The people of Europe are in revolt. In France, following victories by Marine Le Pen‘s National Rally in every region, Emmanuel Macron has dissolved the lower house of parliament and called a snap election.
In Belgium, the liberal prime minister, Alexander De Croo, has resigned.
In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has beaten all three parties that form the governing coalition: the Greens, the Liberals and the Social Democrats.
The political structures of the European Union have been shattered. And, as the EU attempts to deal with unprecedented numbers of illegal arrivals on its shores, the cause is obvious.
Its voters have had enough of price rises, political correctness and eco-posturing.
The president of French far-Right party National Rally, Marine Le Pen, celebrates with her political protege Jordan Bardella last week
The only ‘Net Zero’ they want is Net Zero migration — and it’s migration that is fast becoming the No 1 issue across the Continent.
As Rudyard Kipling put it: ‘This is the tempest long foretold, slow to make head, but sure to hold.’
True, Sunday’s poll was only for membership of the European Parliament. Having spent 21 years as an MEP, I know better than most people that voters tend to treat Euro-elections as a free hit.
But do not underestimate this moment.
The EU population wants action on migration. Without decisive measures, the number of illegal crossings into the continent will only grow. It is inevitable. And responses that once seemed beyond the pale for European governments will in time seem normal and necessary.
An election campaign poster for Germany’s centre-Left party SPD is vandalised, with an Adolf Hitler moustache drawn on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s face and the words ‘social parasite dirty pigs’ and ‘warmongers’
We could see the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention rewritten or junked, for example. Both date from an age before cheap international travel. Both were drawn up with an eye on the monstrous persecutions that had preceded and accompanied World War II. Neither is fit for purpose in an age when billions might move across the oceans. Mass deportations now seem much more likely. There will be far greater readiness to send illicit entrants overseas.
Most of the parties that won Sunday’s votes across Europe want some version of Britain’s Rwanda scheme. They want to be able to send illegal migrants to safe third countries regardless of whether or not they are claiming asylum.
And we’re likely to see tougher action at sea, with boats turned around or occupants dumped back on the North African beaches from which they embarked.
When the Mediterranean boats crisis first began in 2015, I spent part of the summer volunteering in a hostel for unaccompanied minors in southern Italy.
The young men stepping off the coastguard vessels almost all carried smartphones, even if they owned nothing else of value. Smartphones are the key to understanding the whole crisis.
They offer a daily vision of what a Western lifestyle has to offer — and seem to bring it within reach.
In the Netherlands, discontent has led to the rise of Geert Wilders, now the country’s leader, who is known for his Right-wing populism, anti-immigration stance and opposition to Islam
They allow young men to transfer information and financial credit, enabling journeys across the Sahara and the Mediterranean that their grandparents could never have contemplated.
I mention this to show how empty is the claim, popular with people who don’t want to face the magnitude of what is coming, that the migrant crisis originates solely with the way events have unfolded in Afghanistan or Libya. Or that the answer lies in making these and other countries, in Africa for example, richer.
If, one day, African nations really did catch up or surpass our living standards, that might indeed reduce their people’s incentive to move.
In the meantime, the richer these countries become, the more their people will travel. It is important to stress that the election results were a victory for the Right in general rather than just for parties of the so-called ‘hard-Right’.
The distinction can sometimes be blurred because, for decades, the BBC and Left-wing newspapers have used the phrase ‘hard-Right’ to mean ‘something I don’t like’.
This label has been stuck on entirely democratic and constitutional parties simply because they want to deport illegal entrants or have criticised the EU.
Right-leaning parties of every variety gained ground: Christian Democrats, free marketeers, populists, authoritarians, conservatives.
Leftists of every variety — socialists, Communists, radicals, Greens — lost.
Disgruntled farmers in Poland burn a car tyre outside parliament in protest against the EU’s climate policies
This shift was not wholly about immigration, of course. No election is determined solely by one issue. A number of other factors were at play and almost all of them tended to push voters to the Right: the war in Ukraine and concerns about defence and security; the post-lockdown price rises; the cost of decarbonisation — all these things are strong suits for Right-leaning parties.
But immigration was what ultimately counted.
Where does this leave the United Kingdom? In theory, we should be better placed than the EU to cope with what is coming. We are an island. We are outside the EU’s free movement rules and outside its so-called ‘burden-sharing scheme’ on illegal immigrants (which obliges each member state to take a proportion of the total).
Unless we make use of our freedoms, however, those advantages count for nothing — and already we can see the mood changing.
Migration is a key preoccupation for Nigel Farage and his Reform party — and they are polling strongly. Yet, bizarrely, the British electorate is poised to give a mammoth majority to Labour, the party that opened the immigration floodgates in the first place, back in the 1990s.
Sir Keir Starmer has made clear that nothing will make him reconsider our membership of the various human rights charters with which our courts frustrate deportation orders.
Starmer is in favour of rejoining the EU’s burden-sharing agreement. He has also promised to scrap the Rwanda scheme, thereby making Britain attractive to migrants. The irony is that we are about to hand a huge victory to Starmer, a human rights lawyer who loves the free movement of people, and all because we are upset with the previous government – not least thanks to its record on immigration.
In fact, illegal immigration is lower here than in the EU, largely because of our unprecedentedly harsh laws.
It will fall further next year, regardless of who wins the election, as more of these laws take effect. But afterwards, as a Labour Britain becomes a haven — a soft touch compared with a tougher EU — things will turn around.
The Right has gone from strength to strength in Italy too, culminating in the election of prime minister Giorgia Meloni
My sense is that we have given little thought to what a Labour government will be like. Yes, after 14 years, we are cross with the incumbents. We are familiar with every Tory blemish.
But do we truly want to be governed by a party that will exacerbate most of the things that annoyed us in the first place? A party that is keener on taxes, codes of human rights and wokery, and less keen on public sector reform, spending restraint and border controls?
Are we really happy to have Britain as the one of the few places in Europe where there is no Rwanda-type scheme?
A country acting as a magnet for the endless numbers of ‘sans-papiers’ seeking to avoid deportation?
We’ll find out soon enough – when we see the reality of what now faces us and the sheer scale of the response that’s now required.
Unthinkable or not to our political classes, it is coming.
- Lord Hannan is International Secretary of the Conservative Party and serves on the Board of Trade