RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amber Rudd lost her job as U.K. Home Secretary this weekend amid a widening immigration scandal. Yet there’s every chance Britain’s political class—and voters—will let this crisis go to waste.

Ms. Rudd’s resignation is the latest fallout from the Windrush scandal. For two decades starting in the late 1940s, the U.K. accepted migrants from across the Empire (later, the Commonwealth) to rebuild after World War II. Known as the “Windrush generation” because one of the first ships to bring them was the HMT Empire Windrush, hundreds of thousands and their children worked hard, paid taxes, and assimilated into U.K. society.

A 1971 law granted these migrants permanent U.K. residence and a path to citizenship. But an unknown number either never obtained formal proof of their immigration status because they didn’t realize they needed it, or have lost the relevant paperwork. Now they’re running afoul of a 2012 law that requires employers, landlords and even hospitals to verify the immigration status of prospective tenants, employees or patients. Some face deportation.

That law was a product of Prime Minister Theresa May’s promise, when she was Home Secretary, to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. David Cameron had pledged in 2010 to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000. Since Britain couldn’t limit arrivals from EU countries, Prime Minister Cameron and Mrs. May had to limit other skilled immigrants. They also concluded that ramping up deportations might help meet their targets.

In principle, the idea is no different from George Soros’s 220-page guide seemingly to create a permanent voting majority for the Democratic Party by “enlarge[ing] the U.S. electorate by 10 million voters by 2018.”

Greece’s ruling Syriza coalition appears to be adopting a strategy of garnering votes from immigrants by expediting their naturalization process. It will be easier to obtain Greek citizenship than a fishing license.

A total of 800,000 immigrants — almost one-tenth of the native Greek population — will soon become citizens. Transposed to the United States, that would be the equivalent of 32,000,000 new voters.

As Greece struggles with accelerating economic decline and an increasing lack of public faith in the political leadership, the ruling Syriza coalition appears to be adopting a strategy of garnering votes from immigrants by expediting their naturalization process.

According to a recent report in the Greek daily Parapolitika, Interior Minister Panos Skourletis is laying the groundwork to enable hundreds of thousands of immigrants to become citizens and vote in the next elections. Although the mandate of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras ends in September 2019, some analysts have been predicting a call for elections by the end of 2018.

Until now, candidates for Greek citizenship had to be vetted by a committee. Under the new system, applicants will be granted citizenship automatically if they correctly answer 20 out of 30 questions online. In addition, the government is planning to allow immigrants over the age of 65 to obtain Greek IDs, without testing their knowledge of the Greek language. In other words, it will be easier to obtain Greek citizenship than a Greek fishing license. As a result, a total of 800,000 immigrants — almost one-tenth of the native Greek population — will soon become citizens. Transposed to the United States, that would be the equivalent of 32,000,000 new voters.

Leftists welcome immigrants, whom they perceive as useful tools in their quest to dilute and diminish the British people’s former sense of common history and culture. Curse you, Tony Blair, for quite deliberately fostering policies that have destroyed these forms of solidarity.

Britain is a very small island, a tiny off-shore fragment. England taken alone has a population of over fifty million crammed into a land area about twice the size of Tasmania. Due to immigration England now has the highest population density in Europe and the fifth-highest in the world. The last thing such a country, one that was once a major source of emigration, needs is more people. Yet it is experiencing very high levels of immigration due to the stupidity and wilfulness of its political rulers, who are happy to ignore the resentment felt by the ordinary citizen at this influx and some of whom, like Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, even condemn these ordinary voters as “racist”.

Between 1995 and 2014 an extra four million foreign-born people settled in the United Kingdom. In any one year as many as half a million new long-term immigrants arrive. England now has 419 people per square kilometre, which is up from 379 in 2001. England has overtaken the Netherlands in population density and it is England, not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, where the immigrants are settling. It is projected that the density of population will rise to 460 people per square kilometre by 2030. The prospect is intolerable.

The result of this mass immigration has been a marked but deliberately concealed fall in the standard of living of the indigenous population and a large rise in inequality. The lying politicians, notably Tony Blair, have boasted about the rise in total national income due to the extra labour the migrants have provided, but most of this increase has gone in wages and welfare payments and services to the migrants themselves. Very little of it has ended up in the pockets of the indigenous population and that little has been completely offset by a rapid and substantial rise in house prices, as more people are crammed into a fixed space. Rents and mortgage payments have rocketed and these are of course a very large part of the expenditure of British citizens and particularly the poorer ones. Not only can the building industry not provide new dwellings fast enough, but as it tries to do so it gobbles up our unspoilt countryside. Britain is being concreted over and is ceasing to be a green and pleasant land. Travel has become impossible, with clogged roads and crowded trains. Our land has been stolen from us. Immigration is theft.

