Britain’s growing “migrant” crisis
It’s interesting how there are harmonic resonances in much of the Western world for problems concerning illegal aliens (called “migrants” by the left) and those who ask for asylum and are not true asylum seekers. In the US – for now, with Trump as president – the situation has gotten better in terms of new arrivals, although those who are already here remain here for the most part. In Eastern Europe, many of the leaders have taken a hard line. But in most of Western Europe the opposite is true.
In Britain, Keir Starmer can thank the fact that the Tories were no better on this than the left has been; that failure of the right is what was mainly responsible for his own election as Prime Minister. It’s a poor solution to the problem – in fact, it’s no solution at all – but it’s understandable that frustrated voters didn’t want to reward the right for doing nothing constructive. However, as could easily have been predicted, rewarding the left turns out to have been a very bad idea.
Brendan O’Neill of Spiked explains in the following video what’s been happening lately. The entire video is of interest, but I’ve cued up a small section of about two minutes that deals with just this issue:
Here’s an article describing those recent protest demonstrations in Britain over this issue. Although it’s from the leftist BBC, its content is more fair than one might expect. An excerpt:
Lorraine Cavanagh, who works for charities on the Isle of Dogs, echoes the concerns in Epping. “I don’t know who they are.
“They are unidentified men who can walk around and do what they want to do with no consequences,” she says.
That comment, “I don’t know who they are”, lies at the heart of the opposition to asylum seekers in these communities.
It can be very hard to establish basic facts about the young men in the hotels, the system that put them there, or the impact they might have on locals. …
We know how many hotel places are being used in each region – the vast majority are in the south of England. They cost £5.77m a day for the government to provide. The estimated cost over the decade to 2029 has spiralled from £4.5bn in 2019 to £15.3bn.
But there are no specific figures for the age and sex of hotel occupants, no details about their countries of origin, or their claim for sanctuary in the UK.
I have little doubt that these statistics could be compiled – at least, based on what the “migrants” say – and I assume it’s no accident that such figures are not available.
I had a related “argument” with a good friend some years ago. Can an undocumented immigrant commit a moderately serious “non-violent” crime in the US, get stopped by the police; and then, if he/she has no ID, get released?
We happened to be at an event with a few cops casually walking around, so we asked them. Yes, if they have no ID, how do you book them properly? They can fingerprint them, but they made it sound like that was a futile gesture (I disagree. Please fingerprint them!) They said they can put them in county jail for some days, which does happen on occasion, but generally not. They just let them go.
The “refugees” are only 1/3 of the story though. The hotels are not turning down the government checks. The refugees are not writing the checks. Cronyism has much to do with this story. It’s the same in the US. Connected people benefit from these policies, they have to exposed and dealt with or it won’t stop.
Power, power, power
Labor has a majority in the UK Parliament not because they swept up unhappy Tory voters, but because the Conservatives and Reform split the vote. Similar to Clinton’s 43% Presidency in 92. Not like in France where the opposition agreed which single candidate would oppose National Rally. Labor’s support actually declined compared to the prior national election.
jvermeer51:
But people voted for Reform instead of the Tories because they were fed up with the latter. They didn’t care that it would result in a victory for the left.
@neo:They didn’t care that it would result in a victory for the left.
This is why it is so crucial to hold the right accountable, otherwise you get opposition theater and the progressive ratchet. At any rate, under their system they are not stuck with Labor government for two or four or six years, it could fold tomorrow for all you know.
But with Labour’s huge majority it will be very difficult to bring them down before the next scheduled election.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
That’s the British government on the Muslim invasion.
They will be under them or start a civil war, there is no other option.
@FOAF:But with Labour’s huge majority it will be very difficult to bring them down before the next scheduled election.
If there’s no issue that causes them to turn against one another, maybe. A big scandal uncovered, some really unpopular action, lots of things can happen. They’re not tied to scheduled election dates.
At any rate, the logic of “let’s never vote against blue because red will take over”, that’s just the “plantation” that the Democrats run for their voters here. In the US it’s not necessary to give the Dems a majority in order to hold the GOP accountable, you just need to target the most egregious of the GOP; a few examples will encourage the others. The UK has a much stronger party system and so it’s very hard to punish one without giving another a majority.
European countries are now paying the price for the Imperialism of previous generations. They apparently feel a moral obligation if not a legal one, to accept citizens of their former colonies. Welcome to the UK all you Pakistanis. Of course in France, at least, it is a legal obligation that was taken carelessly.
If I may dare to speak an unspeakable truth, the United States is now paying the price for slavery.
When you sow the seeds for an underclass, bitter fruit is not surprising.
Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad posted a video on this topic a couple months ago in which he pointed out that the 15.3 billion pounds spent annually on putting migrants in hotels is twice the amount of Britain’s defense budget.
Which says a great deal about the priorities of Britain’s current ruling regime.
Oldflyer at 5:55 pm…
Bullpucky. Responsibility for the actions of prior generations is the factually dishonest meme that the left has been pushing for generations. Academia and the media has long promoted the biggest pack of lies ever conceived. Colonialism was a net positive for the colonized. Whites occupied lands from the then current native American tribes that they had stolen from the prior tribes occupying the land. Who had stolen the land from the tribes before them. More than any other tribe, the Cherokee practiced slavery. West African Blacks enslaved and sold into slavery millions of their black ‘brothers and sisters’. “Approximately 12.5 million people were captured and forced onto ships during the Atlantic slave trade, but about 10.7 million arrived in the Americas”
The Arabs hold the distinction of enslaving far more black and white people than the rest of the world combined. Britain ended the Atlantic slave trade at considerable cost in treasure.
Rick67 I certainly don’t disagree that Britain is grossly mishandling the migrant crisis but I suspect that figure for Britain’s defense budget – less than 8 billion pounds equipment to about 11 billion dollars – is far off. That would be barely more than 1% of the US defense budget and while Europe is bad on defense spending they aren’t that bad. The figures I found were about 10x that, still less than half the US per capita.
equivalent, not equipment
FOAF: Thanks for the reply. I did a quick search and found the UK defense budget for 2025 is 53.9 billion. I need to watch that part of Benjamin’s video and see if I misunderstood.
The only way the Labor government can fall is if the Labor party chooses to fall.
The king can’t dismiss the government any longer, and Labor doesn’t need anyone else to prevent a vote of no confidence. Otherwise they don’t need to schedule elections until mid 2029.
The only question is, will Advance, Reform, and/or the Tories trip each other up enough to give Labor another minority-majority in Parliament.
— neo
That’s because all the Western countries are governed, or until recently have been, by a single transnational ruling class and disdains their own peoples and wants ‘one world’. The details vary locally but in every case it’s an alliance of corporate interests that want to import customers and keep wages low, and social liberal types who want to replace Western Christendom with John Lennon’s Imagine, more or less.
Obviously that way oversimplifies, but it’s true in essence. In almost every case, it took the form of a right-wing party that embodied corporate interests (the GOP in America, Tories in the UK, Christian Democrats in Germany, etc.) and a left-wing party that embodied the John Lennon fantasy (Dems in America, Labour in the UK, SPD in Germany, etc.)
Voters thus had a choice between open-borders globalists and open-borders globalists. That’s why more and more Americans started talking about ‘the uniparty’ over the course of the 20teens. On paper they hated each other, in practice both parties represented educated upper class opinion and they shared most goals, they justed wanted to adjust the dials a little differently. Same deal in the UK.
In America, the logjam began to break in 2016 with Trump and his out-of-nowhere victory. But the price of breaking that logjam was partly the rejection of Romney in 2012.
In the UK Brexit passed in 2016…and the Wet Tories in concert with Labour immediately started desperately trying to make it go away. The uniparty hated it, but ended up being unable to stop it.
All over the West right now, that transnational uniparty is fighting for its power and status and influence and control. In America it takes the form of lawfare, in Germany attempts to outlaw the biggest ‘outsider’ party, the AfD.
The usual result of a big win by an outsider party in a parliamentary state is that the local uniparty parties come together in a ‘grand coalition’ to sustain the status quo. In the UK Starmer and Labour are continuing former Tory policies that more or less criminalize public dissent.
(If Farage and Co. somehow manage to come in first in the next UK election, I look for the Tories and Labour to try something like that, unless the majority is just too big to challenge.)
It’s a dangerous situation.
The only way the Labor government can fall is if the Labor party chooses to fall.
The king can’t dismiss the government any longer, and Labor doesn’t need anyone else to prevent a vote of no confidence. Otherwise they don’t need to schedule elections until mid 2029.
The only question is, will Advance, Reform, and/or the Tories trip each other up enough to give Labor another minority-majority in Parliament.
In theory Labour can hang on until 2029. Heck, in theory they could postpone that election indefinitely, for that matter, with their majority.
In practice it’s more complicated. There are deep divisions just under the surface of Labour, and the policy actions necessary to secure the majority after the next election exacerbate them. If public discontent become strong enough, there will end up being an early election.
J.D. Vance is over there right now prepping the battlefield for the US conquering of Great Britain coming in 2027. It’ll be a gas propping up the doddering old monarchy, setting the poor spluttering thing back on her feet.
People that chase power have a peculiar blindness!