Mass immigration and the refugee crisis have transformed European politics over the last decade. The United Kingdom has experienced some of the biggest changes, as repeated popular revolts against immigration have led to both Brexit and the collapse of the Conservative Party in favor of Reform UK. The American Conservative sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a British journalist and political commentator, to talk about the impact of immigration on the UK and the country’s future.

Let’s start with something that I think a lot of Americans have found quite puzzling looking at the situation in the UK. Immigration is the question in British politics, especially right now. Every British government for years has been elected on the promise of lowering immigration. None have done so. Why?

When you say for years, that means going back to 1974. Every single election referendum since has promised lower migration and never delivered. There’s a few reasons. 

The first, I think, is the economic system. Anytime someone promises to cut immigration, a pie chart is wheeled into the room by the so-called experts, and they say, “If you do this, we won’t be able to fudge the numbers on the population, which then builds our annual GDP up, which then allows us to borrow even more debt to pay down for subsidized socialized medicine and pension system.” One thing that Keir Starmer ran into when he was elected to government was that because the Treasury predictions are done on an annual cycle, you can’t cut the size of the civil service, because if you make anyone lose their jobs—and it’s very hard to do the extra legislation anyway—but if you make anyone lose their jobs, they get a year severance pay, and it doesn’t register as cuts. If you cut immigration in the short term, there might be a dip in GDP, because you cut X amount of totally useless jobs. So instead, all they ever do is cut the very few things that they can do—the extra payments and pensions and things like that, which ends up estranging entire swathes of their voter base. 

So economics is one reason. The other one is that there is a human-rights industrial complex that has taken root. Keir Starmer, when he was a human-rights lawyer busy going around the world acting on behalf of murderers to get rid of the death penalty, actually helped write the text for Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act, which wrote the European Court of Human Rights and Convention on Human Rights into British law. So even after Brexit, we still have European laws on our books, because they’re a separate entity.

That means that you get Pakistani pedophiles or Albanian gangsters who say, “My son doesn’t like the taste of foreign chicken nuggets,” appealing to the statue and saying, “My right to a family and private life should mean that I get to stay in this country even though I’m a criminal.” No politician wants to touch that because of the deep taboos that have existed since 1945, since the atrocities of the Holocaust, since Hitler killed a lot of people in a very racist way. So all these antiquated human rights doctrines, like the UN Refugee Convention, like the European Convention of Human Rights, which were written with Dutch Jews fleeing persecution in mind, are now pertaining to North African rapists, and we’re just battery-farming them at the taxpayers expense. 

The final reason, I would say, is that the government has a hell of a lot of contracts with private security and housing firms like Serco. So local councils which mismanage their budgets and these private security firms and these hotel chains will take direct government subsidies to house not just legal migrants that come over (95 percent of whom aren’t paying any taxes at all, and are just a net drain), but also loads of illegal migrants who have come over the physical barrier of the English Channel. These illegal migrants have been picked up by the RNLI, our border force, ferried back, and are now housed in four-star accommodations at the cost of over £14 billion a year to the taxpayer.

To what extent would you say that this is the operation of the British Deep State versus the will of the British political class itself? The Tory party, for instance, which is ostensibly in favor of limiting immigration, has never shown a great amount of enthusiasm to actually limit immigration during its time in government.

What people have to understand about our civil service is, unlike your Washington system, we don’t have appointments. Trump can, despite institutional noncompliance, hire and fire about 20,000 people.

Because of a piece of legislation in 2010 called the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, the Civil Service appoints other civil servants, and they can actually sack ministers who are democratically elected, but the ministers can’t really sack them. The person who runs the Cabinet Office, which oversees the internal affairs of the government, is probably the most powerful person in the country. 

This is one of the reasons why Liz Truss got deposed after her attempts to cut taxes. It wasn’t just the Bank of England, which is meant to be independent from the government and set interest rates in the same way the Fed does, and can now sabotage any elected politician’s plans to adjust the economic consensus. It wasn’t just her own party. It was career civil servants who were briefing to the media against her. One does not have to think Lizz Truss the best thing since sliced bread to know, as J.D. Vance mentioned in his interview before the election to Tucker, that she is an instructive example of how your plans can be thwarted. 

