Another month and another set of immigration figures. 672,000 net immigration for the year to June 2023. At least that’s not quite as many people as at first feared. After all, the Mail earlier this week reported that it “understood” from internal Home Office forecasts that the number could be as high as 700,000. “The figure for the year to June is expected to top 700,000, beating the high of 606,000 for 2022, sources said.” Of course, as the piece went on to point out, the final figure from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) is likely to differ from that of the Home Office due to differences in methodology.
What are we supposed to make of the final figure of 672,000? Thank heavens it was only 672,000 and not 700,000 because that would have been disastrous? It seems that is indeed the purpose of the briefing of these pre-official numbers. It is a form of crude psychological manipulation that the Nudge Unit would barely get out of bed for, residing as it does at the more elementary end of behavioural science. Anchoring is a technique that has been used by retailers for years and is why the expensive bottle of wine in Waitrose makes £14.95 seem reasonable. This crude trick has been played in previous announcement cycles this year and will probably be played again by the Government although for it to work, it would help if the anchor number were a good deal higher than the actual one. It appears that more Government creativity is being put into managing our perception of immigration growth than into actually reducing it.
A second stream of gaslighting activity is being performed in parallel by the Left with enthusiastic participation on the part of the BBC. This is more subtle and can be summarised as the ‘Britain-has-always-been-a-nation-of-immigrants’ narrative. The lesson to be drawn from this narrative is that from the dawn of this country’s history, immigrants – black people in particular – have always played a big part and that any suggestion of a recent influx, wave or surge in immigration indicates racism, xenophobia and being self-evidently far-Right.
The latest contribution to the narrative was reported in the Daily Telegraph this week. A study by the Museum of London alleges “structural racism” in 14th century England as being behind a disproportionate mortality rate among London’s black population during the Black Death. This was, it is claimed, particularly the case for women who are described as victims of “misogynoir” (sic). The study does not appear to offer an estimate of what percentage of London’s population during the Black Death was black but the higher death rate is based on comparing the skulls of a sample of plague victims with those of a sample that died from other causes. As the Telegraph points out, this method of identifying ethnicity has a shaky track record. The Roman-era remains known as the Beachy Head Lady were claimed as those of a woman from sub-Saharan Africa but it later turned out that she was from Cyprus.
The BBC hit the news last month for including content material in its 2023 Black History Month programme containing the assertion that Roman emperor Septimius Severus was black. He was born in what is now Libya but was of Italian and Carthaginian parentage. African yes, black no. Like, say, Elon Musk. While this programming has been withdrawn, this and similar claims have been made for a while by the BBC, most memorably in its ‘Been Here From the Start’ video for CBBC’s Horrible Black History dating from 2021. It is still available to watch here. Every claim on the video from Cheddar Man to the Tudors was recently debunked expertly by historian Tom Rowsell.
The BBC, the Museum of London and others would all have us believe that Britain has ‘always’ been a country of immigrants. While it is true to state that immigration has always played a role, it has been pretty modest since the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and subsequently, the Normans. Modest, for century upon century – until this one. Because in the 21st century, as David Goodhart pointed out in his 2013 book The British Dream: Success and Failures of Post-War Immigration, New Labour drastically increased the levels of immigration.
From 1066 until 1950 immigration was almost non-existent – about 50,000 Huguenots in the 16th and 17th centuries, about 200,000 Jews in two waves, and perhaps one million or more Irish over 200 years during most of which time they were internal migrants within one state.
As Goodhart goes on to point out, since 2004:
More people arrive on these shores as immigrants in a single year than in the entire period 1066 to 1950 (excluding the Irish and wartime flows). [italics in original]
So, the latest immigration figures tell us that net migration in the year to June 2023 was almost three times the total immigration from 1066 to 1950. This extraordinary fact gives the lie to the idea of immigration being a continuous and ancient trend. There really has been a dramatic and gargantuan increase. The numbers bear this out.
The Left inverts reality across a number of dimensions in order to mask the truth. As a closing observation, reflect upon how it does the opposite with climate change, which really has been with us from the beginning. However, rather than accept that we live in one of a number of inter-glacial periods across history during which cooling and warming has occurred naturally, climate alarmists have to confect an ever more dramatic narrative of a sudden surge in man-made warming – the term ‘global boiling’ comes to mind. Perhaps we will come to think of this as the reverse gaslight.
Ian Price is a Business Psychologist and author of the Anti-Human Substack. Find him on X.
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The very measures that contributed to putting the NHS under pressure are now being suggested to relieve the pressure.
Please can we replace all health officials with engineers.
Replace them with anyone off the street – they couldn’t possibly do a worse job. In fact, come to think of it, we need to replace all the establishment with regular folk.
