Don’t just look at the text; look at the coverage. Nigel Farage’s speech about curbing illegal immigration is headline news.
The reports, starting with the BBC, take seriously the possibility that this may be the agenda of a government in waiting. Which is astonishing for a party that boasts just four MPs, if previously five before the suspension of Rupert Lowe.
The Reform leader has set out his stall in today’s Daily Telegraph, in times gone by the organ of the Conservatives. At the heart of it is his proposal for an Illegal Migration (Mass Deportations) bill, including withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Time was, Mr Farage would be pilloried for even thinking on these lines; it says a good deal about how things have changed that Labour’s attack is focused on the fine detail, such as what he will he do about unaccompanied children, rather than the principle of the thing.
One reason for the change in sentiment has been the numbers of small boat crossings. In the past year the Home Office has received a record 111,000 applications for asylum; nearly 28,000 migrants have crossed the Channel this year. These people should never be dehumanised, for they all have a human story to tell, and few of them will come to Britain with the intention of living off benefits rather than working, but it has come to the point where the sheer scale of the influx has become overwhelming.
According to the Home Office, in the 11 days since the Prime Minister concluded his agreement with the French president to manage the problem, over 2,500 more people have arrived. For most viewers, the spectacle of them wading triumphantly through the waves to England inspires apprehension rather than elation. Besides, the Government was mistaken if it thought that voters would warm to a project labelled, “one in/one out”. What people wanted to hear was on the lines of: none in/lots out.
People don’t want to hear ‘one in, out out’. They want to hear ‘none in, lots out’.
So, Nigel Farage is onto a winner with his programme for deporting illegal migrants. But the Tories do have a point about him stealing their clothes – although they did have a full 14 years to deal with the problem.
When it looked as if Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan was actually going to be effected, a number of individuals who might have been targeted moved to Ireland (the Irish were far from pleased). Rwanda didn’t not-work; Rwanda was never really tried. Reform’s talk of shifting thousands to Ascension Island is along the same lines, only with heftier transport costs. There is also talk of a more benign option: giving those here illegally £2,500 to leave Britain. That figure would, in my opinion, make more sense if it were doubled.
But concerns about illegal immigration are almost certainly not the main issue. The real problem for many Reform supporters and others is legal migration. When people in Red Wall constituencies voted for Brexit, what they simply did not expect – because Boris Johnson very much didn’t tell them – was that European migrants would simply be replaced by non-European migrants only on a larger scale. No one prior to Brexit was told that legal migration would amount to almost a million people a year, many from countries with far less cultural affinity with Britain than the Europeans.
In 2024, overall legal migration amounted to some 948,000 people, just shy of a million. The net figure is less scary because about half a million people left the country in the same period, but even so, this is a huge number of people, most of whom come from very different cultures. It’s hard to think that prior to Tony Blair’s premiership, net migration was in the tens of thousands.
It’s immigration on that scale which has transformed Britain. In 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, the number of people here who were born elsewhere reached 10 million; presumably it’s far more now. That is demographic change of a very significant order and it’s hard to identify any point at which people actually voted for it.
When Enoch Powell made his - racist - Rivers of Blood speech about the consequences of immigration, this sort of figure didn’t cross his mind. What he said was, “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population”. The striking thing about that speech now is not just its xenophobic and inflammatory rhetoric but quite how small his figures are.
It is for this reason, I’d say that Nigel Farage isn’t quite getting to the nub of the immigration issue. Certainly the small boats problem seems out of control but it’s not the main challenge. The main challenge is the growth in legal migration which has already increased, still is increasing and currently is showing zero sign of diminishing significantly.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The London Standard
