Democracy must prevail over mob rule

Will an incoming Labour government kowtow to extremist pressure from its base?

For UnHerd, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says Sir Keir Starmer must grapple with the reality of extremism among his voters and activists.

Faced with the arrival of a new community with such a strong belief system, Europe’s political elites sought refuge in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Denying them agency, we shrouded Muslim immigrants in a rhetoric of victimhood. A set of false assumptions were developed to characterise them as a casualty of exclusion and discrimination. It became just another form of “common sense”. After 2001, when Jihadi terrorism started to take place in Europe, and survey after survey showed that most Muslims quietly supported the belief system that justified the terrorists’ activities, European leaders doubled down on those assumptions. Rules were relaxed, standards were lowered, and excuses were made whenever their estrangement tipped over into violence.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon of data manipulation became the political norm. Academics and think-tankers lined up to produce reassuring outcomes on paper that refused to acknowledge the rising tide of Islamisation, either by ignoring it completely or downplaying the number of Muslim migrants. The establishment of Sharia tribunals was barely registered, while we were told the construction of gigantic Mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centres were led and manned by moderate Muslims. Those brave enough to still speak out — for example over grooming gangs — were silenced or expelled.

This is the backdrop to the rise of Islamist attacks in Europe and the West, but it is also the cause of today’s political crisis in Britain. Across the country — from Rochdale to Tower Hamlets, Salisbury to Manchester — we are starting to witness what happens when Islamism is given licence to flourish. Many were fooled into thinking that 2024 would be a “boring year” for Britain: that, after the turbulence of the Tories, the reign of Starmer would, at worst, be benignly insipid.

But this was always a fantasy. Starmer, like so many of his predecessors and counterparts in Europe, is simply focused on the short-term goal of winning the general election. And, again like so many of them, he now finds himself wrestling with a Muslim base that will require compromise if he’s to win their vote: only yesterday, he called for a “ceasefire that lasts” in Gaza, without explaining how that might come about. It is, in other words, increasingly starting to feel like 2005 redux: a replay of the VVD’s electoral conundrum, and an allegedly “common-sense” response that inevitably backfires.

In The Telegraph, Fred de Fossard argues that as Labour gets closer to power, the more it will reveal its Corbynite tendencies.

Labour MPs report that they have been threatened by protestors, hounded by pro-Palestine activists demanding they call for a ceasefire or condemn Israel’s actions against Hamas as a “genocide”. Video footage of Labour MPs like Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and others being hounded by activists, many of them Islamists, tells the real story behind the procedural drama. 

As the poisonous Rochdale by-election campaign shows, parts of Britain with large Muslim populations have seen their politics become explicitly sectarian, with Gaza the primary issue. If this spreads across the country, Britain will cease to be a pluralist parliamentary democracy, and will instead become a tribal polity, riddled with ethnic and religious tensions. The slide began decades ago during the Salman Rushdie affair, where the British state tacitly sided with those threatening violence against an iconoclastic author.

The threat this poses to British democracy and prosperity cannot be overstated, but our political parties have buried their heads in the sand, ignoring immigration-driven sectarianism. Conservative MPs have been in a state of denial, increasing immigration and allowing the Government’s counter-extremism programme to investigate supporters of Tory MPs while Islamist terrorists commit multiple atrocities, including murdering a serving MP. 

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says Parents are increasingly turning against smartphone ownership for under-16s, arguing that we should consider a societal ban.

This is happening because parents can see with their own eyes what the data is increasingly showing: rampant smartphone use has precipitated a marked and significant decline in child and teenage mental health across the developed world.

Rates of suicide, depression and anxiety have been rising for the past decade and psychologists studying the data (most prominently Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge) believe we are running out of alternative explanations for these trends. Haidt has even found that across multiple studies for teenage girls, the average correlation between increased depression or anxiety and heavy social media use is stronger than the correlation between IQ impairment and lead poisoning.

