Immigration: A duty to the truth

By Pete North - June 12, 2021

To the untrained eye my tweets lately don’t look that dissimilar to a “far right” account. Not that the term “far right” has any particular meaning. It used to refer to quasi-nazi outfits and ethno-nationalists. Now it just means anyone the left doesn’t like. Personally, I’m not down with racism because broad brush discrimination simply isn’t accurate enough. I’m happy to speak in generalities without prefacing everything with caveats, but anyone who would rather take issue with the bluntness over the substance is really someone who doesn’t want to have an open and productive debate.

The reason for the change is that I simply can’t be bothered to couch arguments in the usual measured and mealy mouthed way. There are some things that just need to be explicitly stated. You can’t address a problem if you’re not even prepared to openly describe it. In particular I talk about Pakistan and Pakistanis living in Britain. We have a very large number of people from Islamofascist backwater living in the UK, they are not integrating and they’re creating a number of serious problems.

I also talk about British blacks. In particular, those in London. They are killing each other. It’s an every day occurrence and it’s not because of systemic racism. The worst thing we ever did to British black people in recent times is persuade ourselves that criticising black, particularly Caribbean, culture was racist. It made us lower our expectations and stop debating the problems and we then led ourselves to believe they had no agency in it. That’s the systemic racism (if such a thing exists).

That we allow them to behave like animals and treat each other appallingly is the racism of low expectations. We keep making excuses for it, which is often reflected in the criminals sentencing. Because we’re not successfully correcting it, anyone who can move away form them does so, and like the Pakistanis, they’re living in parallel communities, evolving separately and things that should be getting better over time are becoming worse.

Which brings us to asylum and immigration policy. For as long as we have this systemic dysfunction where we are unable to discuss and debate the issues without being derailed by grifters in the race relations industry, our porous borders mean that we’re pouring petrol on the bonfire.

Far from being “far right” I suppose I could loosely be described as a liberal democrat. If we want to defend the sanctity of the vote then we have to get a handle on Pakistani and Indian voter fraud. If we want to protect gay and lesbian people we have to address homophobia among blacks. If we want Britain to be safe for Jews, women and girls, we have to address the racism and misogyny in Pakistani Muslim men. If we wish to remain a liberal, tolerant democracy we have to get a grip on these issues and we have to slow the rate of influx because we have clearly reached our absorptive capacity.

None of this, though, is likely to be address now or in the near future. Now that the Tories have consolidated their power, they have reverted to the old habits of the establishment and will only fiddle around the edges, while the insurgency on the right is scattered to the winds, fragmented into nonentity parties, some of which are undeniably racist in language and intent.

One wonders, then, if there is anything to be done at all. Much of the right is still under the spell of Boris Johnson and has yet to realise the bait and switch, while the rest are so odious they bring nothing to the table and actively harm the case. This is ultimately where we need a functioning conservative party, but there is nothing about the Tory party I presently recognise as conservative.

Around the edges, the tide is slowly turning on woke issues and the system is waking up to the virus that is critical race theory and depraved trans ideology, and the left was always going to overplay its hand, but even if these issues are put to bed, we are still squeamish about grasping the nettle on immigration issues – a dynamic that existed long before the term “woke” was ever coined. The race relations industry is about as bad as ever it was, and the Labour left is still a prisoner to race grifters and grievance mongers. This is something only a conservative movement can address. Until we do, girls will continue to be victims of Pakistanis and young black men will keep dying in the gutter.

Conservatism, though, is dead in the water and will remain so for a time to come. I did not anticipate Boris Johnson staying the course but Covid has protected him from the political fallout of a botched Brexit and he’s safe for a time to come. While he is PM, conservatism is buried. We can also assume that if Priti Patel is not going to get a handle on illegal immigration, it is simply not a priority of this government. Patel takes us for fools and anyone watching developments in Dover has now realised this.

That then means a resurgence of an actual far right is a distinct possibility. I’m not sure if it will manifest in the form of a new party or whether the disparate strands of the populist right can unite, or whether something interesting will emerge from the anti-lockdown movement. But I’m reasonably convinced, we are only a terrorist atrocity away from EDL style vigilantism, particularly while we have two-tier policing under Covid restrictions. This is no doubt something our intelligence and security services are acutely aware of if they’re even halfway good at their jobs.

Far right parties don’t grow because people are inherently racist or necessarily because they are brainwashed by the media. They are symptoms of a sense of powerlessness as government fails to take note of and address growing concerns that affect everyday people on the street level. While the PM bleats about building back better, a greener more feminine society, white working class mums in Batley are worried if their lad’s going to get jumped by a pack of Pakistani thugs. This certainly speaks to my lived experience. I want that tackled more than I want a green revolution.

Eventually Covid will become background noise, as will Brexit, but the many societal challenges we have ignored for decades will come to the fore again, and for as long as there is a culture of defensiveness and denial, and a institutional reluctance to act on the part of the police and the polity, there will be a growing sense of abandonment that could up-end our politics. It is therefore necessary to speak frankly and frequently about it and not allow them to distract us with trivia. They would rather we talked about something else. Do not oblige them.