Immigration

Thursday

The Spectator

After Rwanda: what will Labour do now?

Keir Starmer is advertising for someone to head his newly created Border Security Command. The salary is higher than his own: the person in charge of stopping the boats would earn between £140,000 and £200,000. According to the ad, the job of patrolling the English Channel can be done remotely from any one of 12 cities, including Edinburgh and Belfast. It will require coordination with the Home Office, parts of the navy and even MI5. Never mind that this goes on already, with no discernible effect. The key requirement for the job, it would seem, is to be the fall guy, someone ready to take the blame for a policy

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Don’t bother calling the doctor 

‘If you are calling about sinusitis, sore throat, earache in children, infected inset bite from the UK not overseas, impetigo, shingles, or female-only uncomplicated water infections, speak to your local pharmacist.’ That is how my parents’ GP surgery now answers the phone. A recorded message telling you to go away for almost every illness you might have is read out by a very stern male voice, unnecessarily loudly. He first tells you to dial 999 for life-threatening emergencies, or 111 for anything less serious, leaving you to decide which is which. Then he tells you there are no appointments even if you wait for an answer because so many of

Tuesday

Victor Sebestyen

The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later. The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was

Tuesday

Agnès Poirier

If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad

A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and how little it seems to permeate the national consciousness. This blindness – or the British inability to realise how they appear to others, as opposed to the image they have of themselves – often has foreign correspondents pulling their hair in disbelief. If only Britain knew how it was seen! One senses that Peel’s return

Thursday

Melissa Kite

No one knows how to sell the European project to the Irish any more

A few days after having Sunday lunch at the hotel where Michael Collins ate his last meal, we found ourselves on the road to Beal na Bla. We had gone to get hay and the hayman was out to lunch, so we followed the heritage signs to the site of the ambush where Collins was shot dead. The events of 22 August 1922 immortalised this picturesque valley in West Cork near to where the builder boyfriend and I have bought an old country house. Beal na Bla, or Blath, translates as ‘entrance to the good land’. The memorial by the curve in the road where Collins was murdered is surrounded

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Why are the Tories playing Farage’s game?

How should Rishi Sunak respond to the unwelcome insertion of Nigel Farage into the election campaign? The Prime Minister called the election for 4 July in part because he hoped it would wrong-foot Reform, but that hasn’t worked, with Farage electrifying the challenger party and near-electrocuting many Tory MPs who were already terrified of losing their seats.  The response from the centre has been to move even further into Reform’s territory. Home Secretary James Cleverly was out and about this morning talking about immigration, and dropping hints that the Conservatives could make leaving the European Convention on Human Rights a manifesto commitment. Asked about it, Cleverly said: ‘The point that

Thursday

The Spectator

How many countries have conscription?

Halfway points Rishi Sunak told us we would have an election in the second half of the year, and we will have one on 4 July. When, exactly, is the halfway point of 2024? – There are 366 days in 2024, so we will be halfway through after 183 of them. That brings us to midnight at the end of 1 July, a day later than many might assume. – However, there is also the effect of daylight saving, which takes a hour away from March and puts it in October, shifting the halfway point of the year forwards by an hour to 1 a.m. on 2 July. Only two days of

Piers Morgan

Why won’t Rishi honour our £1,000 bet?

When I interviewed Rishi Sunak in February, I told him I thought his Rwanda plan for ‘stopping the boats’ was an expensive, unworkable dud and offered him a £1,000 bet to be paid to a refugee charity that he wouldn’t get any asylum-seeker planes taking off before the next general election. To my surprise, the Prime Minister clutched my outstretched hand and accepted the wager, sparking considerable revulsion. As the HBO comedian John Oliver put it: ‘Set aside the grossness on display here, imagine what a monster you have to be to put me in a position of genuinely wanting Piers Morgan to win something?’ Now Sunak has admitted no

Wednesday

James Heale

Visa figures fall again – but is it enough?

