Europe is in turmoil over the mass migration policies of the EU elites. Migration has become a dominant, divisive issue across the European Union from eastern Germany to southern Italy—and in the UK.
Geert Wilders’ populist PVV party shocked the Brussels ‘bubble’ by finishing first in November’s Dutch elections, after pledging to cut “the asylum and immigration flood to the Netherlands” and ban mosques and Islamic schools. In the same month Dublin was convulsed by riots, sparked by the stabbing of three Irish schoolchildren and a woman by an Algerian-born knifeman. Meanwhile, nervous European cities have witnessed angry pro-Hamas protests by Islamist migrants, aided and abetted by their useful idiots on the Islamoleft.
The response of the panicking European authorities has been to brand anybody who speaks out about the problems connected to mass migration as ‘far right’ extremists who should be cancelled, censored, banned, or even arrested. But they cannot silence the growing disquiet.
Manfred Webber, German president of the centrist EPP group in the European Parliament, recently let slip the EU elites’ genuine fears. Weber warned that “If we do not find the solution or proper common understanding how to manage migration, then I’m very worried about the next European elections.” Note that Weber is not worried about the real economic, social, and cultural impact of mass migration on European societies, but about the fact that this might drive more people to vote for the ‘far Right’ next June. His fears are reserved for European voters—especially white working-class voters—who are anxious about what mass migration is doing to their countries and communities.
In response, we should insist that it is not ‘far right,’ racist, or extreme to worry about the effects of migration in Europe today. There are good reasons why it is now the issue that seems to matter most to millions of European voters and could have a dramatic impact in the run-up to next year’s elections to the European parliament.
Traditionally, European concerns about mass immigration have focused on the possible scarcity of resources. The record scale of recent migration, in the context of existing housing shortages, falling real wages and stretched public services, does nothing to alleviate those worries. But there is much more going on here than simply economics.
The migration debate has become the focus for some of the biggest conflicts in 21st century European politics.
Democracy and sovereignty
The biggest unasked question in European politics today is: who rules? Is democracy in Europe really about control by the demos—the people? Or is it a mask behind which the EU elites exercise the other side of that ancient Greek idea—kratos, meaning power and control?
Borders and mass migration are now at the heart of these political tensions. The centralising Brussels bureaucracy hates nothing more than national borders, and the national sovereignty on which real representative democracy depends. The EU’s obsession with imposing open borders has been made worse by its current demand that member states must accept a large number of migrants, whether they like it or not —a policy that goes by the Orwellian-sounding name of ‘compulsory solidarity’.
Here in the UK, our democratic Brexit revolt was fuelled by disquiet over an EU policy of mass immigration that we had never been asked to approve or offered a vote on. (The fact that post-Brexit Tory governments have failed to do anything about the problem does not undermine the legitimacy of that rebellion.)
Other EU member states may not yet be ready to contemplate leaving the bloc, but the idea of ‘taking back control’ of national borders is taking hold among many European peoples. European governments of differing political stripes are moving to reimpose border controls. Sovereigntist governments in Hungary and, until now, Poland have stood up to Brussels in ‘rule of law’ battles of who controls migration policy. The conflicts over migration will only become more intense as a proxy for the battle for the future of democracy in Europe.
Freedom of speech
Migration is also on the front line of the new free speech wars across Europe. Branding anybody who questions the pro-migration narrative as ‘far right’ or racist means that they should not be allowed the same rights as ‘respectable’ folk. This is an important part of the EU elites’ crusade to restrict what can be said and heard, and so narrow the terms of acceptable public debate.
Control of the language we can use is key to controlling the migration debate. By redefining economic migrants as refugees, and bizarrely relabelling illegal immigrants as mere ‘irregular migrants,’ the EU authorities and their supporters are effectively legitimising all forms of migration.
Those who question the conformist line on migration can be closed down. In the UK we have even heard paranoid Labour MPs demanding that popular former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage be barred from appearing on a TV entertainment show, to prevent him spreading his ‘toxic’ message against mass migration on the airwaves.
Meanwhile facts that don’t fit the official story can safely be denied. The standard established in Germany on New Year’s Eve 2015, when the police and the media sought to ignore or play down reports of mass sexual assaults against German women by groups of migrant men, has since become the norm.
Thus the Irish political establishment and their media allies refused to talk about the Algerian origins of the alleged Dublin knifeman last month. Those who did emphasise it were accused of spreading ‘misinformation’ and betraying ‘journalistic ethics.’ Whatever happened to the moral responsibility of journalists to report the whole truth, warts and all? Instead the Dublin government responded by threatening even tougher measures in its new ‘hate speech’ laws, designed to curb opinions considered beyond the political pale.
Elsewhere, states such as Sweden and Denmark are moving to criminalise Quran-burning protests against Islamisation. This is part of the general European trend effectively to impose new blasphemy laws that will protect Islam from trenchant criticism. Meanwhile Islamists have often been given free rein to spread antisemitism and genocidal hatred of Israel on the streets of our cities.
