It’s odd watching your country from afar.
I’ve been doing that, a bit (I was on holiday) recently. I was with the descendants of the Vikings who turn out to be more of a behaviour than a race. Yes some of them saw our shores and raided them, but by no means all of them. In the true sense of the word being a Vikingyr meant being a pirate and not every person we call a Viking was, at all.
These past two weeks I have not looked enviously back at my country thinking ‘what riches lie there’ but observed it through the filter of Norwegians, who, it must be said have a general good will to Britian, to do with royal links and our assistance during WW2.
We might post sarcastic comments on social media about the quality, but 80 years later we are still annual recipients of a huge Christmas tree for Trafalgar Square. If you think of the logistics that’s quite the thank you.
While I was away, the UK seemed to tie itself in knots over men of fighting age crossing the sea to settle in Britain. And of course there exist, usually with police escort, those who angrily cry “racist” at anyone who dares question current immigration policy.
It’s funny but since since Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana set up their sixth form politics group as a party, you may have noticed the ‘be kind’ crowd have re-emerged being anything but if you disagree with them. I do disagreed with them, profoundly, but am grateful. Given questions about “14 years” of Conservative Government, Corbyn and his ilk did the Tories a huge favour, keeping he and his party far from power but re-enforcing ours.
The far left howl about how many more votes he got than Blair or Starmer, but electoral maths was never their strong suit.
It’s the numbers of people coming across the sea that still bothers us in Britain, and the truth is we have every right to be concerned, and to want it stopped. No, the last Conservative government did not do enough to tackle illegal migration, Labour have done far less whilst constantly bleating they’ve “secured our borders” and overseeing record numbers crossing the Channel in dinghies.
This trumpeted French deal, is highly unlikely to be the deterrent they hope for. I still maintain the best tactic Labour could have empoloyed was to review Rwanda, dress it up as a Labour revamp and used it. After all we now learn the US are now going to use it at our expense. Just like the Chagos Islands.
In Norway they had a refreshing view of our immigration issues. To be fair they have historical experience of coming to our shores in boats, primarily in search of riches. The main point, and yes of course they too have those who shout ‘racism’ at just about anything, is, in the main, they don’t see illegal migration as an issue of race.
Good, because it isn’t and we shouldn’t let it be. It is about resources and culture clash. Tim Montgomerie – or ‘Number One”, as I refer to him (since he calls me ‘Number Three’) wrote the same on social media, and he’s gone to Reform who draw the biggest flak around race an migration.
It was interesting to watch from afar how much those on the left want to make any criticism or protest about immigration ‘far right’ or ‘racist’. And like all of Labour’s tin eared communications they never realise it doesn’t work.
Using hotels and opening more of them, despite their promise to close them for asylum seekers, was always unpopular, for any party. I have personally been lobbied by MPs begging the Home Office to shut a hotel in their constituency to illegal migrants. My former boss James Cleverly had a site in his constituency. That he could not, and would not, as a Secretary of State simply move them elsewhere for his own benefit certainly cost him votes. I still think large sites like airfields and old army camps were better all round and I think Labour shut them because they thought they’d get a rousing cheer when they did.
But they didn’t. When you convince yourselves you’re the only good guys, you get a lot wrong.
The protests around hotels have been framed as racist, and far right, and look, I’m not going to suggest that no single person part of them was either racist or far right, that would be silly, but branding all of them that way, and having counter protests police-escorted in just seemed to me, and my Viking relatives, equally absurd.
There are, I won’t name names, civil servants in the Home Office who quite clearly take the view that action on migrants comes from an ideological dislike of non-white foreigners and that we’d all be better off giving them an amnesty and letting them all stay. One way of reducing the ‘backlog’. Funny because that’s exactly what the Government is quietly doing.
When they boast they are reducing the backlog of asylum applications they never say how many were successful. It’s a lot. One civil servant said rather revealingly in a meeting last year “the thing is Giles basically half the population loves refugees and half the population hates them”
This was false on so many levels it was hard to know where to start.
Nobody has an issue with genuine refugees, but plenty have quite a problem with the assumption that anyone who sets foot off a dingy on a shingle beach in Kent is automatically a refugee. I don’t think people hate them, they just want the influx controlled. And for good measure I don’t think people love them either, I think there is a political wedge that some find useful by pretending they do.
People who struggle to pay their bills don’t like seeing men between 16-40 with an obvious cultural dissonance get ‘better’ treatment than they think they do, from ‘the powers that be’.
The hospitable Vikings who took me into their homes and look after me, were confused about how we allowed legitimate concerns about illegal migration, with numbers far far smaller than legal migration, to get tangled up with the tricky threads of race and ethnicity.
They get the cultural concerns, and the logistics of looking at an ongoing influx of large numbers when they look at their neighbour Sweden, with sadly shaking heads. They don’t see that as ‘racist’.
I see, indeed I have contributed to, warranted criticism of Starmer, Reeves, Lammy, Kendle, and others, and often wonder how Yvette Cooper escapes an equal tsunami of flak. Her immigration policies have been a complete dud, and no I don’t think this French deal is going to fix things, more than window dressing for a comms strategy that has strayed into, frankly, outright lying.
Do far right racist people like it when people get angry or upset about immigration? Of course. Is being angry or upset about immigration inherently far right and racist? No absolutely not.
To suggest otherwise is, like the Home Secretary, balls.
conservativehome.com (Article Sourced Website)
#Tackling #immigration #isnt #race #left #stop #branding #people #concerned #racists #Conservative #Home