You know how it is. You get on the 87 at the Vauxhall depot and you suddenly realise you know no one on the bus. Time was when everyone in the queue would have been best mates. Off for pie, mash and jellied eels together before a knees-up down the Old Bull and Bush. Worse still, some people may not even be talking English. We didn’t beat the Hun in two world wars to hear German spoken on public transport.
Then there are all those Polish supermarkets. Who asked them to come over here, pay their taxes and business rates and set up on the high street? They don’t even have the grace to relabel their produce in English. And why can’t they sell something quintessentially British? Like Lurpak. What do you mean, that’s Danish? Butter was invented by the Brits.
Truly, we have become an“island of strangers”. There are days when I walk out of my front door and have no idea where I am. Everything has become foreign. Must be the palm trees I planted in my front garden. It can only be days before the thought police come round to have them removed. The same people that were happy to let Keir Starmer echo Enoch Powell’s “strangers in their own country” line from his “rivers of blood” speech at his Monday press conference. Or maybe No 10 is just a bit clueless and hadn’t made the link.
This was the great immigration reset. Labour’s chance to channel the national mood that we are all fed up with foreigners. Hell, even foreigners have got fed up with foreigners these days. Here in the UK there are definitely hierarchies of foreigners. There are good foreigners and bad foreigners. But if in doubt, just assume the foreigners are bad. It saves time.
Keir wanted you to know that Keir has also had his fill of foreigners. Enough is enough. His patience has been tested to the limit. Time to call a halt to the “squalid experiment in open borders”. A charming way of referring to people who had come to this country to work in the NHS and the care sector. But hey, it was time for Keir to deliver some home truths. He could be silent no more.
Some might have thought it quite the coincidence that Labour was choosing this moment to target immigration. Little more than a week afterReform had cleaned up at the local elections. But Keir wanted you to know that Keir had always had it in for foreigners. He wasn’t the sort of prime minister who would play politics with other people’s lives. No. He had always believed this stuff. At least he had believed it for the past three years or so. There was nothing more Labour than targeting immigrants.
“It’s time to take back control,” he began. Something he went on to frequently repeat. A phrase that had also been borrowed from the Conservatives and Reform. The difference was that Keir insisted he meant it. The Tories had lied through their teeth. Promising to reduce immigration while letting it quadruple in the four years between 2019 and 2023. Keir was going to cut immigration by … a lot.He couldn’t say how much exactly. Setting targets was to fall into the foreigners’ hands. By the end of the parliament you would notice the difference. More white faces everywhere. Even if they were strangers.
Not that this was about prejudice. Heaven forbid. It was about fairness.Keir liked diversity, he stressed. It was just that you could have too much of a good thing. Thing was with foreigners, if you did them a favour then sooner or later they would start taking the piss. It’s about time migrants started talking English. That way anyone hearing a foreigner moaning about life in Britain could be reported to the authorities.
Then to the details. The great Treasury experiment in using mass immigration to fuel economic growth had been disproved, Starmer insisted. The Tories had tried that and the economy had flatlined. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Keir that the economy might have been in an even worse state without the immigrants. But there is no place for those kind of awkward counterfactuals in Labour’s brave new world. That was one of the benefits of having fewer foreigners. We could go back to having good old British truths. Truths that Brits liked to tell themselves. Truths that weren’t contaminated by awkward foreigner facts.
Time also for a major shake-up of the care sector. Keir had also had enough of foreigners come over here to do the jobs looking after our elderly men and women that no Brits were prepared to do. Far better to close the care homes and let the old people die in the street. Because that’s what the aged and those with dementia would have wanted. Pure Brits to the very last. Same with our hospitals. Better understaffed than fully staffed with the wrong people.
And if all this didn’t have the desired effect? “If we need to do more, then mark my words, we will,” Starmer said. That was more like it. Here was an immigration policy to get behind. A prime minister who really meant business.
None of this was enough to satisfy Kemi Badenoch. She immediately tweeted that she would have been a lot nastier to immigrants. Conveniently forgetting that she never got round to it while she had the chance in government. But give her another chance and just watch her go. No foreigner would be able to sleep easy in their sleep. Give her a chance and she might even deport herself.
As for Nigel Farage, he was just a bit blase. This was all the stuff he had been saying for years. Finally, the Tories and Labour were coming round to his thinking. But, ever the opportunist, he used the occasion to muddy the waters. Most Reform voters think illegal immigration makes up half the national figures. Nige wasn’t about to disabuse them. The small boats were full of Iranian terrorists, he said. The race to the bottom is on.