LET me ask you the same question I asked voters in the Red Wall this week. Do you think immigration is under control?
If I was a betting man, which I am, then I’d bet that, like them, you answered no. And you’d be right to think so.
Contrary to what the British people were promised, immigration is now totally out of control.
Illegal immigration on the small boats is making a mockery of Britain’s borders and its claim to be a self-governing, sovereign nation.
Nearly 100,000 people have crossed since 2018 and 65,000 are forecast to join them this year.
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And now you, the taxpayer, are paying £7million a day to house the growing numbers of migrants in hotels.
On top of that, the amount of legal immigration into Britain just hit a record high.
Net migration has soared to an eye-watering 504,000 — meaning half a million more people are coming into Britain than leaving each year.
Think we’ve got a housing crisis and an NHS crisis now?
Just wait until 2041 when, unless things change, our population is forecast to surge by another five million people, the equivalent to five cities the size of Birmingham.
And contrary to talk about “high skill” immigration, many of the people coming in are not high skill at all.
The salary thresholds people need to meet to get a work visa are as low as £23,000, well below the average wage of £33,000, while a large and growing number of migrants are simply relatives of international students.
Lean further to the cultural left than voters
Instead of Taking Back Control, we’ve Completely Lost Control.
So why is this happening?
Wasn’t the whole point of Brexit to not just leave the EU but lower immigration, so we can invest in British workers?
One part of the story is that the British people have been led up the garden path by a succession of leaders who routinely over-promised and under-delivered.
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While Tony Blair transformed Britain into a country of mass immigration, every Conservative Prime Minister since 2010, from David Cameron to Boris Johnson, has promised to lower immigration only to then see it rise.
And most MPs went along with this because, whether they are Conservative or Labour, they all lean much further to the cultural left than most voters.
Our political class, in other words, simply does not represent the rest of the country on this issue; it is in thrall to the liberal graduate class in the cities who benefit far more than others from mass migration.
Despite Brexit, both parties have remained firmly committed to mass immigration — to a hyper-globalised economy which, like a drug addict, has become hooked on importing cheap migrant workers to satisfy an alliance of big business and London liberals.
But the failure to shatter this consensus also reflects something that has taken place outside of the political elite — the rise of who I call “radical left progressives”.
Representing 15 per cent of Britain, they are highly educated, financially secure if not wealthy, come from families in the managerial and professional class and live in the big cities or university towns.
They are the academics, think tankers, creative, media, marketing and BBC-types, lefty lawyers, judges, NGOs and other professionals who either make a lot of money or work in low-income but high-status jobs which allow them to wield considerable influence.
One study describes them as highly opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and politically left-wing.
Two-thirds vote for Labour and three-quarters voted to Remain in the EU.
They absolutely hate Brexit and they absolutely loathed Boris.
They get their news from The Guardian, Channel 4, podcasts, BBC Radio 4 and Twitter.
They are six times more likely than the average voter to spend their days on Twitter, where they preach their political views and berate those who disagree.
They are the #FBPE (Follow Back Pro European) types who shriek about Brexit, compare Britain to Nazi Germany, impose their views on others and try to cancel anybody who dares to disagree with them.
The problem with progressives is that when it comes to their views they are utterly adrift from the rest of us.
They are fanatical in their support of immigration and “diversity”, which, like a religious belief, are considered sacred, never to be questioned or criticised.
While only 40 per cent of people think immigration changed Britain for the better, nearly 90 per cent of progressives do.
While most voters want less of it, they want to keep the status-quo or even increase it.
Or take the Government’s policy of relocating asylum seekers and illegal migrants to Rwanda, in East Africa.
While only 27 per cent of people oppose it, nearly 80 per cent of radical progressives do.
Were you to listen to their podcasts and debates, you might be left with the impression that only a fringe minority want to clamp down on immigration.
But in fact it is they who are the fringe minority, adrift from everybody else.
Nor is this the only issue which makes them distinct.
They are also the most likely to want to prioritise minorities over the majority, to think Britain is “very racist” and to think rights for women, minorities and trans people have “not gone far enough”.
They’re the least likely of all to feel attached to the British majority and the nation and the most likely to feel ashamed of our shared national identity.
While most of us feel proud of Britain, only one in four progressives do — they simply don’t see Britishness as an important part of who they are.
And they are utterly consumed with “historic injustices” — with what they see as the urgent need to tear down statues, rewrite history, revise books and repudiate our cultural inheritance.
While only 41 per cent of all voters think Britain cannot move on unless it deals with its past mistakes, 84 per cent of progressives think this way.
And while most people are mature enough to grasp that British history contains a mixture of the good and the bad, progressives only want to talk about the bad.
Theirs is a world where they simply want to erode and tear down the established barriers in society.
You can see this too on sex and gender.
They are the most likely to believe there are dozens of genders and that women can become men and men can become women.
While less than half the country believe “a transgender woman is a woman”, 71 per cent of progressives hold this view.
And they are the most likely to want to expose our children to these highly contested ideas, which often have no serious basis in science.
While not even one in three voters think it is appropriate for children to be taught about trans issues in primary school, 61 per cent of progressives do.
And they’re the only group who think political correctness has “not gone too far” and support further restrictions on our speech and expression.
If you want to explain why voters have not been given what they asked for, in other words, then you need to look at the radical progressives.
Increasingly, they are wielding growing influence over the institutions — over the schools, the universities, much of the media, the civil service, the courts, the NGOs and the activist groups.
But the enormous gulf which separates them from the rest of the country cannot remain in place for ever.
As those voters in the Red Wall reminded me, when the ruling class loses touch with the rest of the country the result is often a seismic political earthquake.
The only question, when it comes to immigration, is what form that political earthquake will take and when it will arrive?
- Matt Goodwin is the author of Values, Voice And Virtue: The New British Politics, (Penguin) available now, £10.99.
