Nul Points

Only liberals, including neoliberals, and Trotskyists, including neoconservatives, are in principle in favour of unrestricted immigration, although they are. But even they have never succeeded in giving effect to that principle. When, exactly, has any country ever had no immigration controls?

The idea that Britain has had none since some indeterminate point in recent history has replaced the old, and equally ludicrous, hallucination that there has ever been some kind of taboo against discussing immigration. I must have been in a coma, and I am not the only one.

A good three years after anyone last mentioned the subject, the Government has decided to bring forward legislation that replaced caring about where you were from rather than about what you had to offer, with what might be called the Fiona Bruce Principle that a job was "highly skilled" if it were paid a lot, and "low skilled" if it were not. Thus, care workers are low skilled, while people who read out autocues for a half an hour each evening are highly skilled.

It is completely false to suggest that opposition to this Bill is motivated, not even by a support in principle for "open borders" (in point of fact the Government is packed with, and surrounded by, people of that view), but by a desire to preserve some "free movement" that allegedly still exists. 

By the way, we did not have to leave the EU in order to do any of this. The things that the Government is doing and which could not have happened without Brexit are the likes of renationalising the railways. And the likes of Yvette Copper are as opposed to those as they have always been.