I’ve written about my friend Matt Goodwin before, but he’s got a bold new documentary out this week which deserves your attention. How To Stop An Invasion shows & describes the crisis facing the UK with an unusual mix of intelligence, good sense, & speed—it’ll take a quarter hour of your time. Of course, once you watch it, you’ll want to read more of Matt’s work & support him, so that’ll take up the rest of your day! Post is linked below & the short movie is also on X.
The part of the work I especially applauded is Matt’s insistence that the problem & solution go through the courts. A deformation of judicial power, of lawyering, of international agreements has led to political paralysis. Britain cannot stop illegal immigrants from breaking the law coming in to the country, cannot deport them when they’re arrested for crimes in the country, & to some extent it’s impossible to talk about these problems, too, because the lawyering could get people arrested.
He mentions the craziest parts of the problem, domestic & foreign respectively, the UK Supreme Court & the European Convention on Human Rights. The former is a brand new 21st c. concoction that is trying every year to throw some more snares around gov’t, & its tendency ultimately is to make sure that democracy is either impossible or unworkable depending on whether it leads to outlawing dissenting politicians & parties or to vetoing gov’t actions when dissenting politicians try to implement popular policies which, however sensible, go against the lawyering power. This Supreme Court decided recently to assert its supremacy in the case of the 2019 prorogation of Parliament—the court blocked the action of gov’t & monarchy, in short. That constitutional crisis, I suppose, has been forgotten. One reason is, democratic elections in 2019 created a new Parliament that carried out Brexit, which the divided & mad previous Parliament was trying to stop. So democracy won on the issue—the Brexit referendum, the 2019 elections, goodbye to the EU & all that... But in another sense, democracy lost, since the Supreme Court advances its political supremacy. Another reason for forgetfulness is, the UK is so badly governed that worrying about the constitution seems meaningless (except to the Labour gov’t trying to change the constitution, specifically to remove the hereditary peers). But part of the awful gov’t is the courts blocking immigration policy.
As to the European Charter on Human Rights & the European Court of Human Rights it created, this is the sort of nonsense that Brexit was intended to solve. Brexit wasn’t merely about EU membership, but about the sovereignty of the UK gov’t, which is ultimately popular sovereignty. Lawyering, unlike England, is a transnational way of life. It’s not just about states, but also about international organizations, transnational organizations, & non-governmental organizations, as well as Quangos (quasi-NGOs, a peculiarly English corruption of popular & representative gov’t). Lawyering is almost entirely removed from any kind of political control & even involves a claim to legitimacy independent of democracy: Humanitarianism as a political ideology, human rights as an anti-political legal instrument or media rhetoric.
The long & short of it is, the inhabitants of the British Isles, have recently learned that far from their lawyer class resembling & representing them, the lawyers are trying to remake the English & Irish & even the Scotch & Welsh into something more international through illegal immigration. The principle underlying this kind of politics is amazing: No one who lives in England gets to decide who lives in England, whatever their political arrangements, votes, or gov’t—but anyone who doesn’t live in England can do so, & claim moral authority in the bargain.
So Goodwin is correct to talk about an invasion. He has guts, too, to speak of the evils of invasion in a political situation in which Tories have betrayed England systematically for 14 years while lying about restoring sovereignty, only to be replaced by a Labour gov’t that’s openly anti-English, to the point of restoring a more old-fashion Labour preference for criminals over their victims, with shocking prisoner releases. Matt’s success is modest compared to the forces he opposes, but he is achieving more & more each year. Compared to the failures of Tories on immigration since 2010, on the other hand, his success is nothing short of astonishing & he deserves all the support people are able to give him.
It has become obvious in this decade that, despite every effort our elites have found it possible to make, the political question is being raised regarding who belongs in the community & what kinds of decisions are exclusive to members of a political community. Illegal immigration is the most humiliating & most obvious part of that broader conflict between elites & democracy, so it is the one that generates the political parties. This is true both in countries divided over illegal immigration & those that seem not to be—the only difference is, in the latter, illegal immigration is policed. They look as different as Denmark, Hungary, & Australia, but they have this much in common, & therefore make it even more interesting to notice that every other wealthy country has failed to prevent this problem or at least palliate it.
I’ll be writing some more about the political crisis ushered by illegal immigration in both Europe & America—events are upon us.
Meanwhile, here’s my previous post about Matt:
Discovered Mr. Goodwin recently, already watched the (impressively executed) video to which you link. May he prosper!
Apropos to the critique of lawyers (i. e., judges): cf. Manent, A World beyond Politics? (2001), "The Empire of Law" (and the beginning of the next chapter, "The Empire of Morality"). An essential part of the depoliticization of Europe in the name of a unilateral "DemocracyTM".
Excellent video. Anyone know Goodwin's past relations, or lack of them, with groups like UKIP and (the now-defunct) For Britain? I.e., on immigration, but on other issues as well (Bridgen), the Conservative Party has a lot to answer for. A judgment to support one of the minor populist parties in any given district was ever a difficult one to make prior to the late melt-down of conservative support, but I'd like to know that Goodwin was not among those "conservatives" openly or quietly advising one and all to have no contact with people like Farage, and the long-suffering Anne-Marie Waters. Or if he was, I'd like to hear his defense of that.
This comment probably makes it sound like I know more about British politics than I do. Or that I would have agreed with Farage and Waters on most issues had I been a British citizen. Neither is true.
But I have a sense that a refusal by respectable UK conservatives to work, on any terms, with any of the in-the-trenches and in-the-grubbiness populist-conservative figures, is a big part of the reason why things look so hopeless over there now. For a peek into that much less attractive and polished reality of British political work against present immigration policy, see Waters' latest video on yt, where she's come out of semi-retirement from politics (a retreat caused in part by threats of violence against her party), to engage in the grubby chore of explaining why right-wing figures like Dan of The Voice of Wales, and Tommy Robinson, are so wrong to not have clearly denounced Andrew Tate. Yes, threading a line, and insisting upon it, between people who make excuses for the likes of Tate, and those who accept establishment calls to never dialogue with or feature the likes of Robinson, Waters, etc., is part of the real work over there.