Those who would defend our most precious liberty today need to start by upholding free speech for anybody who wants to question the impact of mass immigration in Europe, no matter how loudly the other side screams ‘far right.’
Citizenship and culture
The migration issue goes even further into the heart of Europe’s political malaise. It raises fundamental questions about who we are and what values our societies believe in, questions that illustrate the widening gap between the ruling elites and the mass of the population.
Mass migration over the past two decades has changed the character of Western European societies. Last year net immigration to the UK reached a record 745,000. In the once-isolated and homogenous Republic of Ireland, one in five of today’s residents was born abroad. These sorts of seismic demographic changes inevitably raise concerns about how our countries and communities are being changed, and why. They threaten to alter the meaning of citizenship, of our stake in society.
The sight of those mass hate protests in European cities, celebrating the Hamas massacres of Israeli Jews, must have looked to many like a graphic warning of where we are and what might be to come. To live in a multi-ethnic society may be an inescapable, and in various ways positive, fact of life in Western Europe. (Though many Central and Eastern European states take a different view, as they are entitled to do.) To live in a multi-cultural society, however, under divisive rules and self-loathing laws imposed from the top down, feels more like a denial of the national culture and established values that held people together.
The woke EU elites are not merely oblivious to these popular concerns. They have actively sought to weaponise mass migration as a political and cultural ‘wedge,’ to weaken Europe’s traditional national and community loyalties.
I recall a rare honest insight to this process from more than a decade ago, from a former advisor to Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Andrew Neather belatedly admitted that, from 1999, Blair and New Labour had deliberately sought to “open up the UK to mass migration” in order to radically change British society and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”
Fearing the reaction of Labour’s ‘core working class vote’ however, ministers kept quiet about that policy and instead focused on the economic benefits of migration. And of course, when anybody complained, Labour would simply throw up their hands and say that the free movement of people was an inescapable rule of EU membership. The UK may since have left the EU, but Blair’s contemptuous use of migration in a bid to discipline and tame the working-class voters the elites fear and loathe has become institutionalised.
In the lead-up to the European elections next June, Democracy Watch will be keeping a close eye on how the migration debate affects the fight for sovereignty, democracy, free speech, and citizenship across the EU—whatever names they might call us.
Why Migration Is Now Europe’s No. 1 Issue
Europe is in turmoil over the mass migration policies of the EU elites. Migration has become a dominant, divisive issue across the European Union from eastern Germany to southern Italy—and in the UK.
Geert Wilders’ populist PVV party shocked the Brussels ‘bubble’ by finishing first in November’s Dutch elections, after pledging to cut “the asylum and immigration flood to the Netherlands” and ban mosques and Islamic schools. In the same month Dublin was convulsed by riots, sparked by the stabbing of three Irish schoolchildren and a woman by an Algerian-born knifeman. Meanwhile, nervous European cities have witnessed angry pro-Hamas protests by Islamist migrants, aided and abetted by their useful idiots on the Islamoleft.
The response of the panicking European authorities has been to brand anybody who speaks out about the problems connected to mass migration as ‘far right’ extremists who should be cancelled, censored, banned, or even arrested. But they cannot silence the growing disquiet.
Manfred Webber, German president of the centrist EPP group in the European Parliament, recently let slip the EU elites’ genuine fears. Weber warned that “If we do not find the solution or proper common understanding how to manage migration, then I’m very worried about the next European elections.” Note that Weber is not worried about the real economic, social, and cultural impact of mass migration on European societies, but about the fact that this might drive more people to vote for the ‘far Right’ next June. His fears are reserved for European voters—especially white working-class voters—who are anxious about what mass migration is doing to their countries and communities.
In response, we should insist that it is not ‘far right,’ racist, or extreme to worry about the effects of migration in Europe today. There are good reasons why it is now the issue that seems to matter most to millions of European voters and could have a dramatic impact in the run-up to next year’s elections to the European parliament.
Traditionally, European concerns about mass immigration have focused on the possible scarcity of resources. The record scale of recent migration, in the context of existing housing shortages, falling real wages and stretched public services, does nothing to alleviate those worries. But there is much more going on here than simply economics.
The migration debate has become the focus for some of the biggest conflicts in 21st century European politics.
Democracy and sovereignty
The biggest unasked question in European politics today is: who rules? Is democracy in Europe really about control by the demos—the people? Or is it a mask behind which the EU elites exercise the other side of that ancient Greek idea—kratos, meaning power and control?
Borders and mass migration are now at the heart of these political tensions. The centralising Brussels bureaucracy hates nothing more than national borders, and the national sovereignty on which real representative democracy depends. The EU’s obsession with imposing open borders has been made worse by its current demand that member states must accept a large number of migrants, whether they like it or not —a policy that goes by the Orwellian-sounding name of ‘compulsory solidarity’.
