For the past ten days, a culture war has been raging in Britain over immigration and multiculturalism. The person who fired the initial broadside, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, has been engulfed by repeated denunciations as at best a blithering idiot and at worst a spittle-flecked racist and bigot.
Her crime was to have told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC that multiculturalism had failed, that immigration levels were catastrophically high and that the global asylum framework was no longer fit for purpose.
At the Conservative party conference this week she doubled down, warning that a “hurricane of migration” was coming to British shores and that she would do “whatever it takes” to protect the UK’s borders. “Millions more” migrants could come to the UK, she warned, unless the government took decisive action against “uncontrolled and unmanageable” illegal immigration and in addition reduced legal migration to “reasonable” levels.
Cue uncontrolled and unmanageable levels of hysteria among the political and chattering-classes. The fact that Braverman’s own parents immigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya respectively makes absolutely no difference, of course, to the charge against her of racism.
Indeed, her offence is so great she apparently doesn’t even deserve to live in her own country, in which millions of foreigners with no ties at all are said to be entitled to reside; it turns out that she is barely fit to be considered human at all. Thus that citizen of the entire world, the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis who is so enlightened he asks:
Do we really want borders?
told Freddie Sayers on Unherd:
You have a minister who should have been expelled from this country for having those ideas…she’s a dangerous, poor excuse of human nature, that Suella Braverman of yours. Be very ashamed of her.
Quite apart from the appalling name-calling and party political power-play involved in the furore over Braverman, and leaving aside the fact that she hasn’t come up with any practical proposals to deal with the problem that she says is defeating the government of which she is a prominent member, her AEI speech was impressive, grounded in devastating facts and extremely brave.
The most striking aspect of the foaming reaction to it, however, is that she and her opponents are speaking entirely at cross purposes.
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