Stephen Daisley
The great civic crisis of our times is state capacity. When policies favoured by voters are repeatedly met with a bureaucratic 403 error – the action you requested is forbidden by our servers – dissatisfaction with the established order grows, as does the appeal of those outside the mainstream who wish to topple that order.
If a country refuses to take back citizens who have committed serious crimes in Britain, that country is hostile to our interests and a legitimate target for sanctions
Among those policies which the public has been told simply aren’t possible are the Rwanda scheme; withdrawal from the ECHR; the deportation of Islamist hate preachers; the restriction of social housing/welfare/non-emergency NHS services to citizens; the securing of Britain’s maritime border against people-smuggling; and most infamously Brexit, which the state was so unwilling to deliver that it took two general elections, the collapse of the two-party system and unleashing Dominic Cummings on the civil service to get it done – and even then on the most limited and compromised terms.
The political mainstream is flashing a 403 error once again, this time over Reform’s plans to deport all foreigners currently residing at His Majesty’s Pleasure, a move proposed as an alternative to the impending liberation of about 5,000 lags to ease overcrowding. There are presently 10,000 overseas nationals, roughly 12 per cent of the prison population, and the most commonly represented nationalities are Albanians, Poles, Romanians, Irish and Lithuanians. Nigel Farage wants to return them to sender and, if their home countries refuse, to ship them off to El Salvador where criminals are kept in supermax prisons under a harsh regime brought in by authoritarian president Nayib Bukele, the only Covid lockdown enthusiast the right idolises and the only Palestinian the left doesn’t idolise.