The other problem with the civil service is that, while having all this power, they are ideologically captured by interest groups. The Islamic network, specifically in the Home Office, controls not just immigration, but also counter-terror responses. Anytime someone reads the Quran a bit too seriously and detonates a mail bomb at a pop concert, they gather together a bunch of imams and do photo ops; they control the front page of the newspapers to decrease the public’s opposition to immigration, especially Islamic immigration. 

This is no longer working. Alternative media has made people more aware of things, and YouGov polling from just last week saw that one half the country thinks Islam is incompatible with Britain. Upwards of 40 percent think all Muslim migrants have been a net detriment to the country. Nine in 10 constituencies want migration to be lowered at the last election, and that’s when they also underestimated migration by a factor of 10. They thought we were getting 70,000 a year. We have net 700,000 a year. We’ve got almost the same level of migration every year in a country the size of New York State as the whole of America, legally. It’s absolutely mental. 

However, the politicians do, intuitively, want to continue this. There’s only a handful of politicians who are seriously committed to delivering on their manifesto pledges. As the greatest example of this gaslighting exercise politicians do, there’s a columnist in the UK called Fraser Nelson—who, a bit of deep lore, accidentally kicked off the Pakistani grooming gang scandal and brought it to Musk’s attention and America’s attention when he wrote on Christmas in his final column for the Telegraph that Britain is experiencing an “integration miracle.” In 2016 Fraser Nelson gave an interview where he said that politicians don’t actually have to do anything about immigration. They can instead act as a kind of pressure relief valve by telling voters, “I hear your concerns,” and then talking them through how actually we can afford to pay for the health care and the housing of these migrants, while completely marginalizing questions of culture and identity—questions which are much more virulent for young people like me, who have only grown up in the world of the Yookay, spelled Y-O-O-K-A-Y, rather than homogeneous Great Britain. 

Lots of these politicians are really convinced that enough civics programs and economic opportunities can turn literally anyone from anywhere into being British. This is why the Conservative Party that you mentioned has elected Kemi Badenoch. Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK a year before they abolished birthright citizenship in what was essentially an act of birth tourism by her parents to get her British citizenship. Now, members of the press with inside sources are saying that she doesn’t want to talk about migration, because if she starts questioning too much, people will begin asking, “Aren’t you basically an anchor baby?”

So you have lots of politicians pushing immigrant heritage politicians in front to try and make the case for the integration of millions of migrants the British public never wanted here in the first place, and who themselves feel loath to criticize mass migration on cultural grounds because they’re afraid of being called racist by the Westminster media establishment. There’s literally only a handful of people who really understand what time it is and understand that, based on Trump’s election, promising mass deportations for illegals, promising to give no quarter to people who hate our way of life and to send them elsewhere, is not just moral, but is also a vote-winner.

As part of the reaction to this, there’s been a big change in the UK party system. We’ve seen the rise of Reform UK on the right, while voters seem to have lost confidence in the Conservative Party. Does Reform UK have a serious plan to take on the Civil Service and address the foundational problems that have caused this migration inflow?

There are people who are involved in Reform UK, like Matthew Goodwin or James Orr, who are trying to put forward policies on this. They understand the scale of the problem. The problem is that within Reform UK, you’ve got that congenitally liberal instinct that caused Nigel Farage to say in the New Statesman a few weeks ago that he is to not only the left of Robert Jenrick, but to the left of the country, on immigration. Farage is voluntarily saying “I will take a softer stance on migration than my own voters want me to, because of a moral issue.” Now, I have heard that within Reform, there were some members that were saying, “What are you doing? That’s not our messaging strategy.” But this is something that he said intuitively. 

He spoke to Steven Edgington of GBNews and said, “Mass deportations is not my ambition. It’s a political impossibility. We’re never gonna be able to deport hundreds of thousands of people,” even though Eisenhower, in the ’50s, got out hundreds of thousands of people with a very small border force. President Trump is doing this at the moment. The idea that this is neither palatable nor possible is insane, but Farage just has this instinct.