The Left-liberal proponents of an open-door policy, the ones who have imposed this hell on an unwilling people, are the same ideologues who whine about rising inequality. Yet immigration is a key cause of rising inequality. If there is an influx of relatively unskilled migrants, it is those among the indigenous population without skills or capital who are bound to lose out. The leftists were recently excited about Thomas Piketty’s best-selling and utterly misguided book Capital, which set out in an over-simple algebraic formula why we were getting more unequal. However, by capital Piketty meant wealth and a large part of that wealth consists of land and housing. It is the value of these that has risen enormously. When house prices rise there is a transfer of wealth in favour of those who own one from those who do not. Those who lose out are the ones struggling to purchase or rent one. My own modest house is worth ten times what I paid for it, far more than the rate of inflation. Today I could not afford to buy it. The situation is made worse by affluent foreigners buying up the better-quality housing purely as a speculative investment.

Enoch Powell was Britain’s Conservative Minister in 1993

His language is sometimes shocking, but the concerns he raised have never gone away.

The 20th of this month marks a significant anniversary in Britain. For it is the 50th anniversary of what is probably the most famous — and certainly the most notorious — speech by any mainstream politician since the war.

On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell gave a speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham on the subject of Commonwealth migration, integration, and possible re-emigration. It was a carefully chosen moment, and a carefully chosen intervention from a man who was then the shadow defense minister in the Conservative opposition of Edward Heath. Powell knew what he was about to do, telling a friend who edited a local newspaper, “I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up.” For half a century, Powell’s speech has certainly lingered in some fashion — whether by staying up or by rumbling away underneath Britain’s political debates.

The fact that the speech, which (although the phrase itself does not occur) became known as the “rivers of blood” speech, remains strangely alive in Britain was demonstrated again last weekend when the BBC chose to broadcast a program to reflect on the half centenary of the speech. The program included critical analysis, contextualization, and reflection. But most crucially, the BBC chose to have the actor Ian McDiarmid read the entire speech aloud — the first time this had been done on radio, apparently (only portions of the original speech having been recorded at the time). Although the BBC broadcast the speech in segments, with critical commentary interspersed, to go by some reactions, it was as though the BBC had chosen to go full Nazi on the British public.

The moment the program was announced, prominent figures such as Andrew (Lord) Adonis (a former Labour government minister) condemned the BBC, accusing the corporation of “an incitement to racial hatred and violence.” Surprisingly enough, Twitter did not in general react well to the announcement of the broadcast. And so once again Britain wound itself up into that specific lather Powell still manages to create even two decades after he went to his grave.

Of course, if anybody had stopped for a moment, they might have realized that the catatonic fury that Powell and his speech still provoke is itself highly suggestive. Had the BBC chosen to broadcast a speech by a leading member of the Flat Earth Society last weekend, it is unlikely that the reaction would have been like this. Amused, certainly. Contradicted by experts, for sure. But not the basis of days of organized hate and fury on social media and off it. Indeed the reaction to the broadcast of the full text of the “rivers of blood” speech proves once again that even after half a century, Britain has not reconciled itself to Powell or some of the specific points he was making in 1968.

In October 2017, Salzgitter was the first city to impose immigration restrictions: It will not accept any additional refugees.

“I see it every day: ‘Woman, step aside!’ The elderly, who are often severely handicapped, stand no chance to compete.” — Norbert Reinartz, a volunteer with the Essener Tafel food bank.

Faced with unchecked mass immigration, it seems, more and more people and institutions in Germany feel compelled to draw their own borders.

The recent decision of Essener Tafel, a food bank in the city of Essen, Germany, temporarily to stop issuing membership cards to non-Germans has triggered an outcry among German politicians, journalists and activists, who have accused the charitable organization of “racism”. Serving about 16,000 poor people in the industrial city of Essen, Essener Tafel is one of the biggest charities in Germany, operated by volunteers only.

Essener Tafel’s announcement read:

“Due to the increase in the number of refugees, the share of foreign fellow citizens among our customers has increased to 75 percent. To guarantee a reasonable integration, we see ourselves forced currently to accept only customers with a German passport.”

A board member of Essener Tafel told the weekly Die Zeit that the five-member board had discussed and changed the wording of these two sentences “for hours… until no one had an objection”. Neither had there been any criticism from the migrants who had to be sent away or among other charities with which the Essener Tafel cooperates, he said.

It was clear that the measure would not affect existing clients and was supposed to remain in place only as long as it took to restore the balance between Germans and migrants — supposedly only a few weeks. This goal was reached in mid-April: As the share of German customers had climbed from 25 to 56 percent, Essener Tafel announced a new policy: From now on, in it will give priority to senior citizens, disabled people, families with minors, and single parents, without regard to nationality. Still, scores of politicians and journalists expressed their moral outrage on Twitter.

Karl Lauterbach, an MP for the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the party’s healthcare expert, tweeted: “Hunger is the same for everybody. Too bad, xenophobia has arrived among the most poor.”

Berlin’s Secretary for Integration, Sawsan Chebli (SPD) tweeted: “I’m shivering. Food only for Germans. Migrants excluded.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel — who needed a whole year to express her condolences to the relatives of the victims of Berlin’s jihadist massacre in December 2016 — immediately gave a television interview in which she berated the decision as “not good”. One “should not use such categorizations”, she advised; instead, “one should look for good solutions”.