In the wake of America’s 2024 election a curious narrative shift has been unfolding within the political leadership of Canada and Great Britain.

The moment he assumed the office of Prime Minister, Canada’s Mark Carney played up the country’s founding British and French (and, of course, Indigenous) heritage, referring to Canada as the ‘most European of non-European countries’, deploying nativist rhetoric that hasn’t been heard from the country’s Liberal politicians in living memory and thereby rejecting by implication the official stance of multiculturalism that has dominated Canadian politics since the elder Trudeau. To back up his commitment to Canada, Carney renounced his Irish and UK citizenships, symbolically burning his boats on the beach, and implicitly repudiating other members of parliament holding dual citizenships. As a further emphatic gesture towards Canada’s historical roots, King Charles III will give the throne speech inaugurating the new parliament, the first time the monarch has delivered the throne speech in person since 1977.

All of that is just symbolism, but on the policy end Carney has promised to reduce immigration, capping new permanent residents at roughly 1% of the population per annum and holding temporary foreign workers to 5% of the population in any given year. As immigration restrictionist policies go this is pretty weak beer – it’s really just a return to the levels that pertained through the first half of Trudeau’s term as Prime Minister, and keeps Canada well on track for the Century Initiative’s goal of a hundred million people by 2100, with native-born Anglo-French ethnic Canadians destined for minority status some time shortly after 2040.

The Liberal Party’s new immigration policy does not live up to its rhetoric, but the rhetorical shift from ‘immigration is great, diversity is our strength, immigration-maxing is our moral duty and historical destiny’ to ‘immigration is a problem that we need to control for the good of the Canadian people, who are a specific people’ is notable.

The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer presents an even more remarkable case of narrative volte-face. Not even a year ago, Starmer was ranting about the perfidious influence of far right agitators upsetting the bucolic social peace during the Southport riots, vowing to ruthlessly hunt down and prosecute those guilty of expressing their frustrations with thirty years of having their noses rubbed in diversity, and generally giving every impression that he was going to use the full Stalinist weight of the Blairite regime to crush the intolerant nativist bigots like bugs.

Through the Chilled Years Ahead

John Carter

·

August 10, 2024

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

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But lately Starmer has been sounding a very different tone. The first indication of this came a couple of months ago, when Starmer expressed displeasure with the two-tier racial sentencing guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council quango, which of course advocated for lighter sentences to be given to non-white convicts. Given that Starmer had already been dubbed ‘Two-Tier Keir’ due to the double standard he applied to British versus Muslim rioters, this was a politically sensitive issue for him. Then, on May 12^th, as he introduced a new immigration white paper he delivered what is being called the ‘islands of strangers’ speech, in which he vowed to overhaul Britain’s immigration system to prioritize career advancement for British youth, take pressure off of the housing and job markets, and to take control of Britain’s borders:

Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together. So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse, that encourages some businesses to bring in lower-paid workers rather than invest in our young people, or simply one that is sold by politicians to the British people on an entirely false premise, then you’re not championing growth, you’re not championing justice, or however else people defend the status quo. You’re actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.

Starmer’s speech has been compared by some to Enoch Powell’s legendary ‘rivers of blood’ speech, which is giving it far too much credit – Powell’s excoriation of the existential risk posed by mass migration was far more direct and visceral:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. ... As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

Ah, for the days when the annual inflow of 50,000 dependents was considered an intolerable imposition.

Powell spoke with the fire of a classically educated statesman of the old school; Starmer’s wooden elocution struggles to escape the stilted diction of the bland and grey-skinned technocrat that he is. Leaving this aside, there’s no question that even implying that immigration is making Britain an ‘island of strangers’ would have been absolutely unthinkable, from Starmer or anyone else in the British establishment, even a few months ago.

Following the speech Starmer launched a social media offensive, reiterating his commitment to strong borders, a crackdown on uncontrolled illegal migration, an end to asylum hotels, and a selective immigration policy that prioritizes the well-being of the British.

It’s practically the only thing he’s been talking about for the last week. Some of that rhetoric could practically be considered ‘far right’: ‘cheap foreign labour’, ‘open borders experiment’, ‘a privilege, not a right’, ‘foreign criminals’, ‘putting our young people first’, ‘betrayal’. Starmer himself would certainly have called such language ‘far right’ not so long ago.

