Britain is out of step with a Right-wing continent

British people voted for Brexit to reduce immigration. What happened next will blow your mind

A couple of years ago I wrote that Brexit was going to have the slightly perverse effect of pushing Britain to the Left socially, while continental Europe moves to the Right. I don’t see myself as being especially good at making predictions, but this one has held up pretty well so far. 

During the past two weeks this trend has been seen in action in both the north and south of the continent; two weeks ago the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats came second in their national election, as the Left lost its majority, while after Sunday’s exit polls it looks like Italy’s next leader is going to be Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy. Meloni is the 187th fascist politician to be elected to major office in the past 20 years — but who knows, maybe the boy who constantly cries wolf will one day stumble across an actual wolf. I don’t want to make predictions.

In both Italy and Sweden immigration was the big issue pushing voters away from social democrats, a societal-altering change which even the most agreeable and conformist of Nordic might eventually question the benefit of.

While the continent moves to the Right, in Britain post-pandemic immigration is running at a record one million per year, and the Government has just announced plans to make free movement even easier. In the years following Brexit, contrary to the sometimes quite neurotic fears expressed, popular feeling towards immigrants and immigration became much warmer; the issue dropped down the list of people’s concerns, even before the plague arrived.

It was perhaps this that convinced some Tories the Brexit vote wasn’t about immigration after all, and that it could be business as usual afterwards, in particular the business of hiring cheap labour from abroad. If that’s their reasoning, then I’m prepared to stick my neck out and make at least one prediction: this won’t end well for them.

It's true that a small minority of Tory Leave voters genuinely did believe in some idea of Global Britain, a vague vision of universal free trade, often made with various pirate-y references to ‘buccaneering’. A small number perhaps believe that we can have more open borders and also evolve into a small-state economy blessed with a super-efficient bureaucracy; even though it’s obvious from looking at voting patterns in multicultural states that the children of the new immigrants you attract will not vote for this.

Some Tories did actually think we should go to the enormous hassle of leaving the EU just so people arriving from, say, India or Pakistan wouldn’t have to queue for longer than Germans or French. Some may believe we have more in common with our former subjects and victims than we do with our neighbours, even though this is clearly untrue, to the point of being delusional. It’s hard not to conclude that the accusation of imperial nostalgia sometimes levelled at Brexiteers has some truth in it, but then lots of British politics is now about replaying the Empire in various forms.

But the majority of Leave voters were not in on this fantasy. It was indeed a vote for reduced immigration, not just an abstract concept of ‘control’, since the average voter has no more ‘control’ over the Home Office than he has over the Commission in Brussels, especially when both major parties are effectively aligned.

Brexit would have been impossible without the huge rise in immigration under Tony Blair, and the political response that followed. Just in case any Tory MP has forgotten, the referendum came about because of electoral pressure from Ukip, which rose to double-figure support because of public disquiet not over Europe but over immigration. And it’s not just about numbers: both Leave and Remain voters prefer EU migration to migration from outside Europe. Ukip’s huge leap in support came before the great Polish influx from the summer of 2004; migration from central Europe wasn’t that unpopular, even if some people saw the new arrivals as economic competitors (which in many cases they were). Ukip’s rise in popularity, as with Right-wing populists on the continent, tended to track the increase in migration from the developing world. This is not spelled out because the English don’t like to be direct about things, as it’s rude; I happen to think that politeness codes are good, but government policy shouldn’t naively take them at face value.

People have these preferences because, the more distant a culture from which immigrants arrive, the greater the unease, the sense of alienation and, in the long term, the chances of continual division between communities. This tends to decline if the supply of immigration is restricted, as happened in Britain from the late 1960s to 1997, but New Labour’s decision to make family-reunion migration easier led to what many later called the growth of ‘parallel lives’. 

If we do the same thing again, the same thing will happen again, and indeed the recent trouble in Leicester seems to have been accelerated by recent arrivals from the subcontinent; I don’t have a side in that dispute, have no opinion other than that I hope people resolve their differences, and cannot say who is more to blame, but in areas with large, settled communities an increase in newcomers from the old country tends to have a counter-integration effect. This is going to accelerate because of Britain’s new trade deal with India, which the Government hopes to sign by Diwali, in exchange for which we will have to further loosen immigration restrictions with a country of 1.4 billion people. To gauge just how much benefit we get from this, India accounts for just 1.4% of Britain’s overseas exports, behind eight different EU countries. Our trade with little Sweden is worth slightly more, but then as Fr Ted might put it, Sweden may be small but India is far away.

The Tories seem to believe that immigration is necessary for economic growth, which might be true but doesn’t appear immediately obvious; after all, immigration has run at record levels for two and half decades now and for the last 15 years our economy has been sluggish. With a million arrivals a year, we should all be flying around in golden helicopters at this point.

It unquestionably keeps the economy buoyant in the short-term, as you would expect if you were recruiting younger workers who are selected for a certain dynamism; but as they age, and their expectations rise, the effect wears off and new migrants are needed to keep the economy going — all of which sounds like a brilliant idea first laid out by a certain Charles Ponzi. Besides which, the net economic effect of non-European migration over the past couple of decades has not been great.

I tend to support market solutions, and still believe that the free market offers the best way out of our economic malaise. But tying the fate of the free market to such a short-term economic benefit with huge, society-changing long term changes, is not going to be good for free-marketeers in the long term. And that’s what Truss’s government is doing.

None of this is what people voted for either during the referendum or the two subsequent elections. A significant proportion of people supported Brexit in order to reduce immigration, and now we have much more immigration, of the type they feel most uncomfortable with, and we’re all much poorer because of Brexit, and we can’t even live on the continent and have to stand in big queues when we go abroad, like chumps.

A cynic might say that the Tories are keen on immigration because they wish to keep wages down, even if this is not good for long term growth and has the perverse effect of reducing investment in technology. Or that perhaps immigration is needed to keep the housing market going, having increased house prices by over 20% since the mid-90s; the same housing market that prices out huge swathes of younger people, who have no prospects of a decent home, a family, all the normal things that a wealthy country with a mixed economy should be expected to give its citizens.

Instead, they’re faced with a future of permanent low wages, existing in a world of cheap luxuries and unaffordable necessities, occasionally being treated to some cabinet minister vowing to do something about ‘the woke nonsense’, whatever that means. This is the exact sort of dystopia large numbers of Brexit supporters were voting against — only for the Tory government to turn up the dial.

Although I’m not great at predictions, I’m going to make this one: in every western European country with significant levels of immigration from outside Europe, Right-wing populists have reached double figures. Even Britain’s system of first-past-the-post was unable to stop Ukip breaking through from 2014, before the party was killed by its own success. All it takes is for someone to emerge with the charisma and popular touch of Nigel Farage, and the Tories will face the real prospect of being wiped out; and having so recklessly gambled the country’s economic prospects and lied to the public, and with a Labour opposition that seems moderate and cautious in contrast, they’ll deserve it. It’s happening everywhere else in Europe and Britain, after all, is not exceptional.