Acting as if he was President of the world, Donald Trump marked his latest arrival in Britain by delivering a lecture to Europe on immigration.
He proclaimed: ‘You better get your act together or you’re not going to have Europe any more. You got to get your act together… you got to stop this horrible invasion that’s happening to Europe.’
He also made a tremendous claim that ‘last month we had nobody entering our country. Nobody. Shut it down’.
We will wait for the research before accepting that assertion. But there is no doubt that Mr Trump has, by decisive action, significantly reduced illegal arrivals in the United States.
No doubt it helps to have weak, compliant neighbours. And this policy has followed more than 30 years during which America has been transformed by colossal mass migration, legal and illegal.
But the President is right that Europe cannot indefinitely sustain migration at current levels. And that warning, of course, includes this country.
Whatever will he say about this when he meets his friend Sir Keir Starmer tomorrow in Scotland? The two men have an unlikely but undoubted rapport. But how will it survive if their conversation turns to the subject of migration?
The Mail on Sunday reports today the latest plans of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to find some way of restricting the cross-Channel boat traffic on the justified basis that these vessels are profoundly unsafe, especially for women and children. This is plainly well-intentioned but it is hard to see it as a game-changer.
Those who pay small fortunes to board these boats are frighteningly ready to take grave risks.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has inflicted a very serious wound on himself by his absurd claim – which will haunt him for years to come – that ‘there is lots of housing and many local authorities that can be used, and we’re identifying where it can be used’, to accommodate both rising numbers of homeless people and migrants.
His statement is disastrously wrong and out of kilter with years of official claims that we must build new housing in great numbers at all costs.
It casts doubt on his awareness of the problems before him and on his knowledge of the true state of the country.
He really said this, unlike France’s Queen Marie Antoinette who never actually said ‘let them eat cake’ about starving peasants unable to afford bread.
Even some on the Left are beginning to see that the social pressures created by the housing of migrants in hotels in towns across the country are dangerous. They simply cannot dismiss objections as bigotry.
And while nasty troublemakers will no doubt do all they can to exploit these events, many of the protesters in such places as Epping are non-violent, respectable, open-minded people who have simply had enough of being treated as if they did not exist and their concerns don’t matter.
It is people very much like them, in the USA, who have upended politics in that country. They have cast aside old parties and played-out politicians who ignored them for too long. All the established British parties and their leaders should take note, and do so soon.