We shouldn’t be afraid, as a nation, to agree across the left, right and centre, that the UK needs to further address immigration.
I don’t believe anyone should have an automatic right to come to Britain simply because they want to improve their life. In an ideal world, perhaps they would. But while we have British families struggling to put food on the table, people living below the poverty line and people without homes, I completely understand why immigration is such a contentious issue.
But here’s the part that those who hang almost everything on immigration conveniently ignore:
Migrants, whether legal migrants, illegal migrants or asylum seekers, ARE NOT the fundamental reason British-born people are struggling.
The far bigger issue is how wealth and resources are distributed.
Britain is an enormously wealthy country. Yet vast amounts of that wealth are concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of extraordinarily rich people.
And this is where the whole debate becomes almost absurd.
Take Sir Paul Marshall, the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-owner of GB News. He has been estimated to be worth around £875 million, while the hedge fund he chairs has billions invested in fossil-fuel companies. He has enough personal wealth to feed over 140,000 British families for a year.
It doesn't take much common sense to explain why he is using GB News to convince ordinary British people that immigration is at the heart of what has gone wrong with their country, rather than wealth inequality.
Then look at Reform. Two crypto billionaires have just poured a combined £72 MILLION into the party. Reform pose as the solution to the immigration issue that they push down our throats 24/7, whilst their most substantive policies are focussed on reducing taxes on crypto and for the ultra-rich.
You could completely eliminate illegal immigration tomorrow and Britain would still have food banks. We would still have a housing crisis. People would still struggle with their energy bills. We would still have enormous wealth inequality.
None of the national conversation right now allows us to take any attention away from immigration - that is deliberate, and £100s of millions has been invested to ensure immigration is all we talk about.
If we continue down this road, sure, we might vote in a party like Reform, immigration might be eliminated, but nothing will be solved, and it will likely get a whole lot worse for working families.