Boris the Betrayer, the Last of His Name

As legend tells us, King Alfred the Great, having lost his lands to Viking invaders, sat in the wilderness and burned cakes in penance. This sombre exile was the prerequisite for his victory at Edington, where he vanquished the Vikings and subjugated them under Danelaw in 878 AD. Alfred was crowned the first King of England in 886, having been humbled and proven his legitimacy in battle.

Such a redemption arc has not arrived for Boris Johnson. The deposed former Prime Minister sought to cement his legacy in the late days of his untenable premiership, by posturing as the second coming of Winston Churchill while Europe went to war with Russia. But his bellicosity for defending Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty does not apply to Britain’s borders. The last Conservative to win an election remains unrepentant about his changes to the post-Brexit immigration system, which resulted in more than four million immigrants, predominantly from the third world, settling here within four years.

To this, we add the revelation that Johnson’s government sought an injunction to hide from the public the hundreds of thousands of Afghans, including sex criminals and Taliban fighters, smuggled into our country and not counted in the official statistics. Also, the 150,000 illegal immigrants detected crossing the English Channel in small boats, across Boris and successor Rishi Sunak’s stints as Downing Street.

This cumulative armada of uninvited guests was dubbed the “Boriswave” by a now-inactive anon, Mithras, a phrase popularised by the powerful Max Tempers and Kunley Drukpa. It entered the SW1 lexicon via commentators like myself, Harrison Pitt, and Sam Bidwell — the last of whom linked it to their imminent permanent right to settle in Britain via Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). Benefits, social housing, and expedited citizenship all await the Boriswave if policies are not changed. It continues today, with 98% of Britain’s annual population growth (+755,300) being a direct result of migration; and birth rates being higher than native Brits among many immigrant groups.

The strength of the name “Boris wave” is that it names and blames the architect of Britain’s immiseration, and follows any attempt by Boris to revive his political career like a bad smell.

Harry Cole of The Sun interrogated Boris on his record last week, following Reform UK’s promise to abolish ILR and reverse the Boriswave (Zia Yusuf was the first politician to adopt the phrase, on X). This was after Johnson argued with former minister Mark Harper, at a dinner for State Department delegates attending President Trump’s second state visit, and defended his record in government by saying “we shouldn’t bash the contribution migrants make to Britain”.

Both Boris and his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, play a shell game when pressed on the Boris wave: insisting that the public wanted more doctors, lawyers, and refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, and saying nothing about the millions more they let in. Only the “best and brightest” came, they claim. The same happened with Johnson last week, when he said, “I’m very, very proud of what we did because we took back full legal control… What they [Brexiteers] voted for is full legal control, and that’s what they got.” Pin a “Got what I voted for” ribbon to the 73% of Leave voters whose main concern was reducing immigration, I guess.

This sleight of hand hasn’t worked, because it fails to explain why Britain needed to import a million Indians in four years, and which has not resulted in roving bands of cardiologists conducting roadside surgeries. Just 3% of all visas at the tail-end of the Boriswave were given to doctors and nurses (all of whom are employed by the taxpayer). Foreign doctors are 2.5 times more likely to be disciplined for medical malpractice, and hundreds have been caught committing “industrial-scale qualifications fraud”.

Only 15% of Boriswave migrants came principally to work. Of those skilled worker visa recipients, between 60 – 70% were on less than the median British salary — meaning they received more in benefits than they paid in taxes. A mere 5% of migrants are likely net-tax contributors. The rest, according to optimistic OBR estimates, cost the taxpayer £465,000 each by the time they reach life expectancy (81). For every £1 paid to the Treasury in tax by these high-earning immigrants, the more numerous net-dependents take out £1.60.

That modelling presumes they arrive and start working aged 25 — meaning the primary applicants’ young and idle dependents cost even more. The forecast cost of providing the Boriswave ILR was given the conservative estimate of £234 billion by Karl Williams. This has since been rescinded; but only because, despite the cries of “Debooonked!” by Labour, it is a gross under-estimate of just how expensive the bill will be.

