This week’s PMQs has more in it than can be covered here, because we take one key issue as our starting point to address the complex crisis facing Britain…
After last week’s stunning results for Reform in the local elections, the Prime Minister
made a speech promising a significant reduction in net immigration. It failed to satisfy migration sceptics.
It upset the Left even more, whose ears pricked up at the dog-whistle phrase ‘island of strangers.’ They would not have started barking so furiously if they had remembered the Government’s agreement to grant work visas to an unlimited number of Indians (exempted from National Insurance Contributions for three years) and plans to allow in young (18-30) people carrying European passports (whatever their country of birth might be.)
They might also have recalled the Sentencing Council’s recommendation that the usual penalty for illegal immigration be reduced to nine months’ imprisonment, which is below the threshold for automatic deportation. It is interesting that although the Council is required to be impartial, seven of its eight judicial members were appointed (subject to the sitting Lord Chancellor’s agreement) by a Lord Chief Justice (Sir Ian Burnett) who was formerly a Liberal Democrat MP (
see section 4 here.) Perhaps more than a pinch of compassion is baked into that cake.
So despite Sir Keir’s recent statement the general direction of travel on this issue seems clear.
Nevertheless in PMQs Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts challenged Starmer, saying his Monday speech contradicted his previous support for ‘migrants’ and free movement. ‘Is there any belief he holds that survives a week in Downing Street?’ she asked. Sir Keir’s reply - ‘Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish’ - was so brutal that it caused a stir on his own side as well as the Opposition’s.
He completed his response with dream-talk - ‘I want to lead a country where we pull together and walk into the future as neighbours and as communities, not as strangers’ - that left us not so much soothed as confused. How was this to be achieved?
The challenges of immigration are not simple. As
Douglas Murray has said, ‘if you import the world’s people, you also import the world’s problems.’ The current dangerous confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is an example, though there is a third, giant country that has an interest: China, which for long has had its eyes on a neighbouring territory,
Aksai Chin, plus part of Kashmir itself.
Again, the conflict between Israel and Gaza has resulted in public unrest in this country and influenced the election of several ‘independent’ Muslim MPs who repeatedly raise related questions in Parliament. Reportedly,
half of Britain’s Jews have been considering emigration because they feel the authorities have not been grasping the Islamist nettle firmly.
There is a specific difficulty with the latter religion, because taken literally and to extremes it threatens to destroy our separation between Church and State. Theocratic rule - we have had this before, with Christianity - unites believers without reference to territorial limits, and the joys and terrors of the afterlife make any sacrifice or atrocity here well worth while. The easygoing liberal democracy we have enjoyed until recently is, historically speaking, a temporary sunlit clearing in an ancient monster-infested forest.
Fortunately most Muslims in the UK live by their faith’s general rules for daily living without a close reading of all its texts. Nevertheless there are unequivocal statements in those sources that are a kind of underbrush awaiting a firebrand to begin a conflagration. When society is under severe stress - persecution, war, economic breakdown - wild millennial movements can begin, as
Norman Cohn illustrated nearly seventy years ago. This is why
Ayaan Hirsa Ali argues the need for a Reformation in Islam to temper its absolutism and make it compatible with pluralist Western society.
Not all immigrants are Muslims, but
Pew Research has forecast that by 2050 that religion’s followers may constitute up to 17 per cent of the British population. Without a determined national policy to inculcate support for impartial institutions the Labour drive for devolution may result in a proliferation of political, even clannish fiefdoms like those in London and Scotland; ones that may eventually cease to rely on the Labour Party.
Speaking of the latter, marxism is, of course, another uncompromising religion, replacing Heaven with a millennial vision of a stateless society once all opposition has been ruthlessly eliminated. It may have sprung from a sympathy for the suffering of the poor, but it has mutated into the pursuit of a single aim: not human happiness but social equality, whatever the cost.
It is said that when Chairman Mao was told nuclear war would annihilate a third of humanity he replied, ‘Good, then there will be no more classes.’ Modern British socialism has added-in apocalyptic environmentalism so that we now have a Prime Minister who used to be, and maybe still is,
a ‘red-green.’ We are overdue a Reformation of the Left.
There is another, ideology-free consideration: our country is over-populated. Already we import forty per cent of our food (by monetary value, I think; the dietary value may be greater.) The problem will increase: net migration is more than compensating for our declining birth rate, while farmland is being converted to housing, infrastructure, ‘green’ energy and wildlife set-asides. There may come a time in our unstable world, as happened during the Second World War, when the threat of food shortages raises its head. Even postwar we once kept a strategic food stockpile, but
it was scrapped thirty years ago; not that it would have sustained us for long in any case. The British political class does not plan far ahead but reality makes no concessions to lack of preparation.
However, if we choose not to let our population shrink, then we must have a way to sustain it, which will be principally by boosting production to increase import substitution, and by foreign trade. We are in competition with countries whose land and labour are cheaper, or whose massive domestic market and economies of scale allow them to trade surpluses that undercut us. To stand a chance, we have to rebuild high-value engineering capacity, not just cling on to a couple of ageing steelworks. Our energy policy has to abandon its hippie Garden of Eden dreams and use every available fossil fuel resource to keep us going while we develop other, cleaner forms of cheap and reliable power. We cannot wait for
Reform to oust the Energy Secretary in 2029, assuming that it can; we are fighting for our economic survival now.
Emergency funding may be needed. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has damaged the economy and we cannot allow the Treasury to hamstring us. If
Richard J Murphy and
Steve Keen are correct in advocating Modern Monetary Theory, public debt is not the problem;
it is private debt that hobbles the economy. Keen has some credibility: he is one of only twenty (his estimate) professional economists (out of 20,000 worldwide) to have predicted the Great Financial Crisis.
Will Starmer listen? Does he have the nerve for a radical Cabinet reshuffle? Does he have the wit to abandon the Grand Plan that he got Gordon Brown to design for him?One fears his arrogance and ideological rigidity will be his political undoing.
But he may do for us first before he goes.