Cultural concerns in particular are a real problem for Reform. A little while ago, Farage did an interview with Winston Marshall where he said, “By 2050, if we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose.” Well, speaking for the left-behind majority, what parts of Islamic theology do you want to incorporate into your right-wing populist party, Nigel? Very frustrating. 

I think this is them having their sense of what is politically possible—the Overton Window—contorted by a Westminster media bubble, because they don’t engage with alternative media. Very limited interviews have been given to someone like Winston Marshall, or even Steven Edgington, who’s affiliated with GB News, who Farage meets with. Instead, they’re constantly seeking the approval of the Guardian and the BBC. They need to understand what Trump did: The media are your enemy, and they would rather see you lose or else conform to their expectations so much that you may as well have lost. 

What reform needs to understand is that they must to have a Day One Great Repeal Act, getting rid of laws that have been passed not just by the last Conservative government, not just laws that have been passed by the Blair government, but even before that—laws like Margaret Thatcher’s Public Order Act of 1986 through which, among other pieces of legislation, 12,000 people get arrested for public statements or social media posts every year. Has to go. Race Relations Act? Has to go. Town and Country Planning Act that stops you from building beautiful buildings (we have these Soviet-esque brutalist tower blocks to house everyone from the Third World)? It all has to go. 

Someone needs to do the very quiet work that isn’t in front of a camera, isn’t doing TikToks: to sit down and list all these pieces of legislation, to draft up how you would do it according to parliamentary convention law, and to ensure that on Day One you can get this signed and ensure you get it past the Civil Service. But this also requires that you appoint MPs and build up a group of eventual replacements for the Civil Service—something like institutions like American Moment did in the States—so that on day one, you hit the ground running with your people, who are courageous enough to take the slings and arrows.

At the moment, especially with the expulsion of Rupert Lowe, who’s now set up Restore Britain and is promising to do just that, Reform haven’t appointed the most conservative, constitutionally and courageous people currently their talent. Lowe is looking a lot like our trump figure, but he’s a man without a party, and unfortunately, he can’t take over the Republicans anytime soon. Even if you think Nigel Farage is the greatest campaigner in Britain, and there’s a case for it, Reform’s talent isn’t measuring up to not only Farage, but the kind of people that Trump brought into coalition with him for his seismic win in 2024. So I'm open to the prospect of things changing in four years, but at the moment, I’m not encouraged.

Certainly it seems like there’s the will among the British populace, if not the British political class at large, to do something drastic. There has been a lot of civil unrest recently over migrants who have been put up in hotels across the UK. Do you think that it presents a serious threat to the legitimacy of the British government if popular unrest continues to mount?

I think they know that they are illegitimate. Keir Starmer went to the extent of leaking his own cabinet briefing notes to right-wing, or at least establishment right-wing, newspapers (the Daily Mail and the Times) a little while ago, where he said that the country needs to repair its frayed social fabric to prevent civil unrest. They’ve been having these briefings for a long time, but they’ve done absolutely nothing about it, because they’re unwilling to repeal the laws or abandon their commitments to anti-racist bona fides in order to actually tackle the root cause of the issue. But they understand that their ideological fictions that they’ve been casting as a kind of spell over the population are wearing very thin. As for the population themselves, while the English are very polite and very genteel—we don’t kick off like the French do—in the words of the famous poem of Rudyard Kipling, there’s only so far you can push an Anglo-Saxon before he begins to learn to hate. 

I think that this hatred is manifesting, much like the opposition to the trans movement did in the UK and the U.S., because of the children being harmed. What the British government has done for the last at least seven years for mass illegal migration, but much longer for legal migration, is import foreign nationals from the rape capitals of the world, like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Morocco, Algeria. Traffickers actually film white English girls on nights out, dressed immodestly by Muslim standards, to market their border smuggling services—basically saying, “Look at what you can get for yourself by coming over here.” 