…in fact the studies show that “learning” something on a screen activates less of the brain than using a pencil and paper. Attention spans are shrinking, not growing. The childhood “preparation” needed to handle social media and smartphones sensibly as adults should involve training brains to be capable of long periods of concentration, emotional stability and discipline in the face of distraction.

For The Critic, James Vitali says leasehold is an unjust feudal relic and an impediment to true ownership.

If you currently own a flat in the UK, there’s a 94 per cent chance you’re a leaseholder. From the middle of the twentieth century, leasehold emerged as the principal framework for apportioning property rights for residential units in buildings with shared spaces. In this regime, a freeholder retains perpetual property rights over the building and the land it sits upon, whilst leaseholders acquire the right to reside in a particular residential unit for a limited period. Freeholders are responsible for the upkeep of the building, for which leaseholders contribute towards the cost. 

When a couple in this country have eventually saved up for a deposit, obtained a mortgage and purchased a flat, they believe they are realising a profoundly British aspiration — of becoming a property owner. They believe that they have acquired something fixed and stable that they can build their lives around, and which will give them a stake in society. Quite quickly, however, that same couple will come to see that the leasehold they have acquired is not an authentic form of ownership at all. It is a simulation of it. 

Think about all the reasons why owning property is so valuable. Property is a medium for self-expression. It offers a reliable store of value. It provides independence, and freedom from the arbitrary will of others. And it offers something that can be passed on to loved ones and future generations. All of these things are fundamentally undermined by the leasehold system. Leasehold properties are a very imperfect medium for self-expression, because leaseholders are limited in their ability to change (or indeed improve) their flat. They are not a reliable store of value — their value diminishes as the lease elapses. Leaseholders are subject to the arbitrary will of others presently: they are liable for charges over which they have no control or agency. And perhaps most importantly of all, a leaseholder only owns the temporary rights to a wasting asset; a leasehold property can only be passed onto future generations for the duration of the lease, after which it must be returned to the freeholder.

In The Telegraph, former Immigration minister Robert Jenrick says migration is keeping Britain as a low-wage economy, while welfare claims due to long-term sickness have skyrocketed.

Brexit was a promise of a higher wage, higher productivity economy. One that focused more on growing the size of the slice for the British worker – GDP per capita – than the overall size of the pie – GDP. And it was an emphatic rejection of the broken economic model of mass migration, deindustrialisation and hyper-globalisation.

As time has passed, that vote has been vindicated. As just one example, the evidence of the costs of mass migration continues to grow. This week analysis by the Centre for Migration Control showed the total cost to the taxpayer from jobless legal migrants has been £24 billion since 2020. That figure comes as little surprise when you consider that, during the past five years, just 15 per cent of non-EU nationals migrating to the UK actually came here to work. Although the ineffectual Rwanda Bill was the final straw that triggered my resignation, I have always argued that our uber-liberal legal migration system is the bigger problem that needs urgent and significant interventions.

Our immigration system has, in effect, become a bloated social safety net for the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our own welfare system has ballooned to support more Brits out-of-work than ever before. Unprecedented legal migration has massaged unemployment figures and masked a vast welfare dependency that exploded during the pandemic and has yet to recover. The scale of the problem hasn’t fully entered the public consciousness. It should be a national scandal that in Britain’s major cities – Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool – 20 per cent of the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits.

…Since the pandemic, we haven’t become dramatically sicker as a country, yet we now have a record 2.8 million people out of work on long-term sickness, with 4,000 being signed off every day. That’s 700,000 more than before the pandemic. The official forecasts indicate the numbers – and the benefits bill – for those out of work will rise. This is a drag on our economic recovery and feeds the appetite for yet more immigration which the public have emphatically rejected. But this isn’t just a huge economic challenge – it’s also a moral imperative. Those deprived of the dignity of work are being consigned to dependency, loneliness and insecurity. Children that grow up in workless households have lower educational chances and are more likely to be workless themselves. 

Neil O’Brien evaluates the economic impact of immigration on existing UK residents on his Substack.

