How We're Being Gaslit on Immigration and Climate

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.