Jenrick: JD Vance eyeliner vibes!
The candidates to replace the nice Indian man who led the Tory Party to their biggest wipe-out in political history are James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, and Robert Jenrick. (Also, there are three brown women. Sorry! I kind of forgot about them and, with or without your permission, I am going to continue doing so.)
Most of these candidates are trying to sell themselves as "middle of the roaders" who wish to "re-unite the party" and "regain the trust of the voters," etc.
"Yes, bro, pls trust us. This time we mean it, LOL."
The way the Conservative Party lost that trust was by not keeping their actual manifesto promises. The more edgy ones even say that the biggest broken promise was on immigration. Some of those who were directly involved in breaking that promise, like James Cleverly, even say that.
Cleverly, by the way, was the Home Secretary who presided over enormous abuse of the visa system to allow in a flood of cheap labour migration, and then fired David Neal, the government’s borders inspector at the time, when he blew the whistle on this.
Of the four candidates named, the most "nationalistic" one is probably Robert Jenrick. But what is his position on immigration, and how likely is he to stick to it? This is not an academic question, because the Tory record on immigration seems to be the agreed reason why the Party lost around 16% of the electorate to Reform UK, a segment of the vote that would otherwise have delivered them a crushing victory over Kier Starmer.
First a little background on Jenrick. Although born in England, his name and general look betoken a Welsh origin (not unlike the Tudors who ruled England with some success). He is also something of a "Macron" character, being married to a much older woman. Wikipedia says this of his "better half":
"Jenrick is married to Michal Berkner. She is nine years older than Jenrick, and is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. She is an Israeli-born and US-educated corporate lawyer who practises mainly in London. Together, they have three daughters, whom they are bringing up in the Jewish faith."
Nice to know that Jewish concerns will have a prominent place at the breakfast table should Mr Jenrick proceed further in his career!
But where exactly is Jenrick on immigration? Or, to rephrase the question: "What does the right side of the Overton window of mainstream UK politics look like on this issue?"
Luckily Jenrick has crystalised his views into ten points recently published in the Telegraph.
Most of this is predictable and contradictory Tory boilerplate -- i.e. small gov and lower taxes, combined with liberal doses of "muh NHS" and "muh British military" (aka big gov and high taxes). But there are at least two points that touch on nationalist concerns, points 5 and 9.
Point Five ("Mass migration must end") concerns immigration and Point Nine ("Promote national unity") can be viewed as relating to assimilation, although the latter is a bit wishy-washy, and we've all heard it before:
Most of this is predictable and contradictory Tory boilerplate -- i.e. small gov and lower taxes, combined with liberal doses of "muh NHS" and "muh British military" (aka big gov and high taxes). But there are at least two points that touch on nationalist concerns, points 5 and 9.
Point Five ("Mass migration must end") concerns immigration and Point Nine ("Promote national unity") can be viewed as relating to assimilation, although the latter is a bit wishy-washy, and we've all heard it before:
"We must promote a unifying national identity and robustly defend it from those who oppose the very ideals upon which our way of life depends. We must nourish civil society, and robustly defend our values against those who despise us."
Yawn! I guess this means more Union Jacks at the Nottinghill Carnival or something.
On immigration Jenrick believes in something called "secure borders," and uses a well-known dog whistle that every Tory for the last 70 years has been using:
The reason mass immigration is "bad" is the disappointingly usual one:
On immigration Jenrick believes in something called "secure borders," and uses a well-known dog whistle that every Tory for the last 70 years has been using:
"Without secure borders, we don’t have a country."
The reason mass immigration is "bad" is the disappointingly usual one:
"...fuelling the housing crisis, suppressing wages, causing public service waiting lists and destroying trust in politics."
This is not nearly good enough. Anyone with a basic grounding in economics and the honesty to focus on the workshy aspects of indigenous Brits or their advanced average age, can turn that argument on its head. In fact, all you really need to do to knock that into a cocked hat is to say something like "muh based Black nurses..."
The Tory Party about to have an anal thermometer shoved up its arse again
The real reason mass immigration is "bad" is quite different from this and is intuitively understood by the majority of the British people (and indeed people of all countries). It is a very simple one, which I expressed recently on Twitter:
"Nobody anywhere in the world has liked rapid demographic change that breaks the individual's perceived link with eternity."
To clarify what I mean here, we are all individuals and we are all going to die (I hope this isn't news to you!). Dying sucks because, even if we pretend to have faith in a "spiritual afterlife," almost all of us know that we don't, and that death will annihilate us. Therefore, our only link to eternity is the hope that "people like us" will somehow exist in the future and look back tenderly on our existence.
This is an even more important way of "defeating death" than directly passing on our DNA (although this is important too). This is individualist in its nature but fragile in its continuity. Having a few kids who then merge into a generally changing population is pretty meaningless in terms of continuity. We even see something of this process in microcosm in Jenrick's own family life, where the Blood of the Valleys dilutes, merges, mutates, and re-surfaces in the probably woke synagogues favoured by his wife, with who knows what transmogrifications in the next generation.
This is an even more important way of "defeating death" than directly passing on our DNA (although this is important too). This is individualist in its nature but fragile in its continuity. Having a few kids who then merge into a generally changing population is pretty meaningless in terms of continuity. We even see something of this process in microcosm in Jenrick's own family life, where the Blood of the Valleys dilutes, merges, mutates, and re-surfaces in the probably woke synagogues favoured by his wife, with who knows what transmogrifications in the next generation.
What the ordinary masses intuit, but which is never expressed by their elites, is that true survival beyond individual death lies in collective demographic continuity, so that Britons today have plenty in common with Britons 1000 years in the past and with Britons 1000 years in the future. We are definitely NOT on that course right now.
There is nothing of this awareness in Jenrick or the Conservative Party's views on immigration and national identity. Instead, what Jenrick offers is a watered-down form of "Darwinian immigration selection," whereby Britain tries to grab the brainy, "high-value" immigrants and hopefully "improves" its so-called gene pool and tax base:
"We must become the Grammar school of the Western world, admitting those who contribute more than they receive in benefits and services."
As I said in a previous article, this idea of "superior genes" is not always convincing, because, after all, everybody alive today is the product of millions of successful incidents of natural selection already, and may only be temporarily under-functioning, or even "under-functioning" as a cunning survival strategy.
But it's clear what Jenrick means when he advocates the "Grammar school of the Western world" immigration model. He is talking about his beloved Mrs Jenrick! Remember, she is an "Israeli-born and US-educated corporate lawyer".
Notice the smug look on Jenrick's schoolboyish face
I think a truly Conservative vision of immigration should be founded on one principle and one principle alone -- namely to preserve "the individual's perceived link with eternity." Anything else, including Jenrick's "eugenic" Grammar school model, is sheer attempted progressivism that will not succeed.
Unfortunately, this is the best that the Tory Party and the right side of mainstream politics can offer us at the moment.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
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