(personal underlines)
Middle England is finally waking up to the migrant crisis
I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term ‘accelerationism’. It is generally used to describe a tendency on the left, though is increasingly heard on the right too.
The basic idea of accelerationism is that there are certain flaws in the societal structure which if pushed could bring things to their inevitable conclusion more quickly.
It is why there are so many people on the left of politics who say that sustainable government spending should be discouraged. It is not just because they are economically illiterate. What they really hope is that a speeded-up financial disaster will expose the ‘underlying contradictions of capitalism’, and we’ll all realise that Karl Marx was right and promptly vote for Zack Polanski or similar at the next election.
Such accelerationism is a tendency that conservatives usually have the sense to avoid, largely because conservative-minded people are more sceptical of the idea that things always fall out in a way that fits our own existing desires. A key insight of conservatism, since the French Revolution at least, is that there is always room for things to get worse – generally in ways that no one outside Beelzebub’s immediate family could have imagined.
Yet there is a right-wing version of accelerationism that has started to bubble up a little more volubly of late. This centres around the idea that our high immigration, stretched welfare state and societal model is heading for a crash and that there might be some advantage in things travelling a little faster in that direction. If legal and illegal migration continue to speed up, so this belief goes, then a greater proportion of the public will finally realise what a disastrous model it was. Things will then come to their inevitable end point and we can get this muddy intermediate phase over and done with quickly.
It is surprising that Andy Burnham has turned out to be such a boon to the right-wing accelerationists, but that is what he is proving to be. Not least through his sinister and hilarious idea of solving the country’s problem of where to house illegal migrants by putting more of them in leafy middle-class areas.
As it happens, there are good arguments for Burnham’s brainwave. For decades, left-wing and putatively right-wing governments have managed to disguise many of the downsides of mass migration by making sure the migrants are housed in working-class areas. All across the country this has proved a brilliant wheeze, because if any migrants hang around the streets and start propositioning schoolgirls, you can expect to snooker the locals in a number of ways.
First you can expect them to keep quiet about it, knowing that their betters in Westminster have made decisions they could not possibly understand even if it was explained to them slowly. Second, you can expect that if the locals do object, who cares? Nobody goes to dinner parties with these people anyway, nobody weekends in their areas and none of the locals has a regular presenting slot on Newsnight. Thirdly, if the above doesn’t work and there is actually a ruckus, you can just call the locals ‘racist’, which will make them scurry away, doffing their caps as they do so in the direction of their moral and social superiors.
That was the model Keir Starmer’s government continued when it allowed migrants to stay in hotels in Essex. Starmer and co didn’t care about the people there, and when some of them did pipe up to say they weren’t keen on the child-molesting that seemed to have emerged in the area, the far-left turned up to shut them down, called the locals ‘racist’, and the problem apparently went away.
So I have some sympathy with those who are pleased to hear that Burnham thinks non-working-class areas of the country should take their own unfair share of illegals, particularly when you read the details. For instance there is the idea of housing 1,250 ‘male asylum seekers’ right beside Piddington in Oxfordshire. The village has a lovely church and village hall. The 2011 census recorded a population of 370. A similar brainiac has decided that the village of Barnham in Suffolk should have a right going-over. Barnham has a population of 600, a charming bell tower and a nearby landscape garden designed by Capability Brown. It too is scheduled to welcome 1,250 ‘asylum seekers’.
It is not for me to make predictions. But I suspect that the illegal migrants housed in these parts of rural England will not appreciate the subtleties of church architecture or landscaped gardens. Problems are likely to arise. I say no more.
All this is likely to bring some of our nation’s problems home in a way that will be harder and harder for ‘Middle England’ to ignore. Accelerationists on the right at this point think: ‘And then they will realise that we were right.’ But it is not inevitable that things will fall out that way. My own observations of people and their political delusions suggest that Islington could be completely overrun by migrants and the locals would still turn out of a weekend with ‘Smash fascism’ and ‘Stand up to racism’ banners. Remember that communism in the 20th century killed tens of millions of people, yet there are still people who believe it was a good thing. Why should the multiculturalist open-borders types hand over their political philosophy any more easily?
Allow me to make just one prediction. I suspect that in the coming weeks we will be told that the natives of Piddington and Barnham turn out, sadly, just to be very, very racist. What is more, the only way the locals could ever be cured of this is if they can experience greater diversity.
At this stage our country is quite mad enough to accelerate over a cliff. Some folks might even like that.
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