Britain’s social fabric has been impacted by the volume of legal and illegal immigration in the past ten or 20 years, according to Steven Woolfe, director of the Centre for Migration and Economic Prosperity.
In an interview for NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, Mr. Woolfe said: “It’s impacting us in terms of the housing, the need to house people. It’s impacting social fabric, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, even as basic as water and electricity because we now have a population growth that is not capable of being dealt with by this government, and nor will it be able to be dealt with easily by the next.”
Mr. Woolfe, a former UKIP MEP for North West England, said immigration was definitely needed in the 1950s and the early 1960s when Britain faced a shortage of manpower as a result of the casualties suffered in the Second World War.
But he said the Labour Party under Sir Tony Blair had made a big mistake in the late 1990s when it failed to set a quota on the number of citizens from Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and the other countries which became European Union members in 2004.
He said Sir Tony had famously predicted “only a few thousand” would come to Britain, but it ended up being millions.
“There was 6.2 million visas granted under the European scheme that enables people to remain after Brexit,” Mr. Woolfe said.
But Mr. Woolfe asked: “Now have we had five million more houses to accommodate that? Have we had the infrastructure to build additional electricity? The water? Have we got the food capability to bring it in? Is there any reason why we’re importing more food from across the globe? Why are our roads filled with large articulated lorries because we’re having to feed more people?”
The Issue is the ‘Sheer Numbers’
Mr. Woolfe said: “Where I believe it’s really important to concentrate on is not the ethnicity of where people are coming from—there are going to be issues and questions about that, and I think that’s different—but it must be looked at just the sheer numbers and whether our country is capable of doing that. And what are we planning to do as a nation?”He said the Home Secretary Suella Braverman was right when she said recently that high levels of immigration could not be legitimate without public consent.
Mr. Woolfe, an MEP from 2014 to 2019, said: “In the 2014 European elections we saw increasing polling that said people no longer wanted to see immigration at the levels that they were seeing then. And they didn’t want to see abuse of the asylum system.”
‘Changing the Very Structure of What They Regarded as Home’
Mr. Woolfe said many places, such as Lincolnshire, saw vast numbers of people coming in and, “changing the very structure of what they regarded as home for people.”He said: “We have some big numbers that have come in over the past couple of years, with those from Ukraine. We are really looking at potentially even bigger numbers from Hong Kong, because we’ve given an effective open door to six or seven million people to be able to come.”
“So far, we’ve not had a major impact, but if you look at a town like Warrington, it has seen 20,000 to 30,000 people from Hong Kong wishing to settle there. So you are expecting very large numbers,” said Mr. Woolfe.
Mr. Morland said, “If in Britain, people don’t want immigration, and want to bring it down, I think they have to understand the consequences, and the consequences are we are already short of labour in almost every sector, despite the fact we have pretty sluggish growth, and we have a million people coming in gross per year.”
