Posted on 1st August, 2025 in Blog posts
Immigrants versus refugees
All my life I have been close to refugee families and known their stories. My mother had worked on the MI9 Atrocities Files in the Second World War, so we knew the bigger picture of what suffering makes people flee home for a strange land.
It is because of this background that I want us to face up to the fact that the thousands of people coming every month to the UK are rarely refugees but coming because they have been told that they will get a home, an income and a pension from the British suckers. And, they will be able to bring their extended families here too, to enjoy the same benefits. And no, I didn’t read a newspaper for this, it was refugees – real refugees – that told me.
My earliest memory – aged 3 – is of being hoisted onto the shoulders of an Arab friend so that I might see the Limassol carnival. When much older, I learnt that Husein had fled Palestine and been helped to get work as a journalist by the Mossmans, with whom my mother and I lived. John Mossman, whose grandparents had been refugees, was then working for MI6 but later became a leading Foreign Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph[1]. In the 1990s I found myself helping Uygurs – I taught them to drive so that they could work as cabbies – and looked after a mechanic from Turkmenistan too. Two years ago, I was useful to some asylum seekers who had been imprisoned in China for their religious views. This summer I expect to take some holiday with my most longstanding childhood friend, whose parents fled to Britain as children in 1933.
So, you can understand that it has been with difficulty that I have come to the conclusion that we can’t take in any more people claiming to be refugees.
The chaos being caused in housing, education and health services, the cost of supporting millions of immigrants on benefits, the dangers we expose ourselves to when we allow in unattached males, without skills, from violent countries or countries where women are punch bags, all these consequences of mass immigration threaten our peace and undermine solidarity.
So I strongly support the policy of denying access to the UK of any illegal immigrant and curtailing all legal immigration excepting high skilled specialists needed in industry. This until we have worked out how to absorb the 10-15 million new immigrants of the past few years. Mass immigration and welcoming refugees are contradictory.
[1] Years later, as Moscow correspondent, he interviewed Yuri Gagarin. When he returned to London he gave me a signed picture from Gagarin and some of Gagarin’s badges which he had persuaded the astronaut to give me.