Boris should never be allowed anywhere near the People’s Revolt
Reflections on a rumour that will not die.
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Let me ask you a question.
If you invited an architect to redesign your home and the architect very nearly destroyed your home, would you invite him back? Of course you wouldn’t.
Which is why I find the suggestion, made in one national newspaper over the weekend, that Boris Johnson should join Reform, utterly absurd.
While Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf, and other senior Reformers have, rightly, ruled out the prospect of Boris Johnson ever joining the People’s revolt, I do think it’s worth remembering why so many of us are so strongly opposed to this idea.
Boris Johnson, many people forget, betrayed his voters and the country.
The man who promised, in his 2019 manifesto, to “lower the overall number” of immigrants and “take back control” of the borders, did the exact opposite.
Supported by the likes of Priti Patel and Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the Tories presided over what has since become known as the ‘Boriswave’ —liberalising the immigration regime and flooding Britain, in just a few years, with 2.6 million people.
As a Telegraph investigation into the Boriswave, published yesterday, points out, this very deliberate political choice to open the floodgates was nothing short of a disaster.
Here's just one astonishing fact. In each of the three years for which records are available, more people migrated into Britain than to the United States of America, a country that is 40 times larger by area than Britain, and which has nearly five times the population.
An eye-watering 1.3 million people migrated into Britain in just one year, 2023, alone –the highest figure in a single year since records began.
As Professor Alan Manning told the Telegraph, you basically have to go back two centuries to find anything comparable to the rate of population growth under Johnson (and of course earlier growth was not driven exclusively by immigration).
And it wasn’t just the scale of immigration and demographic change that undermined the country; it was the type of migration.
As longer-term readers will recall, from one of our most viral pieces to date —‘The Big Tory Lie’—Johnson and the Tories flooded the country with masses of low-wage, low-skill, and poorly educated migrant workers from outside Europe.
He basically built the Deliveroo economy that we see today, which as even the Office for Budget Responsibility and top migration experts like David Miles now concede is a net fiscal cost.
In fact, the Boriswave was such a disaster that even liberal centrists at The Times, like Jenni Russell, are today writing to urge the Labour government and others to extend if not scrap the right of all these Boriswave migrants to remain in Britain.
Why? Because they will soon secure something called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, which if not changed will allow them to stay in Britain forever, having full access to the welfare state and bringing many more relatives into the country.
The estimated cost of this, by the way, is somewhere north of £200 BILLION. Thanks Boris.
Here’s what Jenni Russell writes about the Boriswave, which should perhaps be put in front of her fanatically pro-immigration fellow Times columnist Fraser Nelson:
“In 2019 when [Boris Johnson] was elected, net migration to the UK was 188,000. Between January 2021 and June 2024, 3.8 million people were given UK visas, an unprecedented influx.
The British public has long been assured that immigration is vital both to public services and economic growth.
Yet the majority of those arriving under the reckless “Boriswave” did not fulfil either function.
Fewer than a fifth came in as workers. 5.4 per cent were skilled and highly paid; 7 per cent were on health and care visas, the vast majority of those low-paid, allowed officially to work at less than the going rate for their jobs; 4.6 per cent were on other work visas.
The remaining 83 per cent came in as dependents, family, students or on humanitarian routes.”
Read that last line again.
83 per cent came in as dependents, relatives, students, or refugees.
Johnson also handed out ‘skilled visas’ to migrants who had only an A-level-equivalent education.
His ‘high-skill’ worker policy, which he told us would deliver “the best of the best”, allowed people to come for jobs paying just £25,600 a year, many of whom were just school leavers. “We’re not getting their best”, remarked Donald Trump, after years of liberal Republicans flooding America with low-skill workers. Indeed.
While the share of visas for high-skilled engineers and scientists collapsed by two-thirds, the share of visas given to low-skill workers in hospitality doubled while, at the same time, millions of Brits were allowed to move onto out-of-work welfare, leaving the labour market altogether.
It was all completely insane and the effects will be with us for a generation.