We know they’ve been doing this ahead of time, yet the British government has rolled out the red carpet for them, put them up in hotels, and said that if you criticize them, you’re a racist. There was a leaked government report that came out between November and January which said that right-wing extremists are inventing narratives around two-tier policing and grooming gangs to sow public discontent, completely dismissing the threat. Instead, they’ve been monitoring the English people, creating new police units in the home office to monitor posts that have “anti-migrant sentiment”. 

Recently the House Judiciary Committee brought to the attention of the Telegraph that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport was telling TikTok and other social media platforms in the U.S. to take down posts calling Keir Starmer Two-Tier Keir. So not only are they very precious about their reputations, but they know the kind of discontent this is building towards. 

Do I think this will tip over into actual civil unrest? Well, I have spoken to and listened to the predictions of David Betz, professor of war studies from King’s College London.  He thinks that in the next couple of years, if there’s no political off-ramp (and he doesn’t see one arising out of the mist), there could be civil unrest along ethnic lines that could claim as many as 23,000 lives a year. It will take place mostly in cities, it will be a low-level guerrilla conflict, and it will start because infrastructure will be attacked by either vigilante gangs of white accelerationists, or, more probably, jihadists, which foreign intelligence services have identified as being numbering between 30,000–40,000 in our country at the moment, and who have lots of cobelligerents in the Muslim community who have harbored monstrosities like the rape-gang perpetrators out of sense of solidarity along ethnic and religious lines. 

The thing that worries us—the commentariat, academics, even politicians who are becoming aware of this now in the Conservative Party and among the likes of Rupert Lowe—is that eight electrical substations have mysteriously been attacked or at least caught alight in the last couple of months. Is this the sort of low-level precursor of infrastructure sabotage before civil unrest? To add to that are all these protests where the state is bussing out state-funded communist groups to the front lines as agents provocateurs, which looks like instigating unrest as a pretext to crack down on a discontented white majority. It’s looking like a powder keg that the state doesn’t know how to defuse, so it’s quite a worrying situation.

It seems like the principal response from the British government has been to increase censorship—for example, passing the Online Safety Act. The British state has also put people in prison for making social media posts that it says are inflammatory, or conducive to public disorder. How far do you think that Starmer and the British government are willing to go with censorship? Is this the limit, or do you think that there is more and worse in store for the British people?

I think they are willing to go way further. Much like the Democrats in the U.S., their definition of democracy is premised on the idea of the blank slate—that, hypothetically, you can create a governance system that brings to fruition every human being’s identical human nature; a society where everyone’s free, everyone’s equal. All you have to do is censor your way to utopia. If you stop people from noticing their differences, online or in person, then everyone will become indistinguishable gray goo people living in harmony in John Lennon’s imagined future. I don’t think they’re going to abandon this ideological commitment. 

The Online Safety Act created a brand new speech offense as well, which consists of causing non-trivial psychological or physical harm without any reasonable cause for posting—an offence determined by judges who themselves are not neutral, who themselves are trained on the textbook that Keir Starmer wrote, who themselves just had judicial guidance quashed at the 11th hour by the Justice Minister that said that they were going to give harsher sentences to straight white men and more lenient sentences to ethnic cultural minorities, women, pregnant persons, and LGBTQ-confused people. Just because the political heat occasionally gets too high and Starmer has to pretend to President Trump—indeed, to lie to his face—that there hasn’t been censorship doesn’t mean there is not still the ambition to press on with this approach.

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The worst thing about this is that we’ve had two rounds of mass prisoner releases. They’ve released violent offenders, drug users and dealers, even gang members, explicitly to make space for new arrests if there is more civil unrest—for mothers like Lucy Connolly, who is in prison for 34 months for a deleted tweet. Whereas a brand new arrival from Eritrea, for example, who sexually assaulted a 19-year-old girl with learning difficulties, got 14 months in prison instead. In fact, because he was held on remand, he might not get any prison time. 

This British state is willing to imprison sexual offenders for less time than people who post tweets online they don’t like. If you are that deeply ideologically entrenched, I don’t see how you can abandon that and suddenly discover a commitment to something akin to the American First Amendment.

This interview was conducted at MCC Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary.