The British new right are, from observation, about ten years behind the American variant; they’ve come out of the long grass of secretive blogs and are now firmly in the “grift” stage, in which electoral success — transpiring for completely different reasons to those imagined by the profiteers, and the sociological novelty (in Britain) of free speech allows for all kind of strange characters to run amok. One of the features common to both is a belief in “meme magic” — the idea that if enough people chant something at their computers, it will trigger calamities in heaven and great events on earth. A few days ago, one excitable fellow breathlessly informed me that a senior Labour advisor had actually said the words “Boriswave”. Yes, I was truly back in the days of misspent youth: “The West is saved! Shadilay!”
I am utterly baffled as to what commentators imagine is being accomplished by the promotion of the “Boriswave” meme, although the reasons for why it is being pushed are clear. The majority of people in online right-wing circles are student Conservatives or former student Conservatives. If you are a student Conservative, your adolescence is a painful mire of mockery and rejection: pretty much every part of these people’s psychic training has attuned them to social possibilities where they might say “But I’m not like the other Tories!” I don’t blame them. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a red diaper baby. I have no more fondness for Boris Johnson than any other elected politician. This is a different issue as to whether he is personally responsible for mass immigration to the United Kingdom.
The cause of the 2020-21 spike in immigration is very simple. If you massively increase the money supply within an economy, you will suffer inflation. One of the ways to mitigate this is to increase the number of people receiving wages, buying goods and using services. In 2020, the British government, egged on by many of the commentators who now decry the “Boriswave”, decided to massively increase the money supply to fund their desired policy of lockdowns. Between eight and four hundred billion pounds were created by the Bank of England to pay for furlough, subsidised meals in restaurants and a test-and-trace scheme which proved irrelevant to the final rescinding of lockdown. Boris Johnson, by his own testimony and that of people hostile to him, was deeply sceptical of this policy, vacillated throughout its implementation and ultimately ended it before several European states.
Thus, if we are to single out the 2020-21 spike as especially invidious, the culprits are primarily those who loudly pushed for lockdown in the face of all medical expertise and continue defending the policy to this day. One might christen it The Effective Altruist Bump. Once the decision to lock down was taken, the expansion of the labour force became necessary. Note, I say necessary. I do not say desired. People can protest that they didn’t want this to happen — but it was still an inevitable consequence. There was no way, in the incredibly brief window of time, to reduce the inflation — which, even in its mitigated state, has been historically bad — other than mass immigration. This isn’t to say the Effective Altruist Bump is good; it is to say lockdowns are bad.
Focusing on the lockdown wave risks training public ire upon a recent immigration wave to normalise previous ones
If the “Boriswave” isn’t true, is it useful as propaganda? It does not take a tripos-brain to see why the word “Boriswave” is catching on. Left-wing politicians and journalists want to blame immigration on a politician perceived as centre-right; doing so deflects from the main driver of illegal immigration to Britain, the Human Rights courts empowered by Tony Blair. The author does not move in right-wing circles but from observation, they are currently very angry at the grooming gangs. The perpetrators of these atrocities are not 20-21 arrivals, most of them, indeed are British citizens.
Focusing on the lockdown wave risks training public ire upon a recent immigration wave to normalise previous ones. Now, Chris Philps can promise that the Conservatives would reduce migration to below 350,000. Such figures were massively unpopular in the 2000s and 2010s — considered dramatically and dangerously high — but singling out the “Boriswave” as if it was the first example of mass migration makes this sound like great progress.
Will these words have any effect? Probably not. Boris Johnson can be safely praised or blamed as a part of history, while the real architects of the 20-21 wave are numbered among the living capos and signores of the New Right. Nigel Farage, for example, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Boriswave since before it had a name. In the past, he could not stop talking about his desire to replace those pesky Europeans with immigrants from, that most refined of bodies, “the Commonwealth”.
Well, he, and the rest of the British Right, got their wish with the lockdown wave. The majority of illegal arrivals in the 2020-24 period are Ghanaian Christians. I’m sure, when a future Reform government gives them citizenship, they will be vastly preferable to the hated Poles, sneaky Albanians and detested French schoolgirls clogging up Hampstead high street. Like Lord Byron, I can find few harsh words to say about the Albanians, they strike me as the sort of sanguinary chaps we might need in the future.
