatives on 12thDecember. What a looking glass world we are in where a strong and principled woman of Ugandan Asian heritage is trashed as a mad Right Wing bigot!
It’s almost twenty years ago that I first raised the impact of mass migration on what became after 2005 – my Peterborough constituency – on the funding for scarce public services like health, policing and social care and on education and housing in particular. To no avail. My effort to amend the Free Movement Directive – not to repeal it, naturally – via a Ten Minute Rule Bill in 2012 was ignored by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May and the Coalition Government but ironically, less than four years later, David Cameron was making precisely the same points in his ill fated and fruitless negotiations with the European Union prior to the EU Referendum.
That was then, this is now.
The bien pensant class which inhabits a North London mindset believing liberal democracy and globalisation are the peak of enlightened and civilised success and that a borderless world of uncontrolled immigration is a consequence of it, nurse their prejudices and caricatures of Brexit voters like warm brandies. For them, Brexit in so far as it meant controlling who comes to our country and on what basis, was about xenophobia, small mindedness, racism and harking back to Imperial attitudes of cultural superiority and hegemony.
Wrong. It was actually about fairness and democratic accountability. No one ever voted for mass migration, wages being undercut, cheap foreign labour stifling productivity, embedding indigenous welfare dependency and fiscal transfers from the poor from the less poor via tax credits and the multigenerational scourge of in work poverty. The decision to throw open UK labour markets to millions of EU citizens via the Free Movement Directive in 2004 was a political and economic choice which was never properly debated or mandated at the ballot box and even its author Tony Blair, has regretted the decision and its ramifications.
When people who put a premium on place, belonging, heritage, community, patriotism and belonging, “Somewhere” people without degrees and connections and privilege in our post industrial world, they were ignored and told to shut up and quit their racist carping. This was unfair, not least because they were never opposed to immigration per se but to the lack of control over the policy and the sense of impotence and the corrosive impact on representative democracy that it gave rise to, which surely turbocharged the Leave vote in June 2016. It’s a fact that the UK is the least racist country in Europe and is one of the most integrated multicultural and multi ethnic nations on Earth. The Home Secretary’s rules are tough but open to a pragmatic and practical interpretation and have already been amended in the light of public consultation and industry feedback in areas like earnings thresholds, education attainment, family reunification and youth mobility schemes. People forget that for the vast bulk of the globe, the new immigration bill will mean an easing and a welcome liberalisation of previously draconian rules and a level playing field between EU and non-EU workers and what’s wrong with that? A flexible but rules based immigration points system has worked pretty well for a booming Australian labour market.
For millions of Brexit voters, Leave and Remain, Priti Patel’s policies seem both sensible, logical and years overdue – and as a result, will be hugely popular. When they asked politely why their neighbourhoods and towns were changing in front of their eyes, the Establishment ignored them and insulted them and refused to debate in a respectful way. They were smart enough to know that remaining in the EU was impossible if the goal was to wrestle back control of our borders and in Boris Johnson they could vote for someone who wasn’t a mindless populist but had a record of social liberalism in London but nevertheless who paid due regard to the need to end free movement and move to a colour blind immigration policy decided in Westminster and focused on the UK’s long term economic interests rather than on the short term financial needs of employers demanding an endless pipeline of cheap foreign labour. As it happens, there is a strong moral case too, of training and upskilling those most affected by regional inequalities and poor education – i.e. poor white British boys in particular – whilst also conceding that there’s something rather ignoble about harvesting the most talented and economically mobile folk from across the world (and Eastern Europe in particular) to the longer term detriment of those countries. Have we really been so institutionalised and infantilised by our supplicatory relationship with Brussels, that we forget that most normal countries do actually tend to base their immigration policies on what’s good for them and their own citizens?
Immigration reform was not the cause of Brexit but it certainly encapsulates the debate over national sovereignty and popular will and the limits of globalisation and transnational government imposed without a democratic sanction.
It’s taken long enough but it’s courageous, morally sound, economically sensible and above all fair – and it’s thanks to a Conservative Government.
This article was originally published by Global Vision on 24th February 2020. See https://globalvisionuk.com/liberals-are-defending-a-system-which-has-kept-working-people-poorer/