Liberal Britain’s Had Its Fill of Illegal Immigration. Why Now?
10th August 2025
Small boats and fateful decisions on asylum have shifted polite opinion firmly to the right. It risks moving further if the tap isn’t turned off.
Note how ‘shifting right’ is automatically characterized as being a ‘risk’. (Oh, no, we don’t want to shift right!)
On Tuesday morning, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, went on the BBC’s Today programme to be interrogated about the government’s new “one in, one out” plan to deport illegal migrants back to France. It is the “right principle”, she said, that people who arrive on small boats should be returned.
Amol Rajan, the host, pressed Cooper. “The trouble is, a year on from being in power, the numbers are going up, not down,” he said. “Don’t you think, if you said … ‘we hope to return 5,000 a year through this scheme’ it would help win the public over?”
You could hardly hope for a better encapsulation of just how far the liberal consensus on migration has shifted in this country. Neither the Labour home secretary nor the Today show host interrogated the assumption that illegal migrants should be deported; it was merely a question of how many and how fast.
Reality is what hangs around even if you don’t believe in it.