RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country, then you do not really have a country.

While the public wants their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly, in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

By the end of August, it was estimated that almost 12,000 people had arrived in Canada through this route so far this year. It is a number that constitutes little more than an averagely busy week in Italy at any time over recent years. But even this comparatively tiny movement across an entire year has proven too much for Canada. At the end of last month, Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters: “For someone to successfully seek asylum it’s not about economic migration. It’s about vulnerability, exposure to torture or death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we’ll evaluate them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker.”

Bombings and other terrorist attacks are now a common feature of life in modern Europe. On just one day (September 15, 2017), an improvised explosive device was placed on a London Underground train, a man wielding a knife and shouting “Allah” attacked a soldier in Paris, and a man with a hammer shouting “Allahu Akbar” badly wounded two women in Lyon. As the former Prime Minister of France and the present Mayor of London have put it, perhaps this is all just a price we have to pay for living in big cities in Europe in the 21st century: we have traffic congestion, great restaurants and terrorist attacks.

Of course, the public are all the time worrying about other things — not just whether all this is just a taste of something worse to come, but whether anything might be done to stop it. While our political leaders continue to view this as a narrow security-related question, the public can see that it is also a border-security and mass-immigration issue. Across the continent, poll after poll shows the European public continuously calling for migration into Europe to be slowed down. This plea is not due to some atavistic urge or distasteful racist instinct, but something that the public seems to intuit better than their politicians — which is that if you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country then you do not really have a country.

Since the upsurge in Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, when Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally decided to suspend normal border checks and turn an already existing flow of migrants into a tidal wave, politicians and the public have divided from each other over this issue. While the public want their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

Politicians such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada have used the opportunity of Europe’s migration catastrophe to grandstand and present themselves as offering a different way. In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on building a wall along the US-Mexican border, Trudeau in particular has presented himself as the yin to Donald Trump’s yang. In January, when President Trump was sworn into office, Trudeau sent out a Tweet reading, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.” To which he added the hashtag, #WelcomeToCanada. In March of this year, in another clear response to the US President, Trudeau tweeted, “Regardless of who you are or where you come from, there’s always a place for you in Canada” — a tall order, given the existence of 7.5 billion people on this earth, many of whom are not already Canadian.

Until recently, the very notion that some European neighborhoods were “no-go” zones was vehemently dismissed by politicians and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic as a myth, a lie, a vicious right-wing calumny. But even as Swedish officials were denying the existence of such zones in their own country, they were secretly mapping them out and overseeing a police effort to liberate them.

The Sweden Democrats are on the rise because voters finally grasp the extent and significance of the damage their elites have been doing to their country — and the elites, both in the media and in government, are scrambling to snap into line in order to keep hold on power.

In some ways, the winds in Scandinavia may be turning, but it does not seem as if Stanghelle and his ilk are about to speak the whole truth about Islam, or to apologize for their inexcusable abuse of those who have.

Not long ago, Norwegian journalists were virtually united in representing Sweden, with its exceedingly liberal immigration policy and its strict limits on public discussion of the subject, as a model of enlightened thinking that deserved to be emulated. Meanwhile Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate (remember the Danish cartoons) and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. That appears to be changing. As Hans Rustad of the alternative Norwegian news website Document.no noted recently, the term “Swedish conditions,” which some of us have been using for years to refer to the colossal scale of Sweden’s Muslim-related problems, is actually turning up these days in the mainstream Norwegian media — although the relationship of those conditions to Islam is still routinely underplayed, if not entirely avoided.

Until recently, Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. Pictured: A Danish checkpoint on the border with Germany, near Padborg, on January 6, 2016. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Case in point: on August 10, the daily Aftenposten ran a piece by Tarjei Kramviken about an official Swedish report stating that police, during the past couple of years, have been pursuing an organized campaign to “take back neighborhoods from criminals who have set up parallel societies.” But the attempt, the report admitted, has failed. Instead, even more such neighborhoods have sprung up, and the level of violence within them has become more common, more brutal, and more spontaneous. If a police car crosses the invisible border, it is pelted with rocks or bottles.

