According to Manny Macron the British people have been “sold a lie” that leaving the EU would “make it possible to fight more effectively against illegal immigration”.
Manny would have none of that: “Our increasing problems require cooperation, a European approach” rather than what “populists often sold”.
To paraphrase a lawyer joke, “How do you know that Macron is lying?” “His lips are moving.” Manny can’t open his mouth without uttering either a witting lie or an unwitting falsehood. That undoubtedly makes him an expert on the subject of lying, but even experts can get things wrong.
It’s impossible to decode the denotation of Manny’s remarks without first understanding their connotation. So let’s try to do just that.
To the fire-eating European federalists, especially those of the French or German persuasion, the EU is the same thing as the NHS is to the British. It’s the object of their secular worship and heartfelt love. That produces the kind of faith that can be shaken by neither logical arguments nor empirical evidence.
Hence they regard Brexit as a combination of iconoclasm, treason and apostasy. The British people declared their unwillingness to worship that idol, branding themselves as infidels. And infidels must be punished.
But Manny is right: Brexit was indeed tightly wrapped in a tissue of lies.
However, these were told by the likes of him, ideologues who tried to misrepresent Brexit as something it never was because they hated everything Brexit is. I thus place Manny into the same group with our own Remainers, those who now densely populate the Labour front benches (and the Tory ones too, if somewhat less densely).
Most Britons didn’t vote for Brexit because some dastardly liars had told them that leaving the EU would solve every little problem the country has, including that of illegal immigration. They cast their vote for Leave because they wanted to be governed by their own parliament, not by a motley crew of unaccountable Continental apparatchiks.
Populism had nothing to do with it, unless the word is misused to designate anything socialists like Manny dislike. Quite the opposite: the true message of Brexit presupposed an audience well-versed in Britain’s political and constitutional history.
Such an audience is rather small, given the conditions of our comprehensive education. However, Leave campaigners – and all political campaigners have to be populists by definition – managed to boil the message down to a simple binary question: Do you want to be governed by the parliament you elect or by some foreign body no one elects?
Considering that the sovereignty of parliament is the quintessence of the British constitution, and has been for centuries, that concept has penetrated the nation’s DNA. That’s why more Britons voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything else.
Those who really got the message knew that Brexit made it possible for the nation to solve many hitherto unsolvable problems, such as border control. Since the EU travesty of free movement of people no longer held sway, our government acquired the means to stop illegal immigration once and for all, and to control the legal kind as it saw fit.
Yet no magic wand came with Brexit. That horrendous problem wasn’t going to solve itself – it still required a good government to do so.
However, every government we’ve had since 2016 fell into the range between pathetically useless and downright destructive. They had the means to stop what resembles occupation more than immigration, but they either didn’t want to achieve that end or were too incompetent to do so.
Modern European federalism is a socialist dream come true, and the principal desideratum of socialism is to obliterate every vestige of Western, which is to say anti-socialist, tradition. Mass immigration of cultural aliens serves this purpose nicely.
Blair’s éminence grise, Peter Mandelson, once spelled that out with most refreshing cynicism. We welcome mass immigration, legal or otherwise, he said, because thereby we import Labour voters.
That’s no doubt true. Because immigrants need, or least want, handouts, they are likely to vote for the parties that dangle the larger ones before their eyes. This means socialist parties, in Britain usually Labour.
We are now governed not by any old socialists but by card-carrying Marxists. They are running the country into the ground, and they are doing that not just because they are incompetent. Destroying or at least debauching every British institution and tradition is something their ideology demands. Any weapon useful to that end is welcome, and an influx of alien swarms is one such.
If in 2019 1,843 people made the cross-Channel boat trip, that number has gone up to 44,000 since Labour won their landslide. This represents a gross violation not only of Britain’s territorial integrity, but also of EU law.
It no longer applies in Britain, or rather shouldn’t, but it certainly hasn’t lost its validity in France. And EU law says that immigrants from troubled lands must be accepted by the first safe country they reach.
If that country happens to be France, then it’s the French who must mollycoddle those beauties by giving them room (ideally in three-star hotels) and board. Unless, of course, they can argue that France is much less safe than Britain, which they can’t, not in good faith at any rate.
Hence, by building those internment camps all along the Channel, the French violate their own law – after all, those detainees are bound to want to leave the camps for the sunnier economic climes across the water.
At fault here isn’t Brexit but the socialist governments of France and Britain whose ideological interests converge. Otherwise, HMG wouldn’t need France’s help to stop those boats.
After all, the Royal Navy managed to deter a Nazi invasion of the British Isles. Our navy is but a shadow of its former self, but then rubber dinghies make up a less formidable force than German battleships and U-boats.
As Nigel Farage correctly pointed out the other day, those illegal sailors are committing a crime against the very nation the Royal Navy is supposed to protect. The solution seems simple enough: a patrol vessel should intercept a dinghy and order it to turn around.
If it refuses to do so, the patrol vessel should fire a warning shot and, if the message still doesn’t get home, sink the dinghy. Something tells me that those aspiring migrants would quickly decide that France is safe enough after all.
If this measure strikes you as too radical, then at least the government should announce that no one entering the country illegally would receive any social support whatsoever. No room, no board, no medical care (except in emergencies). No family reunification either: if a family of migrants wish to reunite, let them do so in France or, better still, in their own country.
The pathetic palliatives mooted by the two socialist nonentities, Starmer and Macron, aren’t going to work – largely because neither man wants them to work. Such is the truth of the matter, and everything else is a lie. You know, the sort of thing Manny accuses the ‘populists’ of bandying about.
Spot on as usual, Mr Boot!
How to turn diagnosis into votes? That’s the unanswered question though. It needs answering before the demographics put it completely out of reach.
Fortunately, at my age I know that I will not live long enough to see. And history tells us that all civilisations die and are replaced. Sic transit gloria mundi!
Your proposed measure doesn’t strike me as too radical. I don’t think it would strike most people as too radical. But the “long march through the institutions” has reached the Royal Navy, and you’d have to deal with mutinies.
There is also the problem that these invaders, like the “Palestinians”, habitually equip themselves with women and children to use as human shields. To fire on women and children is odious, but in these incomparably odious times, such odious actions may be necessary if anything that isn’t odious is to survive.
Most of those women and children I’ve seen in photographs were burly thirtyish chaps wigh beards. I’m afraid you are right about the Royal Navy though.