You’ll notice that one of Starmer’s key talking points is that the Tories ruined immigration. This is, of course, true: the Conservative Party was in charge for 14 years, from 2010 through 2024, so the ten million foreigners that entered the Yookay as new citizens, permanent residents, temporary workers, “asylum seekers”, or “students”, which increased the non-British fraction of the population over this period is hardly Labour’s fault.

So has Dark Starmer had a change of heart? Did he see the black light of the sonnenrad after being getting radicalized by frog memes in a parliamentary group chat? Is he, dare I say it fam, /ourguy/?

No, he obviously is not. Before entering politics Starmer worked as a barrister, with extensive involvement in immigration and asylum cases. He literally wrote the book on how to leverage European human rights law in order to prevent the deportation of asylum seekers and ensure that they received the full menu of government benefits. His career is inseparably intertwined with the emotional manipulation of white empathy and the leveraging of European human rights law in order to facilitate the replacement of European peoples with illiterate chancers from the third world. When the natives got restless after one of the Yookaydians butchered a room full of little British girls, a Yookaydian who Starmer’s ilk had helped shield from consequences for previous danger signs no less, Starmer’s first instinct as the man wielding the whip hand of the state was to turn it on the natives. It is extremely difficult to believe that this man has turned over a new leaf.

Carney strikes me as an equally unlikely nationalist. The man has spent most of his career as a central banker. He is a Davos man through and through, a self-described globalist and elitist. It is extremely unlikely that he has any genuine, deep feeling for the Canadian nations.

So what is happening, here?

One theory is that the Trans-Atlantic Anglo elite has quietly concluded that mass immigration has not, in fact, yielded the economic benefits that they had hoped it would bring, and furthermore that the immense social friction that it has engendered is not worth the hassle of staying the course. They just watched a populist insurgency claim the throne of the imperial capital, succeeding despite everything the elite threw at the upstarts – legal warfare, media warfare, election rigging, it all failed. For now, the left-liberal globalist establishment holds onto power in Canada and Britain, but Carney’s victory in the recent Canadian election risks Alberta quitting confederation in disgust, while in Great Britain the populist, anti-immmigration Reform party – which has only four seats in parliament – swept the recent local council elections, annihilating the Conservative Party (whom they took 8 councils from), and even infringing on Labour territory (who lost 2 councils to Reform).

Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been quietly sounding the alarm about the growing disillusion of Canada’s youth with the established order, and the resultant potential for radicalization and possibly even violent revolt. In the UK, war studies professor David Betz has been making the rounds with his warnings that Britain – and Western countries more generally, but especially Britain – has ticked so many of the boxes for ‘imminent civil war’ with such gormless enthusiasm that elites ought to be responding to the giant blinking red alarm sirens.

So, it might be that the political elites of the Anglosphere have determined that continued mass immigration is a clear and present threat to their power: it is alienating their citizens, who increasingly regard their elites as a hostile foreign tribe at best and as the foulest species of rank traitor at worst; it is not yielding the promised economic growth, but to the contrary is placing an unsustainable strain on social welfare systems which, should they break, will put the already restive natives in an even worse mood; it is motivating the rise of a homegrown rival elite in the form of populist political leaders; and it is leading to the rise of an imported rival elite, primarily in the form of relatively unprincipled subcontinentals whose clannishness and cunning makes them more formidable competitors for the top layers of the compost pile than had been originally suspected. Since our political elites don’t really have any principle other than hanging onto power at any cost, they’ve stuck their fingers in the wind and decided to tack in a new direction.

Maybe.

But it’s worth noting, as I did at the start, that Carney’s immigration targets aren’t actually a significant reduction. Four hundred thousand new Canadians a year is certainly a much smaller human flux than the million-plus that came in during the terminal phase of Trudeau’s unlamented reign, but it’s still higher than at any time before the rainbow prince ran the country into the ground, and will still guarantee a complete demographic transformation of Canada’s racial makeup in much less than a single human lifetime. In Starmer’s case, his rhetoric is primarily aimed at illegal immigration, rather than immigration in general. His promise is simply that he will only bring in the best, that his government will be selective in who it admits, and will require that they learn a few words of English.