The neighborhoods in question are, of course, Muslim neighborhoods, and the criminals are Muslims. Although the persons in question are indeed criminals — they carry guns, sell drugs, commit burglaries, and break out into the occasional riot — the use of the word criminals seems somewhat euphemistic. We are not talking about some kind of Mafia that has moved into certain neighborhoods, taken them over, and terrorized the locals. The criminals are the locals. They are the young men who live there. Maybe not every last young man, but a high percentage of them. Some of these criminals, moreover, are mere children. One Stockholm cop told Kramviken about “five-year-olds who give the finger to the police and say nasty things.”

There are many things that could be said about Tony Blair’s suggestion that the UK should toughen its immigration policy to reduce the numbers coming in from Europe. He claims this can be done “by measures within our own law or by negotiation with Europe”. Hey presto! – the British will then suddenly come to their senses, demand a second referendum and vote to stay in the EU after all.

I don’t know which is the most startling here – the fantastic magical thinking, the fathomless hypocrisy or the deep contempt Blair displays for democracy and the British people.

“We can curtail the things that people feel are damaging about European immigration,” he writes on today’s Sunday Times website (£), “both by domestic policy change and by agreeing change within Europe to the freedom of movement principle, including supporting the campaign of President Emmanuel Macron on the ‘posted workers directive’”.

An allied report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change recommends forcing EU migrants to register on arrival in the UK, restricting access to free healthcare for unemployed EU migrants, letting universities and businesses discriminate against them in favour of British citizens and banning those EU migrants with no permission to reside in Britain from renting or opening bank accounts.

In the Observer, the former Labour minister Lord Adonis makes a similar pitch, arguing that the British could reverse their referendum decision if France and Germany agree the UK can take control of immigration while staying in the EU single market.

The first thing to say is the the EU will not change its free movement principle for anyone. Why should it? If it were to do so for the UK, the pressure to do the same for other member states would become a stampede.

Secondly, if anyone believes that mandatory checks will stop the flow of EU migrants they must be living in cloud cuckoo-land. UK border controls have been in chaos for years. Why should that change just because Blair and Adonis want the British people to change their minds on the EU? This is pie in an anti-democratic sky.

Third, Blair’s hypocrisy is truly jaw-dropping. Who was it who relaxed immigration policy in order to import hundreds of thousands of people from abroad in order to transform Britain into a multicultural society? Step forward Tony Blair and his Labour successor, Gordon Brown. Who was it who introduced the Human Rights Act, thus embedding human rights dogma with its inbuilt bias against majority cultural norms and stimulating judicial overreach so that the courts made it almost impossible to deport anyone – and almost impossible, for that matter, to discriminate against groups of people in precisely the way Blair is now openly suggesting EU citizens should be discriminated against? Why, none other than Tony Blair.

Blithely, he now says his encouragement of mass immigration belonged to another era. Well, I saw how bitterly it was opposed by the public when they finally realised how the country was being transformed, and how they were (and still are) demonised as a result for racism and xenophobia. With cavalier insouciance, Blair also claims that other EU member states find it perfectly simple to deport people. That’s untrue too: across the EU, deportation has been managed in relatively few cases.

Not only is this proposal hypocritical and unworkable but it also misses the most important point. People in the UK voted to leave the EU not just because of their significant concerns over immigration. More important than that, as they have repeatedly confirmed, they wanted the UK once again to have sovereign power over its own laws and policies.

Even if France and Germany were to cook up a supposed exemption to allow the UK to control its own immigration rules, the overarching loss of sovereignty entailed by remaining in the single market – with the “intersectionality” of the EU’s internal rules – would mean that the UK would still be caught one way or another, not least because it would still be subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice. And what the British wanted most of all when they voted Leave was that the UK should once again be a sovereign nation, with a democratically elected parliament making its own laws which would no longer be subject to the superior authority of a foreign court.

Neither Blair nor Adonis can ever understand this supremely important fact – that the issue, above all, was and is democracy. They don’t believe this was the issue. They dismiss sovereignty as of no concern to the vast majority of people.

And that’s for one very simple reason. It’s of no concern to them. And that’s because, as fanatics in the EU cause, they actually think that the loss of democratic sovereignty advances the welfare of the world. They don’t believe in the sovereign European nation. They believe in the supranational EU project because they have no faith in their nation. They believe their country can only prosper if it negates its own sovereign power.

And that, after all, is the core belief that animates the EU.