Surkeir Starmer has stated his intention to take a firm stance on immigration. However, it appears that this may not be entirely accurate. Earlier this year, Home Secretary Pixie Balls-Cooper announced that the Government had no intentions of joining a ‘youth mobility’ program with the European Union.
It seemed questionable even at that time. One might speculate that Pixie’s reluctance to commit was due to limited accommodation space at Balls Towers. The influx of migrant workers had already taken up residence in various parts of the house, including the loft extension and even on a makeshift bed in her husband Ed’s study.
You may recall that a few years ago she gave a solemn promise to house Syrian asylum seekers in one or both of her own, taxpayer-subsidised, homes.
Nevertheless, the proposed gesture never materialized. Reasons cited included concerns over health and safety regulations, inadequate training, and issues with the en-suite bathroom facilities. It seemed like there were various logistical challenges that prevented the plan from being implemented.
So you can take whatever Pix says about immigration with a shovel-load of Maldon’s finest. Same goes for the Labour Party as a whole. When it comes to migrants, Labour always speaks with forked tongue.
Only this week another minister, someone called Nick Thomas-Symonds (me neither), declared that the Government had ‘no plans’ – which always means the opposite – to agree to a scheme which would allow UK and EU citizens aged between 18 and 30 to live and work anywhere in Britain or Europe for up to two years.
Yet now we learn, from no less a source than the German ambassador to London, that just such a deal is on the cards after all.
According to the Guardian, the EU is prepared to ‘make concessions’ over freedom of movement as part of a wider Brexit ‘reset’. That’s big of them. On closer examination, this amounts to ‘youth mobility’ visas being granted for one year, rather than two.
Surkeir Starmer says he’s going to get tough on immigration. No, he isn’t
So that’s all right then. And what, pray, will happen to any EU ‘student’ who decides to stay on after their visa has expired? What if they claim asylum because of their right to a family life, ownership of a cat, possession of a box-set of Gloria Gaynor LPs, or a distaste for foreign chicken nuggets, etc?
Er, we’ll get back to you on that.
The chances of them ever being deported are less than zero. Our immigration courts, dominated by Surkeir’s far-Left yuman rites acolytes, have already declared that even France is not a ‘safe’ country.
The idea that the EU is making ‘concessions’ is risible. It’s a one-way street. Starmer is on the brink of surrendering our fishing waters to the French as part of the ‘reset’. He’s also willing to adopt protectionist EU food and agriculture standards – jeopardising our chances of a US trade deal – and subject us once again to the jurisdiction of the European Court.
So, as far as the Remainiacs in the Labour Party are concerned, granting free movement to the under-30s is no big deal if it secures us a place back in the warm, suffocating embrace of Brussels.
They’re selling it dishonestly as the once-in-a-lifetime chance for young British men and women to boldly go where they’ve never gone before, to seek out new civilisations . . . to work in a foreign country, learn another language.
Don’t make me laugh. Most of those who do take advantage will end up on a beach by the Med, spaced out on cheap plonk and Moroccan roll-ups.
How many British ‘youths’ do you think will benefit, compared with those coming the other way? Somehow I can’t see Lee and Lance working in a car wash in Gdansk or opening a bogus ‘British barbers’ shop in Budapest.
The vast majority of these Channel arrivals are young men of military age about whom we know nothingÂ
Meanwhile, it will open the floodgates for foreign ‘youths’ to come to Britain, including the one million asylum seekers who have been granted EU citizenship. Why bother clambering onboard a dinghy, when you can be welcomed legally, secure in the knowledge that you will almost never be deported once your visa runs out?
According to a recent report, Pixie is already well aware that graduate visas are being converted to social care visas which allow foreign nationals to stay here virtually indefinitely. And what about those who will simply vanish into the black economy?
The main reason the Government is prepared to give in to the EU’s mobility scheme is that because the ‘youths’ would come here on allegedly temporary visas, they wouldn’t show up on the official immigration statistics. So we’re talking sleight of hand here, deliberate deception.
Some of you – not many, I would imagine – may be wondering why I insist on putting ‘youths’ in inverted commas. That’s because, as I argued on Friday, since when has anyone aged 30 been considered a ‘youth’?
I don’t know what you were doing when you were 30 but I was married with two children, mortgaged up to my oxters and attempting to hold down an allegedly responsible job in Fleet Street. I certainly wouldn’t have considered myself a ‘youth’ by any stretch of the imagination.
More to the point, how many over-30s have emigrated here since Tony Blair threw open our borders in 2004 and the Tories reneged shamefully on their promise to ‘take back control’ after Brexit?
Just look at those making the crossing illegally from France and shipping up on the Kent coast daily. OK, so the people smugglers put the odd woman with a young child into the dinghies to give the home-grown open borders brigade something to wring their hands about.
But the vast majority of these arrivals are young men of military age about whom we know nothing. Even the millions who have arrived legally have tended overwhelmingly to be younger people.
I haven’t seen many 40-somethings from Darfur riding Deliveroo bikes, or grey-haired Romanian women of a certain age working in hospitality. Have you?
As Groucho Marx said: Who you gonna believe, the Government or your lyin’ eyes?
Meanwhile, in desperation at its collapse in the opinion polls, Labour will say absolutely anything to pretend it is getting tough on immigration.
Facing with getting his ‘head kicked in’ by Reform at Thursday’s local elections – in the words of Labour peer Lord Glasman – Keir Starmer is putting it about that he intends to tighten immigration restrictions in the coming weeks. No, he won’t. And even if he did, his mates in the yuman rites racket would go to court to stop it happening.
If Labour was serious about clamping down on migration, it wouldn’t have scrapped the Rwanda deterrent on Day One, just as it was showing signs of working.
(As someone pointed out at the weekend, the number of people taking part in the London Marathon was almost exactly the same as the number of migrants who have crossed the Channel illegally over the past year and are now being billeted in four-star hotels in sleepy Datchet near Windsor and elsewhere. Not many over-30s there, either, judging by the photos on Mail Online of the fit young men in designer tracksuits loafing around the village green.)
The Government would also be closing down those Mickey Mouse ‘colleges’ – like the one in Oxford so brilliantly exposed by Guy Adams in Saturday’s Mail – which are used by bogus foreign students who have no intention of studying anything and yet are being bankrolled handsomely by the British taxpayer.
Nor would Surkeir be about to sign up to a ‘youth mobility’ scheme which will restore freedom of movement not by the back door, but by the front door.
Come on down!
As for Smashing The Gangs, how’s that working out, then? When they promise to get tough on migration, Starmer, Pixie and the rest of them are all lying to us.
Club 18-30 is about to reopen open for business. When it comes to immigration under Labour: It’s Happy Hour again.
