Let's Talk About Immigration

Even if we really don't want to.

So it’s come to this. Let’s talk about Britain’s immigration problem.

Bringing up illegal immgration is like bringing your 15 year old niece to the BBC. It never goes well, and someone’s getting fired.

My country has a funny attitude to immigration. We treat it the way we treat sport; no one knows the rules, everyone’s a commentator, and the referee (aka the Home Office) hasn’t given a fuck since 2009. We invented it, we’re terrible at it, and we’re getting absolutely humiliated by the French.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

The UK has seen around 40,000 - 50,000 people arriving on our shores by small boat. Annually. Sounds high, doesn’t it? To quote the the Adam Smith Institute, it’s a metric fuckton. That’s a town the size of Stevenage arriving on British shores every year. Enough’s enough. We’ve got a Stevenage. That’s already too many.

The asylum accommodation system alone has been estimated at around £4 million per day at peak pressure points. That’s £28 million a week, £1.4 billion a year, and, over the decade, more than £15 billion.

And who’s it being spent on? Most of these people who come here don’t speak the language or “appreciate” the culture. Yet, somehow, they’ve figured out the benefits system faster than you can say “I can’t work, I’ve got ADHD.”

(Then again, half of Liverpool doesn’t speak the language either, and we still let them vote.
For now.)

And once they’re here, they don’t just spawn into the system as Uber Eats drivers. Before they can start a career of hurtling the wrong way down Tottenham Court Road on a Lime bike with a box of Wagamamas, there’s paperwork.

First, they must enter ‘the process’. A labyrinth of paid-for accomodation, legal appeals, healthcare access, room service and smart phones.

It’s system designed to keep theme where they are. It’s no accident; delay is the business model. The system doesn’t have a backlog. The backlog has a system. Today, over 100,000 claims are sat waiting for review. They just don’t have the resources. In the meantime, some Albanian bloke is getting a tax-funded chippy tea in a Travelodge. No wonder the nation’s group chats are switching from memes to manifestos.

Britain can no longer manufacture cars, ships, or steel. But by God, we can put together a nice bill.

Still, at least they’re trying. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been sent to fund French patrols, surveillance, and deterrence measures. It’s like paying your neighbour to stop his cat from shitting in your garden, while the neighbour just uses the money to buy the cat more expensive tuna.

Rwanda? Too mean. Stopping the boats? Too effective. Best we can do is pay the French and virtue signal while the dinghies keep coming. Peak British governing. We’ve spent £600 million stopping it… and it’s gotten worse. £600 million. We’re the only country that would spend half a billion pounds on a fence and then leave the gate open because we didn’t want to seem ‘confrontational’.

You could have built actual processing centres. You could have built a wall. You could have built a navy. You could have built a human catapult for goodness sake.

Not that we should need to. We’re an island! In any strategy game, that’s a cheat code. This is very conspicuous geography. It isn’t some porous land border in Europe where you drift across by mistake on an ill-planned ski run.

The powers that be will tell you the country isn’t being replaced. They’re right - it isn’t. It’s being expanded. Like a loft conversion no one asked for, paid for with a credit card no one’s reading the statements on.

Why is it that when Trump tries to buy Greenland, Zack Polanski shrieks “Greenland Is For Greenlanders,” but the moment we suggest ‘Britain for the British,’ it’s called xenophobia? Funny how ‘nativism’ is a human right everywhere except at home.
Greenlanders: noble custodians of their ancestral land. The British: weird little gammons who need to be re-educated. ‘Protect the Local Culture’ is progressive everywhere on Earth except the bit of Earth I’m standing on.

Still, would hate to be rude. There’s nothing less British than that.

My new book - (Un)educated: My Life As A Teacher - is available for pre-order now!