Neither Carney nor Starmer are saying they will end immigration. They’re just saying they’ll be more careful. But their rhetoric certainly gives the impression of a more robust level of opposition.

Another possibility – and I think this is actually more likely – is that the Anglo-American elite have simply realized that the old message, that if you oppose immigration you’re an awful racist, isn’t working anymore. White people have stopped responding to that. So instead, out of pure political necessity, they’re presenting themselves as immigration hardliners, hoping that the rubes are so easily fooled by cheap verbiage that they won’t notice what’s actually happening.

The American uniparty did the same thing for years, by the way: endless promises to control the border, which somehow never translated to action. Well, that’s not quite true: immigrating to the US legally is an extremely difficult process. The uniparty strategy was essentially to make legal immigration as painful and Byzantine as possible, in order to distract attention from the porous border and the rampant abuse of the H1-B system. The result was that people continued pouring into the country, while the average American was reassured that the government wasn’t just letting people pour into the country. It worked really well until Trump kicked over the game board, and actually did something about border control. Now that America’s southern border is locked down and deportations are proceeding (albeit in the face of intense resistance from activist judges), the political conversation is moving on to the question of legal immigration.

It’s also frankly just very difficult to credit the notion that these people who have been implacably hostile to everything white, Western, and Christian for generations now are suddenly well-disposed towards the civilization and peoples they have been doing their utmost to demoralize, degrade, and destroy. It seems far more plausible that they’re practising what they’ve always practised: the art of deception. Only now instead of trying to deceive us about basic facts about the world – that all humans are interchangeable, that immigration is beneficial to the economy with absolutely no downsides, and so on – they’re trying to deceive us about who they are. They’re trying to trick us into thinking they’re our friends.

Regardless of whether the rhetorical change in Anglospheric political leadership represents a real change in policy, it certainly signals is a change in the culture. Elites are tacitly acknowledging that they’ve lost the argument on immigration, and that such a large fraction of the populace are now so implacably dead-set against its continuation that neither appeals to pensions nor hospitals nor DoorDash nor humanitarian moral imperatives nor the sacred name of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior himself will have any impact. The political class has no choice but to at least pretend to oppose immigration, and to hope that the people are too stupid to realize they’re just pretending, at least until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

So, you know. Don’t be stupid. Don’t let them get away with pretending. Nod along as they admit that immigration is a problem, agree with them, congratulate them for finally catching up as you would the slow kid who finally mastered basic arithmetic towards the end of eighth grade, and keep pressing. Don’t be satisfied token ‘reductions’ in immigration that cap it at historically highs, or ‘deportations’ that largely consist of voluntary returns (which is what Starmer’s claim that he ‘deported’ 24,000 people actually amounts to). Hold them to their new professed standards – push those through to their logical consequences. Canada is founded on a bedrock of British, French, and Indigenous cultures? Yes, and what of the people who made that culture? How are we to preserve them? Should Canada not operate in their interests first? Britain is becoming an island of strangers ... indeed, and how might we best ensure that this societal entropy does not continue? Oh, you are saying that immigration is too high? Well let us debate how low it should be, now that you have admitted there are no economic benefits. And what of those people who were let in - who were given residency and citizenship - while you insisted that immigration was good for us? Something which you now tacitly admit was a betrayal? What precisely is your argument for letting them stay?

By adopting the rhetoric of nativism and nationalism, they’ve implicitly accepted the moral frame that the ‘far right’ has been advocating for years ... a frame that they’ve spent their careers doing everything in their power to malign and suppress. Now they are trying to pass themselves off as the very monsters they fought against. We’ve successfully jerked the Overton window well to the right of where it was only a few short years ago, and they’re having to fight on our turf now. So press that home field advantage.

Thank you for giving this short piece your priceless attention. I hope you derived some value for it. To those of you who support Postcards From Barsoom, you have my deepest gratitude – thanks to you, I’m able to devote my days to writing for you, and for the many readers who enjoy (or hate-read, hey, engagement is engagement, right) this blog for free. Perhaps you are among those many readers who continue to read for free – I cannot force you to pay, that is wholly voluntary, and I will not put my work behind a paywall ... but you may find that there is no small personal satisfaction in joining the ranks of aristocratic patronage, knowing that you count yourself among the elect.