The children of immigrants, born in Britain, are no more likely to be economic gold-dust either: data from Denmark and the Netherlands demonstrates that migrants from the Middle East, most of Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey and their descendants are never net-taxpayers over their lifetime. They were an annual cost of €27 billion to the Dutch between 2016-2019; €400 billion net between 1995-2019. By contrast, Western European, East Asian, and Anglosphere migrants made annual net contributions of €1 billion.

Thanks to the low salary threshold set by Boris and Patel, we can add Indians and Nigerians to that list too: responsible for the largest shares of employment growth (+488,000 and +279,000 in 2023 – 2024, respectively), but whose monthly median earnings have declined in real terms, and are now earning below the average British wage. Britain has become a battery-farm for third-world welfare dependents. There are no economic or moral arguments for allowing them to stay, nor for why they ever came in the first place.

As for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers: their visas were issued with the expectation they would return home once the war for Kiev is won and Hong Kong reclaimed from the Chinese Communist Party. I hope both happen soon, because those good people deserve their homelands back just as much as we do. But neither groups have been troublesome tenants. They commit few crimes, and are culturally proximate to Brits. Whereas the other entrants from countries such as Albania, Eritrea, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and the Congo have disproportionately contributed to making Britain the worst nation in Western Europe for crimes committed by foreign nationals. Every life ruined or taken by a foreign criminal is completely preventable and a consequence of government policy. None of them ever needed to be here. But not all immigrants are equal. There are no Ukrainian rape gangs, or Hong Kong teens smashing up a McDonalds. They make up the minority of the Boriswave, and so should not be scapegoated as the inextricable siblings of the costly criminal entrants from the Subcontinent and Africa.

But it would be wrong to defenestrate Boris on purely economic or legal terms. The incompatible cultures and strange behaviours these uninvited guests inflict on Britain make our quality of life worse. The Yookay aesthetic rode the Boriswave like the Calcutta Star. Highstreets have become an hodgepodge of fried-chicken shops, halal butchers, empty cash-only Turkish-ish barbershops, and neon vape vendors. Leicester Square through Oxford Street is lined with British souvenir and American candy stores, staffed exclusively by bored Bangladeshis.

The Yookay is characterised by its dysfunction and incoherence. Prayer beads dangle from the rearview mirror of black cabs, driven by Somalians with a crippling dependence on Google Maps. Post-colonial grievance poetry, and adverts for remittances and zakat are plastered all over the tube. Bubblegum tuk-tuks blaring garish pop-songs mount London’s pavements without warning. Hot nut stands, gypsy carnival-game scams, and Shi’a processions beating their chests red block foot traffic on Westminster Bridge. Graffiti has become the urban callsign of Diversity: with a sign declaring “Peckham is bootiful” buried beneath layers of spraypaint you could carbon-date back to the Windrush. Lewisham looks like Nairobi. Luton looks like Lahore. This disfiguring of our towns and cities started with Cool Britainnia, but Boris Johnson’s demographic vandalism gave us the Yookay.

Everywhere, characters from the Mos Eisley Cantina stick out like sore thumbs. Men from the Horn of Africa milling about on benches, barefoot, in the middle of the day, as if waiting for events to just happen. Mosques and “community centres” materialise in the quaintest of towns, followed by Friday processions that turn Bexley into Baghdad and Ipswich into Islamabad. That these people don’t belong here is obvious by the way they dress, the way they act, and their absence of any civic sense. Littering, spitting, even public defecating has increased. There is no quiet on public transport anymore: a cacophony of languages, TikToks, and speakerphone conversations give any weary traveller tinnitus. These are the daily sensory indignities suffered by a population who have voted to reduce migration down to the tens of thousands in every election and referendum since 1974, and received record increases instead.

Was this deliberate? Certainly by Boris’ predecessors. Andrew Neather, a Tony Blair era speechwriter, admitted the New Labour government’s immigration policies were designed to “Rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Consider my schnoz well and truly sanded off. David Cameron wanted to convert the Conservatives from “the nasty party” into the “heirs to Blair”, and so drew up DEI shortlists for Parliamentary candidates. Ever an Arabist, Cameron encouraged Muslims to occupy roles at “the top of the Conservative Party [and] all across government in positions of leadership and authority”.

This led to incompetents like Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Dame Sara Khan, Sir Sajid Javid, Dame Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, and present leader Kemi Badenoch taking senior positions in the civil service and government. The promotion of non-English politicians and public servants caused foreign ethnopolitics to be laundered through state institutions. They doubled-down on multiculturalism, and held the door open for their co-ethnics. The Islamic Network neutered Prevent’s ability to monitor Islamic terror, and performed PR stunts to protect the reputation of Muslims after the London Bridge and Manchester Arena attacks, while obsessing over phantom “far right” extremists. Badenoch and Javid both lobbied to remove caps on work and student visas, citing their identity as first- and second-generation immigrants as their rationale. Sunak wrote a paper for Policy Exchange in 2014, encouraging the Cameron government to import more Indians as, per the 1948 British Nationality Act (1948), they can vote as Commonwealth citizens, and often vote Conservative. Patel described Indians in Britain as “living bridges” — a term used by Prime Minister Modi for diasporas abroad he seeks to leverage to his advantage. Before becoming a Conservative candidate, Patel complained the party was “rife with bigots”, and said “Racist attitudes persist within the party.” Her example? At one constituency interview she saw a man wearing a Union Jack tie. “I found that very distasteful”, she said, “stereotypical Tory party”. Why was someone so resentful of British people promoted to Home Secretary, and now sitting as Shadow Foreign Secretary?

Johnson entered Cabinet, then No. 10, in this climate. He gave Ministerial roles to Patel, Sunak, Javid, and Badenoch. He set the salary threshold for the skilled-worker visa at almost minimum wage (£20,480 p.a.), and allowed everyone from phone-screen replacement technicians to kebab shop workers to apply. He ignored the 2018 report by the pro-migration Migration Advisory Committee, which warned against lowering the salary threshold and removing caps on social care and dependent visas. He repealed a Gordon Brown government requirement to advertise British jobs to British workers first — allowing ethno-nepotistic hiring practices to replace domestic labour in UK companies. He repealed rules made by Theresa May, to let foreign students loiter for longer in Britain without employment, and allowed them to switch from a study to work or asylum visa to extend their stay. He did all of this, according to a source, without ever knowing Indefinite Leave to Remain existed. He ran this reckless demographic experiment without any thought for the consequences.

Why did he acquiesce to these absurd demands? Human quantitative easing? A love of authentic curry? A pastime of watching urban youths machete-duel for their honour? According to fired advisor Dominic Cummings: a combination of Carrie pouring progressivism in his ear like Lady Macbeth, and a desire to “make the Financial Times like him again” after Brexit. And so the electorate got neither Fortress Britain nor Singapore-on-Thames, but an anarcho-tyrannical failed state somewhere between North Korea and the ISIS Caliphate.

All of this has been managed by a panopticon of censorship laws and online surveillance, strengthened under the repeated COVID lockdowns that the arch libertarian Boris Johnson placed us under. Authoritarian policies arise in direct proportion to the increase in ethnic heterogeneity. Johnson’s government concocted both the Online Safety Act (2023) and Public Order Act (2023), which exacerbated the recording of non-crime hate incidents, created a new offence of “causing non-trivial psychological harm” with social media posts, and criminalised silent public Christian prayer. Over 12,000 people are imprisoned for social-media posts a year by laws Boris refused to repeal and made worse. But Johnson thinks it is worse for Trump and Vance to criticise Britain’s free speech record because Jimmy Kimmel took a two-day break from presenting his television show after lying about the leftist motivations of Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer.

It is obvious that Johnson is yesterday’s man. Lie as he might, Boris’ legacy will always be the indefensible Boriswave. Like the Boriswave, he must be banished. But though they will be sent back, he will not be forgiven. As Mary Harrington suggested, the best thing for Boris to do now would be to retreat from public life and take up lighthouse-keeping — though he will undoubtedly return to convince us that the increase in shipwrecks on his watch were a good thing. I personally think he should keep talking: the more interviews he gives, the more he guarantees his allies will never feather the nest for his return in Reform UK.

Johnson is fond of quoting Cincinnatus. I suggest he get used to the feel of a plough in his hands, because the public doesn’t want him to ever put it down again. Hasta la vista, Boris.