Ben Lowry: Those who pushed mass immigration do not have to live among its consequences

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on Ken Bloomfield)

But we have not done that with regard to very serious violence, including petrol bomb attacks against police in some areas.

The violence not only destroys towns, it also puts immigrant members of the population in great fear. Anyone who has ever used the NHS knows how dependent we are on foreign workers – I think of the deaths of both my parents at the Ulster Hospital, and the immigrant staff who helped tend to them in their last days.

I think also of people from such a background who go home to lonely houses that are empty because they do not know other many other people who live in our society. I often think, when I see people on boats across the English Channel, do you have any idea how hard life might be here? Such people are generally fleeing from societies which have huge levels of poverty, but living happily in a new community is not merely about money. It takes a long time, often longer than a lifetime, to build up connections and roots. New arrivals will, inevitably, be likely to be living in the most affordable areas – the poorest ones. They might be moving into a community that is understandably wary of them.

So it is outrageous that such people might then have to fear for their safety.

The violence, as well as being utterly wrong, is also of course being used to destroy the reputations of unionists, because it is happening in loyalist areas. It was the same with the Belfast riots last year, when a tier of voices who are always keen to smear loyalists emerged to imply, or state, it was a unionist anti immigrant thing. But this is disproved by the huge and growing opposition to mass immigration in the Republic of Ireland, which has also at times turned ugly (we were among the few media outlets to report on a huge protest about immigration in Cork – why was that not more widely covered?).

So on a pragmatic level the violence is disastrous (but, as I say, that is not the main problem – the wrongness of it is the issue).

I want to make all of that clear before I go on to something that is rarely mentioned with regard to immigration but is at the heart of this problem: the fact that the people who are so pro it rarely have to live with its consequences.

For much of the last 20 years, there has been a consensus between the Labour and Conservative parties on the need for more immigration. The reason is mainly to do with the lower birth rates that established populations in western societies have. We are not having enough children to replace our population, or to tend to our older folk. In other words, there is a growing number of elderly people and a gradually shrinking number of younger people.

In another column in the coming weeks I will look at a part of this problem, which is that a growing number of people in the UK, particularly in Northern Ireland, feel that they should not have to work. They typically claim this on health grounds, and so they are given disability benefits. When, a decade or so ago, I began to write about the huge numbers of people, even then approaching 12% of the population, who were on what was then called Disability Living Allowance, I got essentially no support from any quarter. Instead I got much abuse. The problem of people of working age who are out of work has since got much worse, after covid.

But here I want to address the cultural challenges that flow from mass immigration, which have been dismissed as racist for years, and so ignored. Those problems are becoming ever more apparent. Many people have arrived from countries with utterly different and reactionary attitudes to women. Or from countries that want to execute or at least jail gay people.

More than a few of them have arrived in our wonderful, generous countries with hatred in their hearts for our societies, our values and our way of life. Instead of gratitude, they want to harm us.

And yet the people who arranged mass immigration, who are in the political or governing elites, are usually pretty keen on the good life themselves. They almost never have to live around immigrants or to face anti social behaviour.

Then, unforgivably, they sneer at the societies who have had to face the consequences of their disastrous decisions.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor