Don't protest, predict

Nothing will be done to stem immigration to the UK. There are obvious ‘tells’ and I am surprised that David Baddiel hasn’t spotted them.

The first is the presentation. This isn’t UKIP - every country proudly displays its flag, except possibly us. No, it’s pure Rishi bullshit.

The lad is an ex-Goldman Sachs eager-beaver type whose taste in graphics is like that of Alan Sugar’s ‘apprentices’ selling pots of jam to demonstrate their marketing skills, without the slightest intention of making a career in preserves.

The flag is there (twice, if you look again) because some twentyish arse in his PR team thinks it will appeal to halfbrained elderly nostalgiaphiles who wear check shirts and corduroys.

There’s plenty of red bullet points - looks so businesslike, just like New Labour used to be (when everything was ‘shake up’, ‘crack down’ and ‘roll out’.) And 5’ 7” Rishi is shot from below - punters want the father of their people to be tall - with a Number One Serious Look on his face.

To anyone with open eyes the whole thing shows they don’t share our worldview and have complete contempt for us - they think it’s so easy to push our buttons.

How come Baddiel, with his double first from Cambridge, can’t see it?

Partly it may be that he is in the ‘luvviebubble’, that coterie of artists and entertainers - traditionally Left - who just know that anything from the Conservatives cometh of the Devil. People with that mindset work backwards from their prejudiced conclusions and automatically impute bad motives and stupidity to their opponents.

(Btw I’m a bit surprised by his use of the term ‘Stalinist’ rather than the more obvious ‘fascist’; still, when Starmer gets in we’ll become accustomed to the former adjective.)

Baddiel’s indignation may also have to do with his family’s history - his mother and her parents fled Nazi Germany in 1939. Well snap! David, because mine fled in 1945 - from the Red Army in her case, but her father was anti-Nazi too.

He will also have been influenced by the long and noble Jewish tradition of compassion for the poor and unfortunate. Largely mistaken in this case, when you consider that the rubber-boaters are almost exclusively fit young men, not starving, raggedly-clad women or children.

But what he really hasn’t seen is that this is a cynical stunt, a distraction exercise:

… there are between 594,000 and 745,000 illegal immigrants in UK. In contrast a total of approximately 30,000 people came in on small boats in the calendar year 2021 and of these only approximately 10% are illegal immigrants (90% are legitimate refugees with a legal right to asylum in UK).

If - if - the new arrangements stop the dinghies, and even then only after we have bribed the French authorities yet more heavily than we have done so far, the people-smugglers will simply switch to using more technically legitimate means of entry.

The government already plans to deal with the huge backlog of asylum claims by rubber-stamping them via written questionnaires:

Asylum seekers involved will be sent a 10-page questionnaire to fill out and asked to return it within an initial 20 working days.

Some campaigners criticised the plans as “clumsy" amid reports that asylum seekers will be told to fill out the form in English.

The good news for these poor chaps is that an army of human rights lawyers funded by Legal Aid will be on hand to help complete the forms; similarly, I suppose the ‘underground railroad’ gangs will work out how to get a piece of the action.

The current official ta-da is a cover for the underlying intention to do absolutely nothing about withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, whose provisions are so easily exploited that virtually anyone claiming asylum can legally settle in this country; not to mention common-or-garden immigration.

If all the Labour Party wants is to destroy our social and cultural cohesion (such as it is, and so hard- and bloodily forged over centuries) so that a New Jerusalem will arise magically from the ashes, they must have tears of joy in their eyes. Already…

Out of the 59.6 million usual residents in England and Wales in 2021, 49.6 million (83.2%) were born in the UK and 10.0 million (16.8%) were born outside the UK. This means that about one in six people in England and Wales were born outside the UK.

That figure of ten million won’t include their subsequently-born children, or the second or third generation descendants of earlier immigrants.

Well is that such a bad thing? Officially, not. The Government’s ‘New Plan For Immigration’, issued a year ago, opens with fine-sounding sentiments:

The UK has a proud history of being open to the world. Global Britain will continue in that tradition.

Our society is enriched by legal immigration. We are a better country for it.

We recognise the contribution of those who have come to the UK lawfully and helped build our public services, businesses, culture and communities and we always will.

All very dreamy-eyed and Holy Joe. The trouble is, the lack of discrimination - in its strict meaning.

If they were all like my late next-door neighbour, a Ugandan Asian refugee from the monstrous rule of Idi Amin, no problem: he was a very decent, hardworking man who brought up a good family here; his children started enterprises and are prospering. In fact we have the good fortune to live in an area that is becoming an enclave for aspirant Asians; the children of the taxi-drivers will study at school to do better than their Dad and become pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, accountants and business owners.

But there are others. A few years ago there was a machete fight between two gangs in Harrow, London; within about four seconds one young man was mortally wounded and two hospitalised with life-threatening injuries. It was sparked by an earlier incident in which two black lads were harassed on a bus for daring to ride through the ‘turf’ of a rival group of a different ethnicity. Slowly but surely parts of our cities will come to resemble gang-infested South Central Los Angeles.

The trial must have cost a fortune (to say nothing of the tax-funded lengthy incarcerations.) There was evidence from street and bus CCTV, taxi dashcams, cellphone tracking that could say exactly when SIM cards were switched prior to the attack… here in spyworld almost nothing is missed.

But almost nothing is prevented, either.

Now many of the boatees (and of the legal asylum claimants who arrive in other ways) will be too old to attend our schools, and either too old or too underqualified to go to university. While their claims are assessed, they are not allowed to work - besides, there’s not many well-paid jobs any more, a secular economic squeeze is on. What will they do? Often they come from societies that think, believe and behave in very different ways from ours. If they wish to avoid a life on the dole or benefits-subsidised broom-pushing, it will be too easy to slip into organised crime, swindling and various forms of sectarianism.

And the Conservatives will conserve nothing. There is plenty for white-collar looters to fill their boots with while the system falls apart.

If David Baddiel understood what Rishi and Braverman are doing - taking us for a ride - he might be cheering, not jeering.

But if he understood the consequences?