India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Philippines, China, and Zimbabwe supplied the workers while nobody in Westminster, furthermore, gave any thought to how the country would integrate people from radically different if not incompatible cultures.
David Cameron declared multiculturalism was “a failure” 15 years ago and yet we still do not have a successor to that policy. Even worse, the people flooding Britain with people from radically different cultures no longer talk about integration at all.
Which is all the more remarkable given the ongoing legacy of the Boriswave.
Consider this.
Of the top twenty nations that were given UK visas last year, only three are in the Anglosphere and only one is from Europe.
How can you build a cohesive nation —a country with a shared culture, values, history, and way of life, out of this?
Meanwhile, Johnson, the Oxford graduate, flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of international students, along with their relatives, without realising that most of them would not be studying classics at Oxbridge.
On the contrary, most went to third-rate universities to do one-year programmes before shifting onto other visa programmes and then staying in the UK forever.
Astonishingly, last year, some 15,000 international students even claimed for asylum once they had already arrived in Britain on student visas.
It underlines what a joke higher education has become, with mass migration now being used to prop up this Ponzi scheme, a reality made possible by Boris Johnson.
The Boriswave didn’t only wreck our economy; it drove a truck through the deeper social contract that is supposed to hold our country together, and is organised around the idea democratically elected politicians should try to honour their promises to tax-paying citizens.
Johnson exploited popular sovereignty to win an enormous majority, in 2019, and then treated the people who elected him with contempt, prioritising his desire to be loved by status-conscious Tories and luvvies in London and the Cotswolds over his commitment to the people who had voted him in:
“He is very relaxed about migration”, said one of his former cabinet colleagues, reported in the Telegraph. “He was mayor of London, one of the world’s most diverse cities. He likes that cultural mix”.
Then why did he tell millions of patriotic Brits he would do the opposite?
In fact, the entire episode of the Boriswave reveals just how rigged and corrupt our country and politics have become.
Because as the Telegraph’s investigation also makes clear, when the Tory MPs who ran on a pro-Brexit, anti-immigration ticket, in 2019, were finally sitting around the cabinet table, next to Johnson, they suddenly had no desire to honour their election promise.
Most of them instantly caved in to the interests of globalists and lobby groups that have become completely addicted to cheap migrant labour, which in turn reveals a bigger problem with the Tories and their donor class. No matter who is in charge, they will always sell out to big business.
As Professor Manning, a leading expert on migration policy, told the Telegraph:
“The normal dynamic within government is that you would have some government departments lobbying the whole time to liberalise the rules, and the Home Office pushing back”. However: “What seems to have happened in that period is that the lobby groups were given everything they wanted.”
In fact, Johnson was so disinterested in respecting his own voters he even removed the requirement for British firms to advertise jobs in Britain first.
That’s how committed he was to prioritising the British people and British workers.
So, no, sorry, Boris Johnson should never, ever, ever be allowed anywhere near the People’s revolt.
Because what this so-called ‘conservative’ did was betray his own voters and set the country firmly on course toward all the managed decline and Deliveroo economy you see around you today.
Lastly, there’s also a crucial message in all this for Reform and Nigel Farage, who are attracting the very people Boris Johnson and the Tories cut adrift.
While Reform is currently riding high by promising the British people an end to the unpopular and extreme policy of mass immigration, should they fail to deliver on this, should they capitulate to big business and globalist lobbyists, then, without doubt, they’ll suffer the same fate as Boris Johnson and the Tories, ruining their entire legacy in the process.
And who knows where that will leave an already angry, disillusioned, and febrile country. Boris Johnson very nearly wrecked Britain and is rightly being cut out of the people’s campaign to fix it; I just hope everybody else has learned the lesson …
Quite so. I was also pretty unimpressed seeing Nadine Dorries headlining the conference - a Boris cheerleader if ever there was one... Didn't you just write recently about infiltration being one of the biggest threats to Reform UK?!
Totally Busted Flush - we gave him his chance and he blew it Big Time!