Hear, hear.
You think the problem is that the wrong people are in place?
The problem is that there is a group of people who none of us have any clue who they are, who seemingly have the power to arbitrarily impose draconian measures on 60 million people.
There doesn’t seem to be any control mechanism to regulate the insane actions of some junior ministers and bureaucrats.
We shouldn’t be in a position where if the wrong people are in place they can wreak havoc on all of us. A free society should have checks and balances that are a hell of a lot more robust than that.
When power is being abused, the problem is always that the wrong people have power and there’s no formal way of preventing the abuse of power once the wrong people have gotten it. The so-called democratic method of selecting those who’ll end up having power was supposed to prevent that. In hindsight, and when considering historic precedents, this was obviously pipe dream. One could also call this the myth of the 20th century: Humans naturally possess a set of inalienable rights and democracy is what safeguards these. One should really have noted the contradiction in adiecto earlier: If those right were inalienable, they wouldn’t need to be safeguarded. In reality, states grant certain privileges to certain people and what the state granted, the state can revoke.
Well Chimps from the zoo could do no worse.
Another government micro-brain spouting his unelected mouth off.
I despair. What’s the definition of lunacy again?
Government.
Here we go again …
At least anecdotal evidence gathered in pub-like conversations with friends would suggest none would actually return to the hubric folly of pretending non pharmaceutical interventions can actually contain the spread of a respiratory virus.
Reading some of the Mail on line comments was soothing. Overwhelmingly against any return to madness, and those supporting lockdowns are struck down with vitriol.
My favorite: “Just one more shot to flatten your pulse.”
I’m not so sure. They were plenty of people who claimed they would not comply in the previous rounds of madness – but they did.
It’s frightening just how many normies are out there still looking for any excuse to cower.
Most fell at the first hurdle and will fall again when the inevitable next time round comes calling.
Something must be done… something must be done…. Something must be done …. Perhaps they should switch him off? It’s time for them to learn that wild ideas that crash the economy are a bad idea.
So is the plan to ruin more of the economy with more lockdowns so we have even less money to waste on the NHS, rinse and repeat, until it’s gone completely.
Why do the idiots in the H o L keep asking ‘what the government is going to do’ in the face of rising infections?
If fools stop asking the question, maybe those in power will stop floundering around looking for a policy of some sort (doesn’t particularly matter whether it will work) so as not to look complacent.
FGS, Establishment, stop trying to justify your allowances by asking the same pointless questions- it’s a waste of time and resources.
“Depressingly, if unsurprisingly, it’s clear that the Government has not taken a hard look at lockdowns and other restrictions and found them to be too costly, ineffective and unethical to be warranted, but sees them still very much in play.”
The government know exactly what they’re doing – it’s a psyop. The goal is to demoralise and subjugate the population to such a degree that anything is possible. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much longer my patience will hold. I’m probably not alone.
With you.
We are not bankrupt enough yet, not enough people are dying due to the goo yet and old folks vote.
As for face masks, any rational discussion is impossible with those people.
They can and will therefore only be history, when the cult has collapsed and ended, due to either that bankruptcy, those mass goo deaths or a nuclear war.
With London being first in line for receiving the first bomb, the UK will at least be first and the world leader in that regard again.
I think I’ve changed my Mum’s position on muzzles by showing her the cultrue of fungal & bacterial spores from a mask worn for just 20 minutues… Fingers crossed!
This government was captured by the public sector some time ago.
That is one of the many reasons why Bunter was regarded as a fraud, had to go.
It is also one of the many reasons why ‘more of the same’ will lose the next general election.
The answer is simple: Kemi Badenoch.
The more I’ve talked to people and gently coerced their views on this, the more I’ve seen how many have now smelt the farmyard and woken up to this nonsense. It’s a tall order but let’s hope there’s a collective national “Get f&cked” if they try this again.
And this is really the key.
The authoritarians in position of power were always going to have another go and we are never really going to know if we are truly over this until they try it on and the population say “no”.
If we can push back the calls for measures we’ll be the stronger for it.
I very much doubt if an attempt to impose another Lockdown or return to Covid Restrictions will have the same effect it did in 2020/21.
They can try; but they can’t make us comply.
It’s very noticeable that the various “ethnic minorities” who are massively over-represented in Government, are generally authoritarians when it comes to Covid….. including Sunak, Javid, Braverman, Badenoch, Zahawi and Kwarteng …. who are currently all candidates for the Leadership.
Not entirely shocking news a few days after they finally manage to knock Boris Johnson down.
