Boris Johnson is blameless for the UK’s mass migration “Boriswave” ushered in under his leadership, stating it was merely an exercise in human quantitative easing to suppress inflation demanded by the Treasury.
The public conversation around the surge in migrant arrivals under the last Conservative governments in the United Kingdom is “so unfair” because commenters can’t see how Boris Johnson is innocent of responsibility, Boris Johnson has said.
In remarkable comments to a podcast of The Daily Telegraph newspaper, where he had formerly been a journalist before entering politics, Mr Johnson brushed aside gross government failure as a simple fact of life rather than a problem to be fixed, side-stepped a discussion on whether mass migration risks British ceasing to the British, and launched a raft of well-worn talking points on immigration.
Grilled on his record on immigration, which has been thrown into sharp relief recently by an emerging narrative of a “Boriswave” that saw — the host noted — “between January 2021 and June 2024 4.3 million migrants” in a period where migrant arrivals gross was running at one million people every ten months, Johnson pointed the finger of blame.
Yet while the Telegraph interview may have been an attempt at reputation and legacy management, the tacit admission by Johnson that the government wasn’t in command of the situation and that the Treasury department were calling the shots may not inspire confidence. He said:
…we didn’t know the numbers [of arrivals], because of the system we’d inherited, we didn’t know how many had come in… we couldn’t see the numbers, we were flying blind, we couldn’t see how many were coming in — not in real time, they [the Home Office] don’t.
And so all we could see was inflation, so by the end of 2021, beginning of 22, suddenly inflation is getting into double figures. And that is very, very bad. And the treasure basically believed that was being caused partly by the labour market seizing up, and people couldn’t get a pair of hands to get they job they needed done. And there had to be a fix for that… I’m trying to analyse this in retrospect, because this was not something that the government set out to do…
The so-called Boriswave, then, was by Johnson’s own tacit admission an exercise in what has been called human quantitative easing, the flooding of the labour market with bodies to cool the economy. Further, it seems, all organs of the state are available to be bent to the Treasury’s will — even to the extent of massively betraying the democratic will and interests of the British people — because that office was perceived as the only department with any idea of what was happening in the country and why, reducing border control to nothing more than another macro-economic tool.
Peppered in these remarks on migration were constant references to the Ukrainian visa scheme, deployed by Johnson as a final moral trump to defeat criticism of migration. While the Ukrainian arrivals were a tiny fraction of the millions that came in those years, they are perhaps the most morally defensible, making them a convenient smokescreen for pro-mass-migration argument.
The Centre for Migration Control responded to Johnson’s remarks with a peppery statement this week, saying of his claims: “The BorisWave was economic and social vandalism, conducted without a democratic mandate.
“Johnson betrayed 2019 Tory voters and now has the brass neck to insist he took back control of our borders. This is a damaging lie.”
As previously reported, Brexit’s Nigel Farage has vowed to tackle the Boriswave migrants if elected to power, the prospect of which clearly deeply vexes Mr Johnson and which he spent a good deal of his time in that appearance rubbishing. As reported of Farage’s position last month:
While the British public are “rightly” focussed on the highly visible Channel Migrant Crisis, Mr Farage said a conversation is needed about the migration that successive governments have decreed legal, hand-waving the issue away. He said: “both Labour and Conservative governments have been happy to have open-door migration, the Liberal Democrats would not criticise… and that’s why we have not had a proper, full national debate about this.
“What we are attempting to do today is make people realise that large-scale migration into Britain, where 50 per cent at least of those who come will never work and live off the British state, is actually making this country substantially poorer.”
A neologism that has entered the British political lexicon from right-wing X posters, the Boriswave describes the totally historically unprecedented wave of migrants ushered into the United Kingdom during the Boris Johnson Conservative party government. Many of these millions of arrivals of whom are now on the cusp of being eligible to receive what is called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, cementing their position in Britain for good.
Mr Farage said of this Boriswave: “…the millions that came in the years of his premiership represents the greatest betrayal of democratic wishes in anyone’s living memory. This isn’t what Brexit voters wanted, and it certainly isn’t what any Conservative voter wanted from 2010 onwards, where in election after election they were promised that net migration would come down to tens of thousands a year, and we learn that in the worst year it was… certainly over one million.”
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