Here in the UK, our democratic Brexit revolt was fuelled by disquiet over an EU policy of mass immigration that we had never been asked to approve or offered a vote on. (The fact that post-Brexit Tory governments have failed to do anything about the problem does not undermine the legitimacy of that rebellion.)
Other EU member states may not yet be ready to contemplate leaving the bloc, but the idea of ‘taking back control’ of national borders is taking hold among many European peoples. European governments of differing political stripes are moving to reimpose border controls. Sovereigntist governments in Hungary and, until now, Poland have stood up to Brussels in ‘rule of law’ battles of who controls migration policy. The conflicts over migration will only become more intense as a proxy for the battle for the future of democracy in Europe.
Freedom of speech
Migration is also on the front line of the new free speech wars across Europe. Branding anybody who questions the pro-migration narrative as ‘far right’ or racist means that they should not be allowed the same rights as ‘respectable’ folk. This is an important part of the EU elites’ crusade to restrict what can be said and heard, and so narrow the terms of acceptable public debate.
Control of the language we can use is key to controlling the migration debate. By redefining economic migrants as refugees, and bizarrely relabelling illegal immigrants as mere ‘irregular migrants,’ the EU authorities and their supporters are effectively legitimising all forms of migration.
Those who question the conformist line on migration can be closed down. In the UK we have even heard paranoid Labour MPs demanding that popular former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage be barred from appearing on a TV entertainment show, to prevent him spreading his ‘toxic’ message against mass migration on the airwaves.
Meanwhile facts that don’t fit the official story can safely be denied. The standard established in Germany on New Year’s Eve 2015, when the police and the media sought to ignore or play down reports of mass sexual assaults against German women by groups of migrant men, has since become the norm.
Thus the Irish political establishment and their media allies refused to talk about the Algerian origins of the alleged Dublin knifeman last month. Those who did emphasise it were accused of spreading ‘misinformation’ and betraying ‘journalistic ethics.’ Whatever happened to the moral responsibility of journalists to report the whole truth, warts and all? Instead the Dublin government responded by threatening even tougher measures in its new ‘hate speech’ laws, designed to curb opinions considered beyond the political pale.
Elsewhere, states such as Sweden and Denmark are moving to criminalise Quran-burning protests against Islamisation. This is part of the general European trend effectively to impose new blasphemy laws that will protect Islam from trenchant criticism. Meanwhile Islamists have often been given free rein to spread antisemitism and genocidal hatred of Israel on the streets of our cities.
Those who would defend our most precious liberty today need to start by upholding free speech for anybody who wants to question the impact of mass immigration in Europe, no matter how loudly the other side screams ‘far right.’
Citizenship and culture
The migration issue goes even further into the heart of Europe’s political malaise. It raises fundamental questions about who we are and what values our societies believe in, questions that illustrate the widening gap between the ruling elites and the mass of the population.
Mass migration over the past two decades has changed the character of Western European societies. Last year net immigration to the UK reached a record 745,000. In the once-isolated and homogenous Republic of Ireland, one in five of today’s residents was born abroad. These sorts of seismic demographic changes inevitably raise concerns about how our countries and communities are being changed, and why. They threaten to alter the meaning of citizenship, of our stake in society.
The sight of those mass hate protests in European cities, celebrating the Hamas massacres of Israeli Jews, must have looked to many like a graphic warning of where we are and what might be to come. To live in a multi-ethnic society may be an inescapable, and in various ways positive, fact of life in Western Europe. (Though many Central and Eastern European states take a different view, as they are entitled to do.) To live in a multi-cultural society, however, under divisive rules and self-loathing laws imposed from the top down, feels more like a denial of the national culture and established values that held people together.
The woke EU elites are not merely oblivious to these popular concerns. They have actively sought to weaponise mass migration as a political and cultural ‘wedge,’ to weaken Europe’s traditional national and community loyalties.
I recall a rare honest insight to this process from more than a decade ago, from a former advisor to Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Andrew Neather belatedly admitted that, from 1999, Blair and New Labour had deliberately sought to “open up the UK to mass migration” in order to radically change British society and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”
Fearing the reaction of Labour’s ‘core working class vote’ however, ministers kept quiet about that policy and instead focused on the economic benefits of migration. And of course, when anybody complained, Labour would simply throw up their hands and say that the free movement of people was an inescapable rule of EU membership. The UK may since have left the EU, but Blair’s contemptuous use of migration in a bid to discipline and tame the working-class voters the elites fear and loathe has become institutionalised.
In the lead-up to the European elections next June, Democracy Watch will be keeping a close eye on how the migration debate affects the fight for sovereignty, democracy, free speech, and citizenship across the EU—whatever names they might call us.
READ NEXT
The Enterprise State
Play the Ball, not the Man: Cancel Culture’s Attempt To Capture Hungarian Academia
Starmer’s War on Farmers: a New Low for Client Politics