‘The sanest days are mad’, sang Morrissey in 1994. Hear, hear, Moz; 31 years later and European states are once again at war and tensions in the Middle East have reached fever pitch.
Following Hamas’ massacre of Jews on October 7 2023, Israel has sought to neuter not only Hamas in Gaza, but also the state funding the terrorist group’s atrocities, Iran. After high-profile strikes involving exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting Hezbollah operatives in the Islamic Republic, Israel recently took aim at Iran’s nuclear programme – the greatest existential threat the Jewish state faces.
Last week, Israel began a series of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, oil and gas sites, ballistic missile bases, senior figures in the Iranian military and nuclear scientists. It is estimated that the strikes have also killed hundreds of Iranian civilians, and Iran has now responded in kind. The regime has fired missiles into Tel Aviv and surrounding areas, some of which penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome defence system and reportedly killed 24 Israelis.
Beyond the obvious incentive for Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity – national self-preservation – Benjamin Netanyahu has also articulated a deeper intention. In an address following the first round of airstrikes, the Israeli Prime Minister revealed that he hoped his opening salvo would create the conditions for a popular uprising that could topple the Iranian regime.
While some are cynical, arguing that the Israelis have merely bought themselves time before nuclear enrichment resumes, Netanyahu seems to have some cause for optimism. Donald Trump is flirting with involving the US in the conflict, polling from 2024 has public satisfaction with the Iranian state at just 32% and Iran is in the midst of its worst economic crisis for decades.
A perfect storm is brewing, and Iran’s theocracy could be swept away. But what would this mean for Britain?
Assuming myself and other young Britons don’t end up spending the rest of our 20s in trenches across the Middle East, there’s a distinct possibility that the fallout of Iranian state collapse could wash up on our shores. Between 2018 and 2024, 26,216 Iranian nationals made up 17% of all migrants arriving to the UK in small boats – more than any other group. In 2024, Iranians also made up the greatest proportion of inadequately documented air arrivals.
If the Revolutionary regime were to collapse, one can only imagine this number skyrocketing. We have seen this before. Europe experienced vast swathes of inward migration in the years following the Arab Spring, as states across North Africa and the Middle East broke down. The decisions of leaders such as Angela Merkel to adopt an open-door approach to those fleeing the region over a decade ago have inalterably changed the politics and demographics of Western Europe in the years since.
So how prepared is Britain to weather a fresh migrant crisis?
Having succeeded the Tories, whose failure to effectively control immigration despite numerous promises to do so contributed to their electoral defeat last year, Labour have styled themselves as the party to control Britain’s borders. Last month, the Government released its much-anticipated White Paper on the issue, introduced to the public by Keir Starmer in a speech which warned of Britain becoming an ‘island of strangers’ – the content of which was somewhat overshadowed by lazy comparisons with Enoch Powell.
The fact of the matter is that Labour’s White Paper would more likely be found in a roll next to Powell’s loo than on his mantlepiece. In all fairness, Labour have ceded some of the most influential fallacies about migration. The paper accepts that, in spite of promises to the contrary, unprecedented migration has not in fact delivered unexampled economic growth. Similarly, it is positive to see the state endorsing the argument that record migration has distorted our housing market as housebuilding has failed to keep pace with the demands of an artificially inflated population.
You know what cliché is coming next – but the devil is indeed in the detail. Labour’s plan for fixing the immigration system seems to entail tinkering at the edges of existing, flawed structures.
One significant hurdle to controlling the numbers of people entering Britain is the so-called ‘data desert’. When it comes to working out exactly who is here, we are at a loss, yet all that is proposed to address this in Labour’s document is working with the very agencies who continue to publish flawed data.
Most relevant to a potential increase in Iranian migrants is that Labour will expand refugee programmes by allowing UN-recognised refugees to apply for jobs in the UK. Supposedly, those applicable will be drawn from a ‘limited pool’ of migrants, but there is no indication of what this number will be capped at.
These are but a couple of examples of how utterly unprepared Labour are to take on the structural deficiencies driving unsustainably high levels of legal and illegal migration. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In 2022, the Centre for Policy Studies published ‘Stopping the Crossings’. Among other proposals, the report called for the indefinite detention of all asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally, a statutory annual cap of 20,000 on the number of migrants we take on resettlement schemes and, if necessary, withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. These might be unpalatable to a human rights lawyer like Starmer, but it is politically and fiscally unacceptable to import a city the size of Birmingham to the UK every couple of years.
Morrissey is a man notoriously concerned by Britain’s porous borders, so let’s return to another of his lyrics: ‘the more you ignore me, the closer I get’. Whether they’re found in the 2022 paper or others, the means to curb immigration are there. Regardless of whether Iran implodes, the next immigration crisis is only a foreign conflict away, and with each moment of political impotence that passes, it will only draw nearer.
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