Piers Baker: A Conservative case for mass deportations | Conservative Home

Piers McKenzie Baker is a Conservative Party activist and commentator.

In his 2017 post-Brexit vision for Britain’s place in the world, the great Roger Scruton delivered a clear instruction: that we must recover the idea of the nation as a shared home, not a random collection of strangers. This wording has taken on a life of its own having seemingly inspired our Prime Minister’s now regretted ‘island of strangers’ speech. Regardless of Keir Starmer’s remorse, the imagery could not be more apt to our relationship to Britain and its condition today.

Scruton gives us a framework for national identity in the language of the domestic, the home. It is not simply a matter of legal status, a passport, or a piece of paper granting Indefinite Leave to Remain. Our nation is a family. It is an organic community of men and women with shared experiences and values. One which has been time-tested and rooted in common bonds of trust.

But this sense of commonality, that we’re all in it together, is fast eroding. What once seemed like our shared home is slipping away, transforming into something new and alien. This emerging new Britain, what some modern online commentators call the ‘YooKay’, is the dark reversal of Scruton’s vision of nations. It is a world of fragmented cultures, isolated from one another by different languages and histories. The YooKay spits and graffitis on what was once held dear. There are no shared values, no shared vision of Britain or common bonds of trust here.

The demographer Paul Morland, a fellow of Scruton’s Birkbeck College, has recently observed that there has been more immigration into Britain every single year since 1997 than there has been in the whole long stretch of history since the Anglo-Saxons to the Second World War. We are all witnesses to this in our daily lives.

Take for instance my everyday commute. Since leaving university, I have taken the same train up through the Medway towns to head to my place of work in central London. In the past five years alone the unprecedented demographic change taking place in our country has been impossible to ignore.

My journey takes me through the places of my birth and childhood but now they are quickly becoming unrecognisable. London councils with deep, jingling pockets are syphoning off their social housing problems to the north Kent coast, moving in masses of new people with no connexion to a place where the existing population have roots reaching back deep into our island story.

Every time the train passes through the village where my father was raised, the town where he met my mother, the place where I went to school, I am filled with an immense sense of loss; a grief for a place I once knew, and an anger at those who have given it away.

The rampant crime wave, the breakdown in moral order, the grooming gangs plaguing our towns and cities, these are all indications that a great set of new arrivals to this country have failed to adopt and conform to our way of life. According to a recent whistleblower’s report in The Sun, 70 per cent of all shoplifting in London’s West End is undertaken by organised gangs of asylum seekers. This recent example only makes evident how we continue to host groups of people resistant to any notion of assimilation.

As protests by local communities against the use of hotels to house illegal migrants look to continue this summer, these spontaneous outbursts of frustration prove how mass immigration is undermining the organic cultural unity of our country. Yet few mainstream political leaders offer the answer to this crisis, even when what that is remains obvious.

The historian Samuel Huntington’s observations of America’s establishment in the early 2000s ring true here too. Whilst Britain’s elite has become increasingly obsessed with global welfarism and human rights, the public remains firmly attached to the concept of the nation and knows what is necessary to save it.

An August 2024 YouGov poll, under the lingering shadow of Southport, revealed that 67 per cent of Britons supported increasing deportations of illegal migrants, 44 per cent of those strongly. A more recent poll in March of this year saw a staggering 81 per cent favoured deporting all foreign criminals and offenders. Immigration is consistently ranked as top public concern, as it has for many years, but few politicians have followed President Donald Trump’s lead and stood on a clear and open platform of mass deportations. Arriving in Scotland he declared  “immigration is killing Europe” and who in Britain, except for the chattering metropolitan classes, can really disagree?

As a new and radical generation enters politics, this looks to change. There is a lot of excitement amongst young conservatives around the ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement. Lowe’s plain-speaking has done a lot to shift the national conversation and the Conservative Party’s ‘Deportation Bill’ owes its existence in large part to his smashing of the Overton Window. The common sense position of deporting foreign criminals is now one hardly anyone can disagree with.

Ultimately though, and as has been implicit in this article already, it is not only illegal migration which must be addressed. In 2006, Scruton wrote in The Spectator, “mass immigration without integration is not a recipe for multiculturalism, but a kind of cultural and social apartheid”. Our fragmenting society is a product of massive legal migration. We are now fast approaching a time where mass deportation of not only those who are here illegally, but those who have failed to integrate, is also necessary.

It sounds extreme, but is not the real extremism the ideology which permitted this immense change without ever consulting the British people? At every opportunity, conservative-minded voters have made clear their frustrations at mass immigration. It is time we listened to them. Nothing is more important than our shared home, our Britain. So, let’s take the most robust action possible to get it back on its feet.