How about an “NHS Pull yourself together” policy? Like, for example, not slashing GP’s working hours and taking some of that cash that’s been fire-hosed at NHS management salaries and putting it instead to good use recruiting more frontline staff? The health services of other European countries have far more doctors and far less managers than we do, and yet somehow they end up more streamlined and don’t crumble under the slightest pressure from a small uptick in infection rate.
When the cat has gone away, the mice are gonna play.
With Johnson out of the way, another attempt at reintroducing a full set of COVID measures in the hope to eventually reach the blissful Chinese situation where people are starving in apartments whose doors have been bolted shut from the outside or die miserable deaths because their non-COVID chronic illnesses or ailments (like high blood pressure) don’t get treated anymore is obviously on the cards.
Until this murderous lot of closet communists has been thoroughly beaten, there’s always the risk that they manage to make a comeback and go onto another killing spree. If so-called democracy can’t protect us from this, it’s high time that it goes out of the window,.
Two instructive videos of Anna de Buisseret explaining our Statute Law, some of which have stipulated in the Statute that they can never be revoked. Lockdown impositions can never be lawfully enforeced without revoking a number of Statutes, including Magna Carta, signed into our law in the late 13th Century – the original was void due to duress & coercion, the one which remains on Statute was not signed under duress. These Statutes were written in simple English as they were intended for the ordinary men & women of this country to understand them.
Please disseminate this knowledge as far & wide as you can.
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/conversation-with-anna-de-buisseret_IuK4yn4YBG2PGgm.html
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/anna-de-buisseret-open-mic_45jx2WObTpolGaH.html
Mediocre non entities seeking oxygen of publicity. Some worrying signs with the Queen awarding the George Cross to Covidian NHS bureaucrats. The continual worship of a service which has locked out the majority of acute care cases because these eejits wanted to follow the Beijing hustle.
We had half-empty hospitals and now we have a massive treatment backlog which is still rising. We have ambulances waiting outside hospitals for hours because the occupant cannot be admitted. Yet still these idiots think that lockdowns are helpful?
Junior Ministers are like paper clips, found around the office, of little value and easily lost in the waste paper basket.
It’s evolution! Respiratory viruses achieve greater transmissibility by becoming less dangerous, and since it’s a competitive market place, more transmissible/less dangerous virus come to dominate and exclude other more virulent versions, and this process is ongoing as milder and milder versions evolve – as we have seen with Omicron and new versions – until we no longer realise they are present.
The correct course of action is do nothing that hinders the spread of evolved milder versions.
Now: are those in Government and NHS Covidiots really so thick they cannot understand this basic feature of evolution and epidemiology or is something else going on?
Spot on. It is impossible to understand what is happening from within the framework of public health protection. To me, we are seeing the beginnings of what I would call “opportunistic totalitarianism”, whereby given any crisis to use as an excuse, the state will jump on the chance to impose restrictive controls, surveillance, etc on the population.
In a sense, democracy is an ongoing battle against human nature, which always seeks to extend the level of influence or control, and awareness (surveillance) of the environment that surrounds us.
For governments, this means control of viruses, terror threats, the climate, and ultimately, people’s behaviour. That kind of overreach temptation is what the people have historically always risen up against. If not for people’s action, democracy would be thoroughly dead in the water by now and we really would be living in Orwell’s 1984.
So to answer your question, the policies that have been enacted over the past 2 years sound like they make sense on a superficial level, but are actually just cleverly worded rhetorical smokescreens using whatever excuse can be conjured up to further the agenda that culminates in total control by the state and large multinational corporations.
Global Majority Questioning the Narrative and Believe That Governments Are Taking Our Freedoms Away
https://t.me/covidpositivenews/976
Official Channel for Covid Positive News
Stand for freedom and don’t give the Globalists so much respect
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Another day, another crisis.?
How very NHS…
So Bojo is less than a week into his Gardening leave & here we go ! !!….
Also where’s this Kamal bloke appeared from
My 11 year old daughter has just had her appointment at Leeds dental hospital cancelled.
Why? Because the doctor has been told he might have the sniffles.
Waited about two months for this appointment. We weren’t offered a new appointment and have been told to phone up over the next few days to see if there have been any cancellations as they’re booked up for months.
Can’t these people just stop all this BS? ARE THEY REALLY SO STUPID AND/OR LAZY?
I phoned to make my next dental appointment and was told “5th April 2023”.
Anybody else notice that whites are being erased from politics, as Tommy Cooper once famously said ” Just like that”
Who the hell does Lord Kamall think he is?
These people need locking up they are very very dangerous to themselves and society in general.
RESIST DEFY DO NOT COMPLY!!!
If I read this correctly, “covid” admissions were in fact 687, since 64% of 1,911 admissions were not for covid but for something else, and the patient happened to have covid as well.