Imagine There's a Border - It's Easy If You Try

Imagine that, by some miracle, the result of last year's General Election was a crushing victory for Reform. Imagine Prime Minister Farage delivering an address to the nation outside No. 10 Downing Street in which he talked about the need to put British workers first, denounced Tory failure to control the borders, and warned that strong measures were needed to make sure Britain does not become an "Island of Strangers".

If you have even casually followed British politics over the last decade, you hardly need me to describe the inevitable fallout. Endless TV debates, Guardian columns and Twitter meltdowns about Britain becoming a racist hellhole. Swarms of celebrities led by Gary Lineker promising to leave the country (and failing to do so). Trans flags flown at half mast in leafy London suburbs.

Until this week, this might have been impossible to picture in your mind’s eye but the mood music of British politics is changing fast.

This week Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who previously dismissed concerns about mass immigration as "scapegoating" made exactly these comments in an attempt to appear tough on immigration.

Before anyone gets too excited, it is important to say that there is absolutely no chance that his words will be followed by serious action or, God forbid, genuine results. That's not my opinion as a Starmer skeptic, it's an observation based on his track record and, even more importantly, his character.

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The nature of Starmer's political approach became clear long before he set foot in Downing Street. It has often been claimed that asking politicians “what is a woman?” is a "gotcha question". In reality, it has been an extremely reliable way of identifying people who will lie in public about literally anything for the sake of popularity. Starmer infamously failed this basic test of integrity and common sense before the last election. The fact that in the wake of the Supreme Court Ruling confirming that a woman is, in fact, an adult human female, he abandoned his prior obfuscations on this question is not remotely to his credit. On the contrary, you'd almost respect him more if he had stuck to his guns.

I bring this up not to admonish him for some past faux pa. In this week's speech Starmer claimed that, despite his cynical critics, he is now taking a harder approach on immigration “because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in”. My contention is that if, in fact, Starmer believes anything at all, he certainly does not believe in tackling illegal immigration as a matter of urgency – nor does he believe that mass immigration is as much of a problem as the British public think it is. If he did, he would have campaigned on these issues and then done something about them after being elected.

In reality, every politician who has attempted to deal with illegal immigration has concluded that it is impossible to do without leaving the ECHR. Even Rishi Sunak—who effectively forced out Suella Braverman for saying this out loud and has claimed he went too far with his rhetoric about immigration—has since said there is no other way of solving the problem.

Despite criticism from the right, I do not believe Starmer is stupid or incompetent. On the contrary, I suspect he compares rather well on both of these measures with several recent Prime Ministers. My point is something else: dealing with illegal immigration and unwanted mass immigration is very difficult. It requires doing a lot of things that are popular with the public but extremely unpopular with the progressive lunatics in Starmer's party, as well as the bulk of the virtue-signalling commentariat. These are not things that can be done without genuine conviction.

Let's be honest: the Government is signalling about immigration in an attempt to nullify the onslaught of Reform. This won't work. Not only because they don't actually believe in dealing with the problem, but also because we all know they don't believe in dealing with the problem. The Tories, incidentally, face the exact same issue.

After 13 years of Labour Governments which oversaw more people coming to Britain than had come between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and 1950, followed by 14 years of Conservative Governments which were even worse, the British public simply no longer trust either party to deal with this issue, and I don't blame them.

As such, Starmer will do on immigration exactly what he did on grooming gangs. When forced, he will talk about the issue as if it is really important, while acting as if it is not. We all saw what the Labour Party really thinks about the grooming gangs scandal last week, when a Labour front bencher described it as a "dog whistle". She has since apologised, but even more telling was that Starmer—who spent weeks promoting the Adolescence Netflix series as a "documentary" which must be shown in schools—ignored an actual documentary about grooming gangs that was released shortly after.

I rarely make political predictions, but on this I am fairly confident: immigration will continue to be a massive problem that goes largely unaddressed. The boats will keep coming, deporting violent foreign criminals will still be nigh on impossible because of their "human rights", and low-wage, low-skill mass immigration will continue at a level that is intolerable to a larger and larger section of British society. This will inevitably drive more and more people into the arms of Reform. The only question that remains is whether Nigel Farage and his party can capitalise on the opportunity this presents.