Capitalism is emerging as the culprit for mass immigration
The mask is off. After years of the Tories dissembling with the British public on the subject of immigration, prattling disingenuously about getting the figures down to the “tens of thousands” and “stopping the boats” – this latter mantra being a distraction from the real menace of legal, rather than illegal, immigration – Rishi Sunak finally showed his true colours in a speech to the Global Investment Summit at Hampton Court on Monday.
It was nothing less than a declaration of war on the clearly expressed wishes of the British public. There is now a consensus and an urgency about drastically cutting immigration into the UK that one might have expected a prime minister, within a year of a general election, to take into account. Instead, Sunak disregarded the public’s known wishes to champion large-scale legal immigration. It was a re-run of the similar collision between the establishment and the electorate in the wake of the Brexit referendum.
Sunak told his audience that “we don’t have a monopoly on talent in this country and we recognise that nearly half of our most innovative companies have an immigrant founder. So if you’re an innovator, an entrepreneur, a researcher, you should know that the most competitive visa regime for highly skilled international talent is right here in the UK.”
If any British prime minister since Robert Walpole has made a more provocative comment, insulting this country, it does not imminently come to mind. Where does Rishi Sunak get his information that nearly half of Britain’s most innovative companies were founded by foreigners? From an article in a 2019 edition of Forbes, the house magazine of globalist capitalism, is the answer. He has quoted it several times before. The question arises: how does one estimate the innovative quality of a company without resorting to highly subjective assessments?
In 2019, Forbes claimed 49 per cent of Britain’s most successful firms had an immigrant among their founders. Forbes has since reduced that assertion to 39 per cent. Since such judgements are elastic, the figure could easily be manipulated to 99 per cent or 1 per cent, at will. But Sunak’s contemptuous message is clear: Britain is a talent-free zone that can only be rescued from the entrepreneurial doldrums by a massive infusion of immigrants.
It will not concern the Prime Minister that he has insulted Britain’s native entrepreneurs, many of whom have enjoyed spectacular success, since neither they nor the electorate is the audience he desires to cultivate. Sunak seeks only the good opinion of the globalist capitalist elites, those on whom his future career depends from next year onwards, when he orchestrates his return to California, where he has a multi-million-dollar apartment he calls “home”.
It is striking how little interest, or respect, or understanding Sunak exhibits towards Britain. This is a new kind of UK prime minister. Formerly, ambitious British politicians aspired to be prime minister, in the footsteps of Pitt, Disraeli and Churchill: for Sunak, the office is a useful addition to his CV before he embarks on his serious career in Silicon Valley.
To sustain that CV, he cannot afford to be seen to be obstructing the globalist agenda by restricting migration of cheap labour, which would lead to his cancellation by the Davos elites. Instead, he prefers to alienate the British public by directly contradicting its urgent wishes. And why not? The little people don’t count. How many of them control a FTSE 100 enterprise? Sunak is intelligent enough to realise he hasn’t a prayer of surviving the next election, so why would he spoil his credentials with the Davos elites by indulging voters?
Rishi Sunak can hardly be described as rooted in a culture of immigration control. Infosys, the company founded by his father-in-law, in which his wife received an $800m stake, is one of the world’s largest outsourcing companies, described by The New York Times as having helped American companies to replace their workers with thousands of Indian immigrants.
There are many others, a controlling clique within the Tory Party, who share Sunak’s indifference to national sentiment. Sunak’s resurrection of David Cameron, the defeated Remain leader, promoted to high office without any input by the despised electorate, showed his patrician indifference to the prejudices of the Great Unwoke.
Lies have always been the stock-in-trade of politicians, but they have never before been so barefaced as in the contemporary Conservative Party. No one seriously doubts that Sunak lied brazenly to Suella Braverman about his intentions concerning immigration, to secure her support for his leadership. Sunak has no mandate as prime minister, either from the electorate or even from his own party membership, which rejected him. But he retains the confidence of the globalist establishment, so he is in office, even if not in power.
As for his “most competitive visa regime for highly skilled international talent”, that evokes a loud belly laugh. Did Britain import 745,000 entrepreneurial innovators of genius last year? Were they all cutting-edge AI researchers, nuclear physicists and banking analysts? Does the government take us all for fools? In some areas of employment, visas are being handed out to people with incomes as low as £16,000. This country is routinely refusing admission to medical school to applicants with three “A”s – in 2021, some 85,000 British applicants were chasing 7,000 places at UK medical schools – while stripping Nigeria of doctors.
We are at detonation point on the immigration issue, but the Tories are so out of touch that they are unaware of the gathering storm. However, not only is the immigration crisis approaching breaking point, but a whole new factor has entered into the equation.
Public anger is now flooding out beyond the immediate issue of immigration and focusing on a fresh target. Capitalism is at risk. For half a century, throughout the Cold War, free-market capitalism was seen as epitomising the Free World, in opposition to the failing command economies of the Soviet bloc. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher gave it a fresh impetus, just before the Soviet Union imploded.
That “narrative” prevailed until the banking crisis of 2008. The impact of that event was deeper and more enduring than most people realised at the time. This was succeeded by the further alienating phenomenon of woke capitalism and the charlatanry of DEI and ESG (which Demos, the Labour think tank recommends the next government should impose on companies as a legal obligation, just as Larry Fink, Unilever and other high priests of the discredited cult are in “I’m outta here” mode).
Nothing that finance capitalism could ever do would gain it the tolerance of the Left; in recent years it has become distrusted and is on the verge of becoming hated by the Right. After 2008, many conservative commentators were uneasily aware that capitalism needed to clean up its act and restore its moral authority. Instead, it plunged into neo-Marxist social engineering, while banks began to treat their customers as contemptuously as the government treats voters.
The debanking of Nigel Farage was a tipping point. Still, banks continue to seek intrusive power by abolishing cash and joining the rest of the elites in embracing the potential of AI to impose widespread social control. Now, the revelation that Big Business and its octopus tentacles of lobby groups are the primary instigators of mass immigration is alienating the public from capitalism.
The fact that public services can be brought to a standstill – all in the interests of inflating the bottom line in corporations’ annual reports – is now beginning to be recognised by the British public. Against the devastation of health, housing, transport, education and many other vital services, the claim that mass immigration “benefits the economy” is laughable.
The Treasury has an obsession, by now transformed into a superstition, that large-scale migration, year-on-year, is essential to sustain growth. This alleged benefit is justified by use of GDP statistics, which are completely misleading in this context. When the more accurate measure of GDP per capita – which also takes into account the increase in population – is used, the supposed benefits quickly evaporate. It must be obvious to any sentient person that the effects of immigration on public services more than cancel out any claimed benefits.
The cultural consequences of uncontrolled immigration are devastating. Yet the woke civil servants in the Home Office cannot get enough immigration and ministers notoriously have lost control. The backlash will be ferocious and much of it is now likely to be directed against capitalism, rightly seen as the enemy of national identity, homogeneity and cultural integrity. The blindness of those directing capitalist institutions is appalling. The unimaginable has happened: many on the Right now see capitalism as the enemy.
That is not an entirely novel posture for the forces of conservatism: it was a recognised position, from the French Revolution until the Russian Revolution, which threw all non-Marxist forces into an uneasy alliance against Communism. With the Soviet Union a distant memory, the time was ripe for conservatives to resume an antipathetic relationship with capitalism and mass immigration has triggered that reaction. This is extremely dangerous – as all attempts at social engineering of demographic change invariably are.
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