One first thing to consider is that migration means the UK’s capital stock is divided between more people. Migrants may bring skills and their ability to work; but they cannot bring a mile of motorway; a large piece of industrial machinery; a house, a GP surgery, or an acre of land. The nature of capital stocks is that they have often built up over quite long periods, so the marginal flow of new capital doesn’t change the overall stock much.

In an ideal world our stock of stuff would grow much faster than the number of people. As a result, there would be more stuff to go round, making us more productive. In super-productive, capital-intense Britain you would get a seat on the train and hammer away on your laptop; you’d not waste time in a traffic jam; you’d use the latest bit of kit at work; or perhaps work in the shed at the bottom of your gigantic garden. Drudge work would be automated, and people freed up to get paid more doing those things only people can do. While new ideas and ways of doing things are most important thing of all for growth, there’s an incredibly tight correlation between capital stock per worker, and output per worker. Having large amounts of migration means splitting or diluting that capital stock between more people.

For the UK this issue about capital dilution is particularly significant, because a lot of economists would agree on two points about the UK economy. First, the UK has a problem about fixed capital investment. For many decades we’ve tended to be at the bottom of international league tables for investment in physical stuff that can drive productivity: buildings, machines; equipment and so on. Things like the new ‘super-deduction’ will help, but the problem is a long-running one, and won’t be reversed quickly. British firms installed about half as many industrial robots as France in recent years and about a tenth as many as Germany. South Korea has nine times more robots per manufacturing worker than the UK.

Second, the UK has a long-running problem about housing. We have one of the lowest rates of homeownership in Europe. The share of private renters who have to spend more than forty percent of their disposable income on housing is 38% here, compared to 25% in the Eurozone. There’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that 48% of heads of households in social housing in London were born overseas. But much less about the fact that 67% of private rented households in the capital are headed by someone born overseas. It’s just stupid to say migration is irrelevant to London’s housing challenges. Migrants are not “to blame” for the origin of these problems. But for the UK, the effect of migration in diluting the capital stock further and adding to our housing problem creates a challenge in exactly the areas of our economy where we have long-term problems.

Wonky thinking

The Centre for Migration Control published The Costs of Migration, which examines economic inactivity rates among economic migrants aged 16-64 and the fiscal cost this creates.

On Tuesday 13 February, the Office for National Statistics released its figures from the latest quarter of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) from October to December 2023. The data of the LFS is used by the ONS to calculate the size and composition of the UK workforce and is deemed to be so authoritative that it underpins the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook. One component of the LFS breaks down the economic status of individuals between the ages of 16 and 64; whether they are working, unemployed, or economically inactive, as well as by their nationality and country of birth.

This data has previously been used to report that, as a whole, the UK has 9.23m people who are out of work, and not actively looking for employment opportunities.1 The data is available here The Centre for Migration Control focused on the number of people who are economically inactive and from “non-UK” nations.

There are two clear conclusions that can be drawn from this data:

1) The number of economically inactive migrants, aged 16-64, reached a record high in 2023, surpassing any other single calendar year.

2) That public sector expenditure on economically inactive migrants has been £23.8bn (£35.84bn inc. students) since the start of 2020.

METHODOLOGY

1) To calculate the number of economically inactive migrants, aged 16-64 the CMC calculated the mean of the four quarters for each year since records began.

2) To calculate the economic burden that has been imposed on the UK taxpayer since 2020, the CMC used data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ spending composition spreadsheet that can be found here. We used the sum of those areas of expenditure which most directly affect the everyday lives on individuals: social security (non-pensioners), health, education, defence, public order & safety, transport, housing & community amenities. This, therefore, excludes any expenditure which goes towards overseas aid, debt interest, or social security for pensioners (those aged over 64 years) as well as longer term capital investments.

RESULTS

1) 2023 saw a record number of economically inactive 16–64-year-old migrants. The results show that in 2023 the number of economically inactive adult migrants, regardless of the visa on which they arrived, reached its highest point thus far, surpassing the total in 2022 which was, itself, a record figure.

