Protests

The reality is that immigration has been a huge failure of the democratic process since 1992 and realistically since 1945. The public has never wanted mass immigration and every time the Conservatives have been elected since 1992 they have promised to reduce it, and have then increased it. Tony Blair's government unsurprisingly was particularly egregious in terms of what they promised relative to what they delivered.

We are currently living in an insane situation where many people have been convinced that the most recent Conservative government were very right wing on immigration when they in fact presided over by far the highest incoming levels of net migration ever seen.

The European country which has produced the most longitudinal data on the effect of immigration is Denmark and not uncoincidentally Denmark is now the most anti-immigration country in Western Europe. The data showed exactly what you should expect: measured over a lifetime, immigrants from rich countries are on average beneficial to your economy and immigrants from poor countries on average are detrimental.

After Brexit the UK has replaced very high levels of immigration largely from the EU with almost incomprehensibly high levels of immigration largely from poorer countries. The immediate effect of this is to slightly increase GDP while lowering GDP per capita. The long term effect is almost certainly going to be the lowering of both as immigrants also get older, sicker, and want pensions.

Labour and the Conservatives do not want the electorate to realise any of this as they are equally culpable for these failures since 1992. For now the media is happy to run coverage for them and journalists are increasingly drawn from a narrow set of highly educated cosmopolitans who consider any criticism of immigration to be uncouth, not least because journalism is an increasingly low paying job only likely to appeal to those willing to trade high status for low income, in particular the already wealthy.

Labour has been losing votes from both Muslim communities and white working class communities. Their differing responses to the BLM situation, the Palestine situation, and to this situation makes it clear that they are going to side with their middle class voters and their multicultural voters against their traditional base.

This has been the strategy of the Democratic party in the US since 2008 and it is a winning long-term strategy whilst mass immigration continues because immigrants tend to vote Democrat and Labour and over time you can import yourself the electorate you want. Kamala Harris would have lost to Donald Trump with 2016's electorate but she has a chance in 2024. With 1980's electorate she would have been unlikely to win a single state.

It is therefore hugely in the interest of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party to suppress information concerning immigration. Drumming up the essentially non-existent threat of the 'far-right' is now a convenient way to achieve this.

But this strategy now puts Starmer on a collision course against one of the world's richest and most powerful men who controls one of the few major media outlets still committed to something resembling free speech, and this could easily backfire on Labour and lead to the election of a party that would be genuinely right-wing on the issue of immigration, which would of course only be the correction expected in a functioning democracy.