In today’s Times (£) William Hague, a former leader of the Conservative party and now a regular columnist for the paper, hails what he calls “the age of migration”.
Mass migration is already a global phenomenon and is set vastly to increase. By the middle of the century, writes Hague, if just one in twenty people in Africa and the Middle East were to choose to migrate there would be at a conservative estimate 140 million people on the move.
Last week, the Dutch government fell because of public anger over its inability to curb mass immigration. Italy, Sweden and Germany are seeing an increasing rise to power of parties committed to halting the migrant tide into their countries — parties which Hague, along with the left, demonises as the “hard right”. In Britain, the government is preoccupied with stopping the illegal traffic in migrants coming in small boats from France across the English Channel, while ignoring the no less combustible issue of the unsustainable numbers arriving through legal immigration routes.
Yet although Hague acknowledges that these migration trends are already transforming the politics of Europe, he scolds those who are “destabilised by anger” about it on all sides.
That’s a most telling phrase. It suggests that, to Hague, objecting to a policy of mass immigration that really has destabilised the country by placing impossible burdens on housing, health, education and other public services while undermining national cohesion and identity is itself an unbalanced position.
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that a desperate struggle is now under way for the very existence of the western nation and its indigenous culture. Instead, he makes the short-term and shallow argument that, because European nations have declining and ageing populations, their need for migrants is “inescapable”.
But no-one is arguing that there should be no immigration. A manageable level of immigration is good for a country. And of course Britain should seek to attract outstanding talent from abroad.
But Hague misses a number of crucial points.
First — and this might come as a shock to him — foreign workers or students themselves age over time. They also often bring in dependents who may not be young — or conversely, such dependents may be young children. All of which adds to the burden on public services which may exceed the immediate benefits that immigrants bring to the country.
Instead of importing foreign workers — a policy that also drives down the wage levels of British workers — the UK needs to service its needs largely from its own people.
It needs to bolster education standards in order to produce a properly educated and skilled workforce. It needs to remove the distorting and damaging effect of foreign students’ fees propping up under-performing universities — at the expense of investment in the education of British students.
Most important of all, it needs to address Britain’s below-replacement birthrate, which requires a full-on natalist policy involving incentives to promote married family life and support for mothers both in the workplace and at home.
Yes, all this takes time — but the country could make a start in the correct direction of travel. Yet none of this features on Planet Hague, where the solution to Britain’s decline is apparently to be provided by incomers from the rest of the world.
The second big point he’s missed is that the problem isn’t immigration in itself but one of numbers. The annual net migration rate is now an astounding 600,000. In 2003, the UK population stood at 59 million; in 2013, it was 64 million; in 2023, it’s currently 67 million; by 2030 it’s projected to rise to 69 million. This is already unsustainable, with public services overwhelmed and social cohesion fracturing.
Yet Hague seems not to have registered the baleful implications of this. His most lamentable argument is where he writes:
If the future is one of continuing high levels of migration, the promotion of shared identity becomes even more important. Britain has done better on this than many of our neighbours — look at how many of our political leaders are children of immigrants. But we should not be complacent. The coming age of migration is another reason to ensure citizenship carries obligations as well as rights. Labour’s David Lammy put it well in advocating compulsory national service to “break down the divides that are becoming entrenched in modern society”.
Oh dear. Hague appears to have no understanding of what national identity actually is. The identity of a coherent and cohesive society is created by shared values to which people from different cultures and backgrounds sign up. That shared culture acts as a kind of overarching umbrella under which, in a liberal democracy, other traditions can find free expression provided — crucially — that everyone shares the same cultural fundamentals such as parliamentary democracy, one law for all or equal rights for women.
Until recently, that’s always worked for Britain because the numbers coming in — Irish, Huguenots, Jews, people from the Caribbean — were always small. They could therefore assimilate and integrate — and their backgrounds weren’t so dissimilar, despite any differences in skin colour. But if too many arrive from wildly different cultures it becomes impossible to unify the society, because the differences in aggregate will overwhelm indigenous traditions.
As Hague says, Britain is better integrated than many other countries, a testament to its people’s tolerance and general absence of racism (its antisemitism is another matter, but still). And yes, of course it’s great to see such a high proportion of black and brown faces in the upper reaches of the Conservative party.
But the point that Hague again misses is that those politicians came from immigrant families who eagerly adopted Britain’s values because they shared them. Crucially, they wanted to integrate into a society they admired and even loved.
No less crucially, there was an identifiable culture into which they could integrate, promoted by a country that derived its identity from its history, institutions and traditions that it promoted with pride.
Yet now the country’s elites trash its history, institutions and traditions. So there’s no culture into which immigrants are told it’s desirable to integrate. Plus a sizeable number of those already in Britain, not to mention those still arriving, come from cultures which seek not to integrate or assimilate but to separate or even dominate.
Hague displays zero understanding of the cultural crisis gripping the west. Zero understanding that mass migration is both a symptom and a cause of that crisis. Zero understanding that the fightback to defend the nation and western civilisation that’s currently under way in the countries of Europe — most advanced in places like Hungary or Poland — will transform the face of the west. Zero understanding that what he describes as the “hard right” are coming to power because of attitudes like his.
Alas, he demonstrates why the Conservative party is so totally over.
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