Chris

The internationalist Left’s chickens are coming home to roost. The whole point of an immigration policy that excludes people who came here legally is to address the claim that many of them should not have been allowed to come here legally in the first place. It is a deliberate unpicking of prior policy, rather than simply accepting the ratchet effect of being unable to undo something which should arguably never have been allowed.

Personally I think there should be more effort to create voluntary resettlement schemes before going in hard in the way this act would. And I’m generally not a fan of enabling clauses that give secretaries of state too much leeway to vary the rules. However, I find some parts of this country unrecognisable any more and I don’t accept that it is racist to object to rapid social change, well within the span of a generation, in order to facilitate people to whom we have no legal or moral obligation. We are not the world’s health and social care system.

When mainstream politicians start to advocate for moves like this, it is only ever because they have begun to detect this is what their voters want. We do still live in a democracy and it should not be anathema in a democracy to propose doing what voters are asking for. As has been observed on this forum on and off over many years, the previous Labour administration is known to have operated an immigration policy designed to ‘rub the Right’s noses in it’. Nobody has sought to address the long-term consequences of such cack-handed social engineering since then, and here we are reaping them now in the policy proposals of a major UK political party.