Last night I took part in a debate on immigration with Matt Goodwin, Aaron Bastani of Novara Media and Polly Toynbee of the Guardian. A video of the debate will be published on our channel shortly. My opening statement is below:
I have a reputation for being controversial so let me open by saying something appropriately provocative:
I think immigration is great. In fact, I love immigration. I love immigration almost as much as I love ice cream. And I LOVE ice cream.
Not very controversial, I know. How many of you hate ice cream? Very few. Around the same percentage of people who hate immigrantion in this country.
I know this from my “lived experience”. When I came to Britain in 1995, I was met with an amazing welcoming curiosity. Not by everyone. I did have an incident at school where someone told me to “Go back to Russia, you Paki”. Haven’t spoken to that teacher since. Worst geography teacher ever.
But it’s not just my lived experience, it’s a fact. When I first came to this country, 3% of the British public thought that immigration was a major issue. 3%. By 2015, this number was 56%. From 3% to 56% in two decades. This required some sort of explanation. And, the media had one – the reason the British public went from not caring about immigration in 1995 to being seriously concerned about it in 2015 was racism. According to them, racism in Britain went up by 1800% during this time – about as plausible as Vladimir Putin’s election results or the idea that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
What actually happened, of course, had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with reality. The reality that shortly after I moved here, in 1997 you enthusiastically elected one Tony Blair who threw open the borders of this country. If you think that is an exaggeration, you probably don’t know that more people came to Britain under his Government than had come between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and 1950. More people in a decade than had come in nine centuries. And that net increase, around 3.5 million, will have been repeated again by the time this useless conservative government limps out of office at the next election.
But Konstantin, you said you love immigration? If you think immigration is great, the more of it the better, right?
Wrong.
For at least 4 reasons:
1) Consent
I love ice cream. But if you forced me eat ice cream against my will for 30 years, I’d very annoyed. Fat, diabetic and annoyed. Not least because I’d no longer be British. I’d be American. The British people have voted to lower immigration to the tens of thousands, which is where it was when I first came here, repeatedly.
It doesn’t matter whether you think we need more immigration: the fact is there was no mandate for what has happened and there is no mandate for what is happening. It is anti-democratic which is immoral and wrong.
2) Scale
I love ice cream. But, as I keep trying and failing to explain to my toddler, the amount of ice cream you can eat is limited. Last year net migration was nearly 700,000. In the words of a man our opponents no doubt look up to and admire, “Quantity has a quality all of its own”. Joseph Stalin.
700,000 people a year is not something our society can even hope to assimilate. Why do we do this? It’s not because it benefits our country. It’s so that our politicians can pretend to boost the economy in the short term. Like a toddler, shoving more and more ice cream down his throat for the instant gratification, we ignore the long term consequences at our peril.
3) Type
The great unsayable about immigration is that not all immigrants are the same.
There are 10 times as many Polish people in the UK as Albanians, yet there are almost twice as many Albanians in British prisons than Poles. Not all immigrants are the same.
We welcomed 150,000 people from Hong Kong and 200,000 Ukrainians in recent years. There are no Hong Kongese grooming gangs in Britain and Ukrainians aren’t running around stabbing each other on the streets of London.
Culture, family structure, ideology, religion, values – these things matter. We must be wise about who we bring into our country. We haven’t been.
Which brings us onto my final point: My mother applied for a visa to come and visit us last year to meet her first grandchild. Incidentally, it is at precisely this point that my wife became a staunch opponent of immigration. To her well-concealed relief, my mother’s application was denied. And yet, tens of thousands of people come to this country illegally on small boats every year. I don’t understand why more people aren’t upset by this: I’ve lived in Britain long enough to know that there is no greater crime than jumping the queue.
We currently spend £8 million a day on hotels for illegal immigrants. I’m sure the majority of them are normal people seeking a better life. But there is no reason they should be allowed to jump the queue, avoid our security checks and break the rules that everyone else follows.
Especially as not all of them are normal people seeking a better life. Some of them are Abdul Ezidi.
I love ice cream but if ice cream started committing sex offences and throwing corrosive substances on mothers and their children I’d be against it.
The immigration situation in this country is best summed up with one of my favourite quotes:
You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of avoiding reality. And that’s where we are. Thank you very much.
