The politics of illegal migration in Britain

By R.W. Johnson

Robert Jenrick, the Tory party’s No.2, angrily supported the protests against illegal immigrants being housed at The Bell Hotel in Epping Forest, Essex. Trouble had arisen over the fact that the migrants were ogling the girls coming out of a local school and that one of them had attempted to kiss a 14-year-old girl. In Britain this is a hot button issue thanks to the scandal of the “grooming gangs” of migrants who have raped and sometimes tortured local British girls.

Jenrick said that he would not be happy if any of his three daughters were growing up in the same neighbourhood as “migrants from backward countries” who belong to a very different culture, who “will never integrate” with the local British, and “about whom we know almost nothing”.

This is only one of many angry statements about the “invasion” of illegal migrants. Communities all over Britain have rallied in numbers in defence of “our local women and girls”, claiming that some of the migrants have assaulted girls as young as eight. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform, which is currently topping the polls, has also talked about migrants coming from “countries where women aren’t even second class citizens”.

Meanwhile, protests have occurred throughout Britain outside hotels where illegal migrants are housed, much to the ire of locals who face a housing crisis. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has come under enormous pressure with two former Labour Home Secretaries joining with many others in insisting that Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR), which ties the government’s hands in how it may deal with illegal migrants. Indeed, there is widespread indignation that the courts, invoking that convention, have upheld the rights of illegal migrants over and against the rights of local residents.

Starmer has just returned from a European holiday to find Labour at 18% in the polls with Reform on 34% and all the headlines echoing Farage’s demand that illegal migrants simply be deported. Starmer is, though, a former human rights lawyer and although his back is to the wall he cannot envisage doing away with the ECHR. Instead he insists that “I get it, I absolutely get it. People want the hotels sheltering illegal migrants to be closed down. So do I. I just want to do it as soon as possible and in an orderly fashion.”

In fact Starmer is now paying for having axed the Tories’ scheme for sending illegal migrants to Rwanda. His own alternative, he said, was that he would “smash the smuggling gangs” which transport the migrants to Britain. This sounded good but every government has for many years said just the same and achieved nothing. The fact is that the smuggling gangs are too numerous, too expert and too ruthless for the authorities, hampered as they are by having to observe the law.

Unsurprisingly, Starmer has completely failed to stem the migrant flow which has now reached record proportions. Popular frustration is at boiling point.

However, Starmer does not “get it” when he treats the issue as one about lodging migrants in hotels. And both Jenrick and Farage are also deliberately skirting the issue when they talk about “backward countries”, about “people who refuse to integrate” or “countries where women aren’t even second class citizens”. What the issue is really about is Muslims and a growing popular mood of Islamophobia. Around 75% of the illegal migrants are young men and roughly the same percentage are Muslims – from the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan as well as from West and North Africa. There are, of course, many sophisticated Muslims in Britain, well used to living there without friction and, indeed, with amicable relations with the locals. But many of the migrants are not like that.

Often the young Muslim men who cross the Channel in open boats come from countries where women are treated as mere chattels, where they have to wear concealing clothing and where they are not encouraged to venture out except with their husbands. When such young men come to Britain they find young women strolling around unaccompanied, wearing no face coverings and often sporting miniskirts or tight-fitting clothes.

The men, particularly those from conservative rural environments, tend to regard this as extremely provocative: such girls are seen as loose women, prostitutes or, at the least, easy game. And, of course, the migrants have no idea about British laws or social mores. Overall British society seems extremely tolerant and permissive, so they feel free to act as they wish.

This is, indeed, how the dreadful scandal of the grooming gangs arose. In many Northern towns and cities Pakistani or Bangladeshi gangs would entice teenage girls with sweets, cigarettes or other gifts – this was the grooming process. Then the girls would get raped and often horribly maltreated for the men viewed them both as easy prey but also as contemptible for not behaving in the way a Muslim woman should.

A ‘Refugee Welcome’ demonstration in Leicester, March 2016. Image: Ben Windsor on Flickr.

The situation is complicated by Labour’s dependence on the Muslim vote. In many of these Northern towns the police were aware that to pounce on these male miscreants would be bad for community relations, so far too little was done to protect the girls at risk. But, of course, news of what was happening spread through communities by scandalised word of mouth. At first Labour resisted calls for a national enquiry into the phenomenon but as the clamour grew they had to give in and an inquiry is now being held. Its findings are likely to be dynamite.

As it is, the Palestine issue saw a split in Labour ranks at the last election with a smattering of Muslim pro-Palestinian MPs elected in what were once safe Labour seats. But for the moment there is effectively a conspiracy of silence: nobody wants to face openly the fact that what they are talking about is Muslims. In good part this is because the open appeal to religious prejudice is seen as a backward and old-fashioned trait, a disgrace in a modern liberal society. But all the parties also have at least some Muslim adherents whom they do not wish to offend. And there are already some five million Muslims in Britain – they are a substantial and powerful bloc.

So we are at an intermediate stage where the issue of Muslim immigration is still not talked about with complete frankness. But this situation cannot last. In effect many politicians are still speaking in code, but everyone knows that all the talk about backward attitudes towards women, about a refusal to integrate or about jihadist attitudes is not meant to apply to Hindus, Confucians or Buddhists. And the first reaction of many to a terrorist event is to check whether the culprit had a Muslim name.

This is a problem even for Reform. Many within Reform’s ranks would like to see a frank opposition to any further Muslim immigration, but Farage will not hear of it. His party chairman, Zia Yusuf, is a multi-millionaire Muslim and Farage likes to boast that Reform is blind to differences of race or religion. The issue comes up most sharply with the popular street politician, Tommy Robinson, who is openly anti-Islam. Robinson has many followers within Reform’s ranks but Farage views him as a disgraceful rabble-rouser who would taint Reform in the eyes of respectable folk. Already Reform has split, with Ben Habib leading away the Advance UK fraction which is open about its opposition to “Islamisation”. Elon Musk is among the supporters of Advance UK.

The dilemma is sharpest for Labour, the party most Muslims vote for. The party has gone out of its way to welcome Muslims into its ranks. Sir Sadiq Khan, the Lord Mayor of London, is one such as is Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor. Indeed, Mahmood is now the head of the entire British legal system, leading some to wonder whether she will wish to lobby for Sharia law. Moreover, Khan is thought to have ambitions to lead the Labour party – something which would also pose questions for many. Jeremy Corbyn’s breakaway Left party also features a Muslim as its deputy leader, Zarah Sultana.

Khan is among those who have lobbied for a law against Islamophobia and Starmer has apparently promised to support this. But this could easily become a very difficult issue since Muslims frequently demand not just protection against hate speech but “respect” for the Koran and Muslim symbols more broadly. This is likely to be opposed by proponents of the freedom of speech who point out that currently any amount of mockery or criticism of the Christian churches is tolerated. If the British can all roar with laughter at The Life of Brian, why should Islam be different?

Nobody will blush if you burn a copy of the Bible, but if you burn a Koran some Muslims may try to kill you. This could easily become a difficult question for Starmer: whether to support Muslim demands or the traditional British way of life. Already he is criticised for supporting the rights of illegal migrants against those of British residents, but the same question could be posed over and over again in varying contexts.

Already the Muslim factor has become quite prominent in British politics. It was Jeremy Corbyn’s determination to win Muslim support which led him into the controversy over anti-semitism. He happily associated with what he referred to as “our friends in Hezbollah” and paid little heed when some of his Muslim supporters came out with bitterly anti-Zionist and anti-semitic views. This ended with his expulsion from the Labour Party.

Inevitably, the war in Gaza has inflamed Muslim feelings and many British Jews have complained of feeling threatened by the large and angry pro-Palestinian demonstrations. There has been a steep rise in anti-semitic incidents of all kinds.

There is also the fact that some Muslim clerics preach violent jihadist sermons, leading to demands that they be deported. MI5 is formally charged with monitoring “extremism”, with the government insisting (in order to avoid Muslim accusations of bias) that Right wing extremism is just as much of a threat as jihadism. In fact MI5 admits that over 90% of all extremist plots against public order are those of jihadis, many of them encouraged by Iran. Britain is now thought to be the home of some 40,000 jihadis.

In fact it is inevitable that anti-Muslim feeling will become far more open. This has, after all, already happened in many other parts of Europe where openly anti-Islam movements are common. In France Eric Zemmour, leader of Reconquete, ran a respectable fourth in the last presidential election. Reconquete consciously echoes the Reconquista, the movement to drive the Moors out of Spain in the 15th century, and the modern equivalent is a demand for mass deportations, a demand already prominent in Germany.

Moreover, the Muslim community has a significantly higher birth rate than the rest of Britain so that the number of Muslims is predicted to triple by 2040. This is bound to see a strong push for the Islamisation of more and more areas of British life, a move which is certain to meet popular resistance.

These trends are very threatening for Labour. Like many other European socialist parties Labour is casting glances at the Danish Social Democrats who have taken a hard line against the immigration of foreign migrants. As a result they have retained their working class electorate and remain in power while elsewhere in Europe most socialist parties have virtually collapsed, with their working class voters deserting to the Right. The Danish socialists realised that their initial welcoming of foreign migrants was a slippery slope and that they would end up, like socialist parties elsewhere, a greatly weakened movement supported only by middle class intellectuals and immigrants. So they reversed their position.

In fact, the latest polls suggest that Labour is already far advanced on the road to decline. If Starmer continues to champion the rights of illegal migrants over those of his working class followers – or supports a law against Islamophobia despite strong popular resistance – the polls suggest that he may be the last Labour prime minister. For while Labour has recovered from election defeats before, Reform threatens to steal the party’s working class core. If that happens there will be no automatic Labour recovery.

However, the problem goes far beyond just Labour’s difficulties. What is looming ahead is a major clash within British society which could easily outrun all the efforts of politicians. The large spontaneous demonstrations all over Britain in the last few weeks in which incensed ordinary people dress themselves in the national flag have not become violent, but the riots which followed the murder by an immigrant of three Southport children last year showed how combustible the issue is.

Many ordinary people feel that those in authority have allowed the whole society’s demography to change in ways that threaten their way of life. They never agreed to this, never voted for it and they have already shown that they are quite willing to throw out both the Tories and Labour as a result. Their anger is reshaping the political system – and it could well go beyond even that.