00:01:07.380As regular viewers will know, for several years now, I've been trying to persuade anyone who will listen
00:01:12.720that if you want to address the widely shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration,
00:01:18.600Britain's most salient political issue, it might be helpful to understand what's actually causing the problem in the first place.
00:01:25.140The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that woke ideologues in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good.
00:01:38.240On the fringes of the right, some even murmur of the various theories of the so-called Great
00:01:42.840Replacement, which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers
00:01:47.860to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through
00:01:53.120to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-word immigration. Whatever the exact flavor
00:01:58.580this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily
00:02:03.320ideological reasons. Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration
00:02:08.760sentiment is also motivated by ideology, hating immigrants or being racist, etc., rather than
00:02:15.600reality. What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only
00:02:20.560partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Nether explained, wanted to, quote,
00:02:25.500rub the right's nose in diversity. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in
00:02:30.580particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does
00:02:35.380not explain why a series of conservative governments elected on increasingly vociferous
00:02:39.740promises to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands continued to ramp it up. Facing the
00:02:45.260threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set
00:02:50.560new immigration records culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000. It's also
00:02:57.500true that some people don't like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant
00:03:02.120portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to
00:03:07.720that infamous far-right anti-immigrant rag, The Guardian, British people are statistically some
00:03:12.960of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world. Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding
00:03:17.800what's happening, often on purpose. My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes
00:05:20.640This really isn't complicated to understand.
00:05:23.120So why do so many people in Britain who clearly feel the economic pain nonetheless refuse to see it?
00:05:29.020To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivized politicians to deceive them about what's actually happening.
00:05:35.980Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive but false idea that they are struggling because the rich aren't paying their fair share.
00:05:43.960A report last month, however, has opened my eyes to another reason, one I had never considered.
00:05:49.820It turns out many British people think that the decline in their living standards
00:05:53.620is personal to them, while the rest of Britain is somehow thriving.
00:05:58.380A big new poll and focus group studies conducted by Freshwater Strategy,
00:06:02.460with the support of the John Templeton Foundation,
00:06:05.080asked participants where they thought Britain stood economically compared to our main competitors.
00:06:09.360As David Frost put it in his excellent article,
00:06:12.000voters are living in a dream world. Specifically, nearly half of British voters think that we are
00:06:17.480as rich or richer than Switzerland. Over half think we're as rich or richer than Australia,
00:06:23.180Singapore, or Germany. And incredibly, over half of Brits think that our country is as rich as
00:06:29.320or richer than the United States. Imagine their shock when they were told the truth.
00:06:34.240We're 10% poorer than Germany, 20% poorer than Australia, 40% poorer than America and Singapore,