It’s a big day for stats in British politics. Following the news that inflation has dropped to 2.3 per cent, the Home Office has this morning published its latest figures for visa applications. They reveal a 25 per cent fall across all visa routes in the first four months of 2024, following the package of changes that the Home Secretary announced in December 2023. The most significant drop was in student dependant numbers, which fell by 79 per cent.  This big fall is one of the reasons why Home Secretary James Cleverly is reluctant to clamp down even further on the graduate visa route. Last week’s report by the Migration

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

British families deserve a tax break

I am delighted to report that some £800,000 of taxpayers’ money is to be spent ‘remediating’ the works of Robert Louis Stevenson to show what a racist bastard he was. 70 per cent of Irish mums say they would stay at home to look after their kids if given the opportunity I assume the decision was taken because, as a nation, we are absolutely awash with cash at the moment and need somewhere to dispense of it. This project, funded by the quango UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will be carried out at Edinburgh University. I hope that, aside from clobbering Stevenson for having been born during a different time

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Beware pathological niceness

When so many polls suggest that restricting mass immigration would be to politicians’ electoral advantage, voters in the West are continually stymied by why the immoderate flow of foreigners into their countries continues apace. Online comments abound with theories. Biden could lose the coming election because of his lovey-dovey border policies alone A global World Economic Forum-led cabal is intent on eliminating the nation state by fracturing polities into mutually hostile subgroups, making them easier to control. (An atomised in-fighting rabble would seem rather harder to control, but maybe that’s just me.) In the US, Democrats are intentionally importing minorities who will supposedly all vote Democratic and usher in a

Thursday

The Spectator

Who’s afraid of population growth?

In ten years’ time, there’s a good chance that the main concern in the western world will be the threat of population collapse. Fertility rates are falling everywhere and no government has found a way of reversing the trend. Plenty have tried. South Korea has so far spent $200 billion on tax breaks and lowering childcare costs and has succeeded only in beating its own record for the world’s lowest birth rate, year after year. In Italy, the situation is close to a crisis, and in France it’s not much better. If this continues, the welfare state model, which depends on a decent worker-to-pensioner ratio, will collapse. There will not

Tuesday

Stuart Jeffries

Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?

In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about ‘how you would feel in such a situation’. Even if, like me, your childhood was spent crying over lost games of Monopoly, nothing could quite prepare you for the cheerless experience of playing ‘Flight and Expulsion Across the World’. It’s unlikely an updated version has been commissioned for our home secretary, with players assigned counters representing the

Saturday

James Heale

Do the Tories have a death wish?

13 min listen

Nick Robinson asked Suella Braverman on the Today programme this week whether the Tories had a death wish. She said no. But why is the party, when it’s doing so badly in the polls, fighting among itself? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls ands Craig Oliver, former director of communications in No. 10.

Thursday

William Moore

Carbon capture: how China cornered the green market

30 min listen

On the podcast: In her cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator’s assistant editor Cindy Yu – writing ahead of the COP28 summit this weekend – describes how China has cornered the renewables market. She joins the podcast alongside Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter for Bloomberg and author of Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, to investigate China’s green agenda. (01:22) Also this week: Margaret Mitchell writes in The Spectator about the uncertainty she is facing around her graduate visa. This is after last week’s statistics from the ONS showed that net migration remains unsustainably high, leaving the government under pressure to curb legal migration. Margaret joins the podcast with Michael Simmons, The Spectator’s data editor. (13:07)

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

Has Robert Jenrick gone rogue?

12 min listen

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, long thought of as one of Rishi Sunak’s closest allies in Parliament, hinted yesterday at a row with the Prime Minister. He had a plan to reduce immigration ready ‘last Christmas’, he said. Why didn’t Sunak take it anywhere? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Paul Goodman.

Wednesday

David Sexton

Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, reviewed

Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’. Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said

Wednesday

Caroline Moorehead

The misery of the Kindertransport children

On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to the UK.  The Kindertransport – the word refers both to the means of transport and to the overarching programme – has always been regarded as a symbol of British generosity towards those in peril and seeking asylum. But it was all rather more complicated, as Andrea Hammel sets out to show. There have been innumerable

Wednesday

The Spectator

Are whole life orders becoming more common?

Bank on it Does the August bank holiday actually celebrate anything? – When bank holidays were first established in 1871, the August bank holiday fell at the beginning of the month, allegedly because it was an important week for cricket in Yorkshire, the home county of MP Sir John Lubbock, who introduced the parliamentary act creating bank holidays. – It was moved to the Monday after the last Saturday in August as an experiment in 1965, largely because early August coincided with the annual factory closure, and many workers were on holiday then anyway. – In 1968 and 1969 the holiday fell in September, so in 1971 it was fixed

Wednesday

The Spectator

In defence of e-bikes

Identity politics Sir: Your lead article (‘On board’, 12 August) highlights numerous issues related to refugees, but does not offer much in regard to why this country is a magnet for economic migrants. You state that this is a rich country. How can this be the case when government debt is 100 per cent of GDP? Further, when we cannot provide adequate services in healthcare, education and housing, why should we take in migrants who cannot make an immediate contribution to the country’s tax base? The reasons that this country is so attractive are, firstly, the English language, which we can’t do much about. Secondly, we have an easily accessible