there is a large and growing gap between the citizens and those who claim to represent them which finally broke with this latest action in dover;

 

 There was a certain inevitability about what happened in Dover on Saturday. Several hundred protesters, many masked, blocked roads around the port, traffic backed up, the police arrived and engaged with them and, after a few hours, everyone went home. No arrests were made. The immediate temptation is to treat this as another example of the disruptive protest which has become familiar in Britain over the past decade, except this time coming from the Right rather than the Left. There is some truth in that, although it misses the more interesting point. What happened at Dover was a reaction, in both senses of that rather unfashionable word, and it has been a very long time coming.

There is an important distinction to make at the outset. Opposition to uncontrolled immigration is hardly an eccentric minority enthusiasm which has suddenly emerged from the political fringes. Immigration has been one of the great unresolved questions of British politics for decades. Governments have been elected promising to reduce it, Brexit was fought, among other things, around the question of control over borders and immigration policy, and opinion polling has repeatedly demonstrated substantial public concern about the issue. The small boats crossing the Channel have meanwhile provided an almost daily visual representation of a state apparently unable, or unwilling, to exercise the control which voters reasonably expect of it. Whatever one’s preferred immigration policy, therefore, it is difficult to maintain that the people protesting at Dover are simply attempting to impose some obscure political demand which has never been tested democratically. A very large number of British voters have been asking governments to control immigration for years. They have voted for parties promising to do so, they voted in a referendum in which control of immigration was plainly part of the political argument, and they have watched successive governments promise action while immigration continued at levels which bear little resemblance to what much of the electorate thought it was voting for..........more.........