Woke culture has spent 20 years teaching children Britain is racist - Labour will feed that narrative - Kwasi Kwarteng

Housing, education, roads, welfare benefits, prisons and, of course, the National Health Service are all, more or less, directly affected by population numbers. Immigration levels are one thing, and one cannot deny that immigration has been a huge issue that has transformed life in this country. Yet what frustrates people even more are the levels of illegal immigration.

We don’t even know the scale of this. I remember as a constituency MP, I occasionally received people at surgeries with no fixed address, no passport, no other forms of identification. It was clear that these people existed in a kind of shadow world, where no authorities even knew of their existence.

The numbers of people who live this sort of twilight life is impossible to know for certain, but estimates vary between 1 and 2 million.

Nobody knows for sure. How has it come to this? How has Britain become the number one destination for illegal migrants and cynical traffickers of human beings? The answers lie in Britain’s reputation as a safe, tolerant place.

Contrary to what the left will say, Britain is seen as a successful, tolerant country where people are largely fair minded and decent.

Woke culture has spent twenty years teaching children that Britain is racist, backward, intolerant and steeped in colonial prejudice.

Like so many arguments of the ‘wokerati’, the exact opposite is the truth. Illegal migrants want to come to Britain not because we have a perfect country. We don’t. Yet they realise that the tolerance and fairness found here will be unmatched in Europe.

In France Le Pen’s National Rally emerged from an openly xenophobic and racist National Front. She has detoxified that brand to a great extent.

In Germany, with its troubled history with the Nazis and their legacy, the AfD, many of whose supporters identify with the Nazis, are on about 20% in the polls.

In Italy, the heirs of the first Fascist, Benito Mussolini, have long been part of the political scene. The Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hails from this political tradition, though she strongly disavows these links now.

In Britain, fascism has never had any real foothold or significant following. We had the BNP and the National Front but neither of these parties garnered enough support to threaten the political system.

People from abroad - the illegal immigrants and people traffickers- might not be history experts but they know that Britain will be a better bet for illegal immigrants than countries where fascism Nazism and extremism have been way more successful politically.

They also know that, because of our sense of fair play, we are generous to a fault. Our housing and benefits system treat newcomers favourably.

We are seen regrettably as a “soft touch”. We need to change our approach drastically. We need the confidence to believe in our past and celebrate our fairness and decency. We also need to be tough on the people traffickers.

We need to make our country, frankly, less attractive to people who seek to come here illegally. It is illegal, after all. People seem to forget the criminal element of this phenomenon. There is no sign that Labour grasp any of this.

They equate being a “soft touch” with humanity and tolerance. They denounce anyone who thinks the opposite as ‘racist’.

The failure to deal with the boats was one of the greatest failures of the last Tory government, in which I was involved at the highest level. Sadly, I think Labour will do even worse.