The Gorton and Denton by-election should act as a very serious wake-up call to the entire country: it is a harbinger of what is to come for our urban areas of Britain. When you have election material going out in an English constituency in Urdu and Punjabi [Ed.: as well as in English], campaigns being fought almost exclusively along ethnic and religious lines, something has gone very seriously wrong, and we need to have an honest conversation about the direction of travel in our country.
Reform UK Dorset
One man who has been prepared to speak out openly is Sir Jim Ratcliffe. He said, in a recent interview that drew much attention, that Britain had been “colonised by migrants”. While his choice of language was perhaps overly emotive, he is, fundamentally, right about the scale of recent migration, which is undeniable.
There are now very significant areas of urban Britain where integration has completely failed. The sheer scale and pace of immigration that we have witnessed under the Conservatives and Labour has been without any historic precedent, and has made even basic levels of assimilation by new arrivals absolutely impossible.
Just during the period that is referred to as the Boris Wave, 2021 to 2024, Priti Patel, the then-Home Secretary, now shadow Foreign Secretary
(but it’s a new team apparently…), allowed more than 3.8 million people to come to the UK, overwhelmingly from outside of Europe, and 86% of those came, not on work visas, but as dependents, students, or via health/care and humanitarian routes. This short period alone changed the foreign-born population of the UK from 16% to 19.6% in a matter of years. In 2004, 5.3 million people in Britain were foreign-born: today, that figure is more than 13 million. By 2035, it is estimated that 1 in 4 people living in Britain will be foreign-born. There are now already over one million people living in Britain who either speak no English or virtually no English. That is the scale of the immigration failure our country is now dealing with. It is totally unsustainable. We need a radical change of direction on immigration, and also to our electoral system. On immigration, Reform UK will end Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and reverse as much of the Conservatives’ Boris Wave as possible. We will aim for net negative legal immigration going forward, taking a far tougher approach to illegal migration: estimates suggest the number of people living in the UK unlawfully currently runs into the hundreds of thousands. On electoral reforms, we will end non-British Nationals voting in our elections, end postal votes for all but the genuinely disabled and very elderly, and take a zero-tolerance approach to coercive “family voting” which was reported by independent observers Democracy Volunteers in Gorton and Denton.
We need to get serious about the state of our country. Failing to address these trends risks allowing sectarian politics to take root in areas where integration has already faltered.
Thomas Gargrave
Reform UK Dorset
