The Tory leadership contest is a disaster

As I predicted, the Tory leadership contest is a disaster, wasting time, dividing the party badly and forcing Boris to adopt positions which he might later want or need to abandon. 

I wonder if Jeremy Hunt can sit in Boris's cabinet after what he has said about him. 

People like Messrs Gauke and Stewart have already said they won't. 

Philip Hammond must be for the old heave-ho. I hope against hope that the appalling Miss Rudd does not get a job, but bet she does. 

The trouble is that, even with the DUP, the Government only has a majority of three, and after the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election on August 1 it will probably be two, so discontented former cabinet ministers are going to be a big threat to a Boris government. 

i (the name of a newspaper) has been told that up to 20 Conservative MPs could be
expected to vote against a government pushing for no deal, if it came to a vote. But will it? And how many of them would be prepared to vote against the government on a no confidence motion, triggering a general election and a far left government supported by the Scottish nationalists?

Boris promised last night that the rights of citizens of EU countries already living in the U.K would be protected and said he would bring in an Australian-style points-based immigration system — as promised by the 2016 Vote Leave campaign. 

 “We must be much more open to high-skilled immigration such as scientists but we must also assure the public that, as we leave the EU, we have control over the number of unskilled immigrants coming into the country.”

Settlement of unskilled workers in the UK must be halted completely. Artificial Intelligence makes them unnecessary, apart from anything else. 

But a large continuous stream of highly skilled immigrants means that in (not necessarily a very long) time the ethnic English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish would become a minority in Great Britain. Is this what the country wants?

If the immigrants are very highly skilled they might have better brains than the rest of the country and, if they come in big enough numbers, dominate it.

A solution might be to let people come in to work on contracts and then leave, as the Gulf monarchies do with British workers. 

When I first set foot in Romania in 1990 I knew I wanted to live here all my life. I am so very grateful that I can live out my days in this country which I love so much. So am I being hypocritical? 

No, because it is, of course, a matter of numbers. There are more than 80 times more Romanians in Britain than British in Romania and the Romanians are only a small fraction of the total number of immigrants and their children who have settled in the UK. 

The indigenous English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish made up about at least 98% of the population of England and Wales in 1950. The two sizeable ethnic minorities in 1950 were the 400,000 Jews and 160,000 Poles, most of the latter being refugees from Hitler. 40,000 Huguenot asylum seekers had arrived in 1685 but, being Protestants, had intermarried with the English and within a couple of generations had dissolved into the general population. Only their surnames remained French. 

In 2017, by contrast, in England and Wales 28% of live babies were born to mothers from outside the UK. 

The same story is being repeated throughout Western Europe and will be repeated in Romania too, if Romanians do not think of counter-measures.