2) Public expenditure on economically inactive migrants has been £23.8bn since 2020.

Book of the week

We recommend Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World by Rana Foroohar. The author argues that neoliberal policies prioritising efficiency over resilience have left national economies exposed and at the mercy of global markets.

While globalization has made the planet wealthier as a whole, that wealth has been concentrated largely at the very top, among financial and managerial elites who own the most assets, and to a certain extent at the very bottom; wages grew in developing countries, particularly China. Within most countries, however, inequality has also grown. Huge areas in many nations, rich and poor, have been hollowed out economically, or environmentally degraded, or left behind politically by globalization. The reaction has been widespread populism, nationalism, and the rise of autocracy in many parts of the world, an indicator that something in the system desperately needs tweaking.

One key part of the problem has been the mainstream economics taught in universities and business schools over the past forty years. It is what supported the “just-in-time” business culture in which redundancy in supply chains was considered a waste of time and money and in which the free flow of capital, goods, and labor across borders to create more economic growth was always considered a good thing, despite any inequality or financial fragility it might create. The idea that there might be human costs to efficiency or that these costs might come with their own snowball cycle of political or economic risks was simply not considered.

Covid-19, of course, ripped the scales from our eyes with regard to such assumptions. Suddenly it mattered that we sourced the majority of our cheap medical masks or key pharmaceutical ingredients from our biggest geopolitical adversary, China. It mattered that we lived in a country with a bifurcated healthcare system and spotty broadband coverage. It mattered that our economy was built on debt and asset bubbles rather than on income growth from good jobs.

…The truth is that [globalization] hasn’t been good for everyone all the time. As the process of globalization has unfolded over most of our lifetimes, there have been winners and losers. Taxes have been slashed. Borders have been opened (though more so for investment and the flow of goods than for people). But labor unions have been squashed, the industrial commons has been outsourced, and the cost of the things that make us middle class (housing, healthcare, and education) has risen dramatically. Corporate monopoly power has grown, and state-run capitalism has, too. Big companies and some emerging markets have benefited hugely from the last forty years. Everyone else, less so. Instead of a world economy in service to domestic policies and overall welfare of people within a broad range of nation-states, we’ve gotten a world economy in service to itself.

Quick links

Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle broke with convention to deny a controversial Gaza ceasefire vote, following pressure from the Labour leadership given threats against its MPs.

The Metropolitan Police said pro-Palestine protestors projecting the anti-Semitic slogan “From the river to the sea” onto Big Ben was not a criminal offence.

The former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, said “the Islamists are now in charge” following this week’s events in the Commons.

Tower Hamlets council is to be investigated following concerns over scrutiny, finances, staff appointments and the impartiality of the returning officer.

The former “ISIS bride”, Shemima Begum, lost her appeal against losing her British citzenship.

The fertility rate in England Wales dropped below 1.5 children per woman for the first time since records began.

The Government has secured a deal with the EU border agency to ease post-Brexit trade.

New guidance was issued to help schools reduce mobile phone use in schools.

One in four care workers have abused visa rules by working in other industries.

Demand from pension funds has driven a resurgence in the UK corporate bond market.

House prices began to rise, reaching 16% higher than this time last year.

The divorce rate hit its lowest ebb since 1971.

Germany has suggested its defence spending could rise to 3.5% of GDP.

The Urban China Initiative, a McKinsey-led think tank, advised the Chinese government to deepen co-operation between business and the military and push foreign companies out of sensitive industries, it was revealed.

German, Italian and Spanish voters are less likely to favour backing Ukraine until Russia fully withdraws than voters in Britain, the US, Denmark and Sweden.

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss told the US Conservative Political Action Conference that conservatives have compromised with the Left for too long.

Men and women’s brains work differently, according to new scientific research.

Artificial trans-women’s “milk” is as good as natural breast milk, an NHS trust claimed.