"I was wrong before. Only net zero immigration can now save Britain"
Telegraph: 14th May 2025: Sunday Telegraph Editor, Allister Heath, lays bare the reasons why tweaks to immigration policy are no longer enough and only a revolution will suffice.
"For thirty years, at every election, Labour and the Conservatives pledged to reduce immigration, and then did the opposite. Far from feeling any contrition, let alone apologising, many of these politicians, convinced of their superior morality and grasp of economics, seemed proud to defy a “bigoted” electorate. This was the foundational lie at the heart of modern politics, an unforgivable breach of trust. More so even than economic failure and creeping anomie, it is the ultimate source of the anger and anti-establishment resentment engulfing Middle England.
This deception went hand in hand with an anti-democratic drive to gaslight ordinary voters, to cast doubt on their memory, to downplay the scale of what was happening and trivialise its consequences, to deny that promises were being broken. History was rewritten, social tensions covered up, a fake economic narrative constructed, inconvenient truths memory holed and dissidents demonised or cancelled.
Tony Blair promised “firm control over immigration” before throwing the borders open. David Cameron said he would cut net migration to “tens of thousands a year”, a promise he broke every single year. A furious electorate voted for Brexit, and what did the Conservative Party do? Terrified to take on the Blob, out of ideas to grow an economy crippled by socialism and lockdowns, the Tories doubled-down...
...Every orthodoxy of the past 30 years must be rejected.
...By the standards of virtually all of British history, I’m a liberal on immigration... But no mature society can cope with the scale of inflows we have experienced, and the woke, self-loathing ideology that dominates in Whitehall has led to the deliberate fragmentation of our country. We are heading towards disaster, and everything that is great about our country, including our remarkable tolerance and our success at integrating previous waves of arrivals, is now at risk...
I now realise only drastic solutions will do. We need a five-year moratorium on net migration – in other words, zero net migration until 2030, before returning to 1990s volumes..."