You know you’re old when the rogue hair you have to pluck from somewhere every day has gone white. And you know you’re REALLY old when you hear a politician say they have a solution to ‘the immigration problem’.
If there is one story that has become endemic to the summer months, along with heatwaves and pictures of cats taken from a long way away in the area of Bodmin Moor, it is that prime ministers, Fleet Street photographers, and Nigel Farage will all turn their attention to the boats of asylum seekers that hove into view on the calm and inviting English Channel.
They don’t tend to go down there when it’s raining, in the same way that Gregg Wallace isn’t quite so autistic when it’s cold, or the cameras are running. And Prime Ministers never let themselves get in the same shot as a Border Force cutter hauling 74 non-swimmers aboard.
Instead Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted a joint press conference to announce a new crackdown that would break the business model of the people smugglers, by sending back around 6% of their customers. Note to world leaders: knocking 6% off GDP is a big issue. Knocking 6% off an industry turning over £129m is, pardon the pun, a drop in the ocean.
Never mind that Nigel will go and point at migrants on camera, weather-permitting, until the day it becomes his problem and he’ll suddenly be allergic to the seaside. Never mind that those 50 poor souls a week will be locked up and sent to France, to try and drown again some other day. What matters is the show – the art of looking like you’re doing something.
Nigel looks like he’s got power, when he has merely borrowed a microphone. Starmer and Macron look like grown-ups, when they both know the EU will probably veto it and send them to bed without supper. And the Tories can shout about Rwanda, and lax borders, because that’s worked so well for them in the past, hasn’t it.
I am now so old I can remember 9 Home Secretaries ago, when Theresa May was sending out ‘Go Home’ vans and David Cameron was talking of ‘swarms’. Then, the journalists were camped out along the Eurostar tracks, capturing nighttime images of migrants cutting the wires and ducking into the Channel Tunnel. You may recall the extra 60ft-high fencing, the lorry checks, the way that migrants could be easily spotted when they popped above ground in Folkestone.
I am also old enough to remember how Cameron and May were told, if they blocked off that route, which didn’t involve swimming, and did include two easily-patrolled points of entry and exit, the smugglers would simply move to boats, which would lead to drowning, entire stretches of unpatrollable coastline, and a massive profit increase for the criminal masterminds.
We are where we are not because of the implacable slyness of smugglers but through the genius-level moves of our own politicians, who have never once told the truth about immigration to the British public on the grounds that there are a lot more votes in performing crypto-racist backflips for the evening news.
If Starmer really wanted to break the model of the people smugglers, he has to let people in for free. If Macron really wanted to crack down on crime, he’d slash every boat when it was still on land. And if the people smugglers were really that brilliant, they’d just start donating to political parties, because there is clearly a mutually-beneficial relationship between them already.
More migrants in, more crackdowns, more votes. Rinse and repeat, just like speeches given by politicians about perfidious foreigners since Enoch Powell, Winston Churchill, Admiral Lord Nelson, Henrys 1 through 8, and Alfred the flippin’ Great. Not a single one of them has uttered the truth about immigration in the UK, not for centuries.
1. We’re an island. Everyone’s a migrant. Almost everyone who’s ever been here came on a boat, apart from the Neanderthals who walked across a million years ago, along with the badgers and some rhino. The Saxons weren’t indigenous, the Celts weren’t indigenous, and if you’re stood on British soil reading this then nor, my friend, are you.
2. They’re not coming for the benefits, for asylum seekers get next to nowt. They could earn more and have better lives if they agreed to the unrelenting misery and abuse of mandatory military service in a failed state. They would rather not, for the same reasons every other wave of humans has broken upon our shores.: it’s nicer here than there.
3. ‘There’ has crop failures, desertification, conflicts so vicious and brutal it makes a Labour Party split look like two over-privileged prats arguing about which massage parlour to attend. You can slash boats, detain migrants, smash gangs, and ‘there’ will still be worse than ‘here’, especially in the eyes of people who live ‘there’.
If you want to end the movement of humans from one place to another, you need to chop off their legs, then smash their wheelchairs, and finally bury them six feet deep in concrete. They will still move, but only by way of continental drift, soil erosion, and plate tectonics, so they will have slowed down considerably. If brutality and murder aren’t your bag – and in these geopolitical times it is increasingly hard to say they’re not an option – then the only thing that will work is making ‘there’ as nice as ‘here’.
You could tackle climate change. You could support international democracy. You could set an example of not electing performative crapsters who will lie in return for your vote, in order to do a job that is impossible and they clearly mostly hate, aside from the Arsenal tickets and other add-ons. Or, you could just shout and point at boats, and see which one actually works.
Immigration is a constant. The reason for it is constant, whether you are Early Man looking for dinner in a place that isn’t frozen or burning, a Norman knight looking for a castle to call your own, or a “fighting-age” Sudanese who can speak English and would rather be working for Uber Eats than the world’s most horrific military. And our response to it is just as constant – unending, asinine, unproductive prattery.
That’s your real immigration problem. And it’s also why they keep pointing out to sea, and saying the problem’s over there.