Boris Johnson: Stormer’s Welcome to Britain… combined with Orwell’s 1984

For the first time I am seriously concerned about freedom of speech in this country.

I’m not just talking about freedoms that are important to people who genuinely believe them to be true. I’m talking about the freedom to say things that are actually true, but what the Labour government has decided is no longer acceptable.

Let me give you an example. We have a problem with criminal gangs who have been transporting migrants in small boats across the Channel for years. This practice is dangerous and hundreds of people, including children, have drowned.

The British public was outraged at the sight of these ships. They do not understand why this trade in human lives cannot be stopped.

They cannot understand why the British Border Force appear to have abandoned any attempt to protect the UK’s borders and are instead actively driving these boats and barges towards our shores.

No one knows who these passengers are, where they come from or what their intentions are once they reach the UK, and yet they arrive in their hundreds of thousands. The whole charade seems to be a parody of the British state and our ability to control our borders.

The vast majority of people want to see the trafficking gangs dismantled and want a practical way to discourage young people – especially young people – from making the journey. That’s why it was so important that we finally had a plan: the Rwanda Economic and Migration Partnership, which, given more time, will undoubtedly work.

As I said in Dover in April 2022, this was always going to be difficult to implement. I predicted it would face fierce opposition from the left-wing lawyers (Keir Starmer is a good example) who are so prominent in the world of immigration law.

In fact, the opposition was united, but we could have defeated it in the end (as we did with Brexit, against a similar opposition).

Even before the Rwandan plan could come into effect, the prospect alone had a deterrent effect on gangs, with potential migrants choosing Ireland over the UK, for example.

Many other countries have followed the British model and opted to counter traffickers by sending their victims to third countries for processing.

It was the right plan and it is still the right plan. Look at the channel in the last few weeks: about 6,000 people have turned up since the election, and some days with near record numbers. But Starmer has left out Rwanda and put nothing in its place.

Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper resemble the two gay Dutch police officers in Harry and Paul’s sketch, who congratulate themselves on reducing crime in Amsterdam by legalising theft.

Instead of cracking down on gangs, Labour has announced an amnesty for 100,000 people who are to be deported, meaning they will now seek asylum in the UK and inevitably live there.

Instead of addressing the problem, they insist that we change the language in which we talk about it.

We are now being officially told that we can no longer refer to cross-Channel traffic as ‘illegal’ migration, but only as ‘irregular’ migration.

Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper resemble the two gay Dutch police officers in Harry and Paul’s sketch, who congratulate themselves on reducing crime in Amsterdam (by legitimizing theft).

Actually, it would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

These groups are cruel. They don’t care about human lives. They need to tell the truth: what they are doing is against the law and so are the people who use their services.

There’s no reason to beat around the bush.

Just as it is illegal to enter the country without permission, it is also illegal to overstay your visa or enter into a sham marriage.

It is illegal for these people to board a ship in France and attempt to circumvent British immigration procedures. To say otherwise is an insult to the many people who do the right thing, who fill in the forms, who queue outside British embassies around the world and who use the many legal and safe routes through this country to get here.

No one can say that our country has not been generous to those fleeing persecution around the world under the Conservative government. Just look at how welcoming the British have been in recent years to people fleeing Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

It seems strange now to tell these legal immigrants who have done the right thing to mingle with lawbreakers. This is a moral and political disaster, because of course it will only encourage blind prejudice against all immigrants, legal or not.

This too is a misuse of language. You could say that shoplifters are no longer guilty of theft, but of ‘irregular’ purchases, and that drunk drivers are guilty of ‘irregular’ driving.

The Labour government is deliberately blurring the lines between right and wrong for political gain. It is abandoning its efforts to combat illegal immigration.

In recent days it has been quite surprising to see how quickly major broadcasters (and many newspapers) have responded to this strange directive from Labspeak. As if this country is becoming North Korea.

The BBC, Sky and Channel 4 now all label cross-channel trading as “irregular” rather than “illegal”, although the law remains the same. Where will this all end?

Once a word has been discredited, especially in a sensitive context like immigration, it becomes increasingly difficult to use. One can imagine that there will soon come a time when such activities are actively considered “illegal,” no matter how obvious that is. The term “illegal immigration” seems poised to enter the lexicon of inflammatory language, the kind that can now lead to jail time.

Of course it was right to punish the rioters after the horrific stabbing in Southport. Anyone who riots, anyone who uses violence, anyone who destroys property deserves the full respect of the law.

On the other hand, there are people who have been sentenced to prison for posting comments on social media that they believed were true. Some of them seem to be people without criminal records. Is he really smart?

In this country we are proud of our freedom of expression. We rightly point out regimes that suppress this freedom. We believe that we are among the great defenders of the right to express our opinion, a right that is the basis of creativity and progress.

Well, now we are losing that reputation with Starmer all over the world. Rival governments are seeing ordinary Britons jailed for a bad tweet, while serious and violent criminals are being released early.

Believe me, the irony does not go unnoticed in a country like Putin’s Russia.

It seems we are entering a new, precarious world, where people can be jailed for hiding something on Twitter before X, while genuinely believing it to be true, while the Labour government insists we collectively say something about illegal immigration, claiming we all know the lies.

Welcome to Stormer’s Britain, combined with Orwell’s 1984.