How Much Longer can Rishi Sunak Stagger on?

The Conservative Party has been in power in Britain since May 2010, initially with David Cameron as prime minister governing in coalition with the Liberal Democrats but subsequently governing fully in its own right from May 2015. In short, the Conservatives have been ruling the United Kingdom for over thirteen years.

In 2010, David Cameron made a pledge to cap net immigration at under 100,000.  In 2017, Teresa May, who had replaced Cameron as Prime Minister in 2016 said her government would limit net migration to sustainable levels, which she asserted would be in the tens of thousands. However, all these promises were abandoned. For the 2022 calendar year, the Office for National Statistics has estimated total long-term immigration at around 1.2 million and with emigration of 557,000, net migration rose to 606,000, a record for a calendar year.   Incidentally, the fact that these statistics, released in May 2023, are just provisional estimates demonstrates how out of control the situation actually is.

I’ve observed with interest the sacking of Home Secretary Suella Braverman by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak together with the legal and other setbacks to the manifestly feeble attempts in recent years to control both legal and illegal immigration. Now in a letter to Sunak, published in full at Quadrant Online, Braverman has revealed the truth of what many have suspected for a long time – that there was never any real desire to address the immigration problem in official circles. Voters would be tossed some red meat before an election, but nothing would follow afterwards.

The British immigration system is a joke that’s long been open to exploitation.  For example, one racket that’s been going on for years is allowing people entering as students to bring their families and dependents along too. The plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, now ruled illegal, was touted as one solution to the problem.   However, why on earth did Rwanda agree to such a strange arrangement? The answer is revealed in clause 16.1 of the Memorandum of Understanding between the governments of the United Kingdom and Rwanda, which reads as follows:

The Participants will make arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom, recognising both Participants’ commitment towards providing better international protection for refugees.

Who are these vulnerable refugees?  There are an awful lot of them!  The UNHCR Operational Update for September 2023 states:

135,733 refugees and asylum seekers are in Rwanda as of 30 September 2023. Mainly including people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (61.4%) and Burundi (38%). 6,144 new asylum seekers from DRC are awaiting formal registration. 

The most vulnerable would tend to have health problems and social problems from their experiences, and many would lack the education and skills needed to avoid becoming a burden on the British taxpayer. In short, the plan would achieve nothing for the British people as, in essence, Britain agreed to swap one refugee problem for another, something that was not highlighted by government spokesmen. 

Of course, all this reflected an effort to be consistent with principles espoused by Britain’s feckless establishment.  In his book, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, David Goodhart wrote about a conversation that took place at an Oxford college dinner in 2011.

When I said to my neighbour—Gus O’Donnell, then in his last few months as Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the land—that I was writing a book about immigration, he replied, ‘When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration … I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was surprised to hear this from the head of such a national institution and asked the man sitting next to the civil servant, Mark Thompson—then Director-General of the BBC—whether he believed global welfare should be put before national welfare, if the two should conflict. He defended O’Donnell and said he too believed global welfare was paramount. — David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

We can all observe that the rights and welfare of ordinary British people are barely mentioned by their elite today, let alone seriously considered.  Ordinary people were never consulted about immigration, it was just permitted uncontrolled, with the inevitable result that towns and cities are filling up with people who contribute little and, even worse, disdain the British people, their culture and their history.  Such people are colonisers, not migrants.  The politicians, whose beliefs are malleable as they largely depend on perceived political advantage, operate on the basis that the British people are to be placated, not served.  Many mouth the mantra that “diversity is our strength” for which no evidence is required or given. Where is the will to serve, to put one’s own people first?

Back in 1978, such a will was shown by Singapore, which faced condemnation from around the world for not permitting Indochinese refugees to come ashore.  Lee Kuan Yew took a tough approach. “You’ve got to grow calluses on your heart or you just bleed to death” he remarked, when challenged on this policy by The New York Times.  Singapore’s foreign minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam stated,

We don’t want to create a Palestinian situation. We cannot afford a population of embittered, inchoate refugees.

Unlike the United Kingdom, Singapore always puts its own people first.

There seems to be no will to solve anything in Britain today and its politicians are losing the people’s respect.  In any case, the best people tend not to enter politics.  As Lee Kuan Yew remarked:

In Britain, if you look at the First Class Honours list of Oxford or Cambridge and trace their careers, you will find that these people end up not in politics, but in banking, finance and the professions. The frontbenchers in Parliament are often not from the top tier. They are not drawn from the best lawyers or surgeons. The same forces are at play in America. — Lee, Kuan Yew; Press, Straits Times, “One Man’s View of the World”

The same applies in Australia and everywhere else in the Anglosphere.

With Islamism advancing in Britain, a revolutionary situation is developing, and some may assert that Britain needs a knight on a white horse to save the nation, someone who can call out the existing crop of politicians as Oliver Cromwell did when he dismissed the Rump Parliament on April 20, 1653 with a speech said to be along the following lines:

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place. Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Echoing Cromwell, on May 7, 1940, following the invasion of Norway by Nazi Germany, Leo Amery, a former First Lord of the Admiralty, made a speech to Parliament that concluded with the following words directed at the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain:

This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.

Just three days later, on May 10, 1940, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became Prime minister.

More recently, on January 19, 2022, senior Conservative MP David Davis rose in the House of Commons to condemn Prime Minister Boris Johnson over Partygate:

I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday he did the opposite of that. So, I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear: Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain. ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.’

Boris Johnson lasted a while longer, leaving office on September 6, 2022. Will the Conservative Party, now facing certain defeat at the next general election, turn in desperation to Suella Braverman to save them?

In any case, would Braverman be able to make a difference?  After all, the Rwanda arrangements were agreed under her watch.  Will the deep state, the Blob, continue in its own sweet way, solving nothing, making excuses, protecting its jobs, conceding everything to radical Islam, Black Lives Matter and woke causes generally?  Will able and enterprising young people take Peter Hitchens’ advice and emigrate to greener pastures, leaving a great nation to sink into civil disorder and irrelevance?