On Sunday morning I awoke to the disturbing news that two knife-wielding men had stabbed ten passengers on a train near a town called Huntingdon, about an hour north of London. At the time of the report there was little that was clear – this was a developing story. Most of the wounded had life-threatening injuries.
As I started this column, no more information than that was publicly known. By the time this is published, further details will be clear. Let me record here, before the facts come to light, that most online commentators I read had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the perpetrators were immigrants. Is this unfair? Yes. Crimes committed by people born outside the UK appear to be roughly in line with their share of the population (about 16%).
But this is also true: the percentage of foreign-born residents in the UK has doubled over the past 25 years. While many people use “immigrants” as a proxy for “Muslim immigrants”, this is not accurate – immigrants come from many different cultures, including a large non-Muslim cohort from East Asia and China. Why mention religion at all? Because it is a fault line of cultural politics, and the one that most often rises to the top of the angry debate.
The question of “who should be allowed to be British” is front and centre, and it needs to be discussed.
There’s something distinctly British about the way the nation has turned immigration policy into its most spectacular political pile-up since the Brexit referendum – which, it bears mentioning, was itself largely about immigration. Britain has elevated the debate to an art form of mutual incomprehension, where both sides speak passionately past each other in increasingly shrill tones.
The Conservative Party spent fourteen years attempting an elaborate political magic trick: promising to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands” while presiding over net migration figures that peaked at 745,000 in 2022. Their response involved a greatest-hits album of policy initiatives – the Rwanda deportation scheme, points-based systems, and hostile-environment policies – each greeted with a roughly equal mix of outrage from the left and scepticism from immigration restrictionists who noted that the numbers kept rising regardless.
Welcoming and vigilant
Meanwhile, the current Labour government tries to sound simultaneously welcoming and vigilant. Keir Starmer and his team insist that Britain remains “open, but not naïve”, committed to both humanitarian duty and border control. Having spent years opposing Conservative immigration policies on moral grounds, they discovered upon taking office that saying “we’ll be nicer about it” is not quite the vote-winner they had hoped. Starmer has spoken about “smashing the gangs” facilitating Channel crossings while carefully avoiding specific numbers on how many migrants Britain should accept – a political tightrope that satisfies almost no one.
And then there’s the other right flank – Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. Its proposals – a Trump-like cocktail of mass deportations and an immigration “freeze” – are politically potent precisely because they are breathtakingly unrealistic. They appeal to the feeling, shared by many, that the country is simply “full up”. This sentiment ignores the labour shortages often filled by immigrants (the NHS being the prime example, which would collapse without its foreign-born workforce) and an ageing population, but it scores magnificently in the court of public outrage – something it shares with MAGA politics.
Reform’s polling numbers suggest that calling everyone who worries about immigration racist has not been the rhetorical knockout blow its practitioners assumed. Many Britons expressing concern aren’t frothing xenophobes but people watching their communities change rapidly without being consulted.
So while it may be easy to satirise the anti-immigration position, one must, with an empathetic nod, acknowledge the anxiety from which it stems. For the average Briton, particularly those feeling the squeeze, the influx of newcomers is not an abstract discussion about labour availability or diversity. It’s the longer queue at the GP, the local school bursting at the seams, and a housing market seemingly designed to punish their offspring. Asking whether this is sustainable isn’t bigotry – it’s arithmetic.
Many feel ignored
It’s a primal fear that your community, your small patch of “Britishness” (whatever that means today), is changing too fast, without your permission, and seemingly without end. Many feel ignored by a metropolitan elite who see immigration as a cultural enrichment, while they feel it as a public-services strain. It’s not always malice; sometimes it’s simply the exhausted sigh of someone convinced they’ve been landed with the bill for everyone else’s progressive ideals.
As in the US and some EU countries, there seems to be no safe centre in this debate – the press and social media prefer to capture eyeballs with crude proxies such as right-tilted “invasion” and left-tilted “fascists”. In the UK this debate has a particularly sharp odour, perhaps as a reaction to the country’s polite and well-mannered past – but that part of Britain has long been gone, if it ever existed at all.
A recent article by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough goes as far as to suggest that Britain is heading towards civil war on this matter, and nails it succinctly here:
“But the quarrel runs deeper. It is not simply cultural, or even political, but existential – a struggle over who constitutes the nation at all: two political tribes each convinced that the other’s triumph means its own extinction. One side clings to a sense of belonging; the other seeks absolution in belonging nowhere.”
Where does this leave us?
Honesty
Britain’s immigration debate needs what it most lacks: honesty. Politicians should admit that controlling immigration while maintaining economic growth and functioning public services is difficult.
Immigration sceptics should acknowledge that zero immigration isn’t feasible or desirable. Pro-immigration advocates should accept that unlimited immigration has costs, particularly for those without the economic cushion to absorb them.
Instead, we get performative cruelty from the right and performative compassion from the left, while the actual humans involved – both migrants and receiving communities – suffer the consequences of political cowardice dressed up as principle.
[Image: reve.art]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend