The truth about the Boriswave
Smoke, mirrors, and the making of an immigration crisis
To call Boris Johnson “a liar” is about as controversial as saying water is wet or that dogs bark at the postman. Lying is his default setting.
But on Sunday morning, the disgraced former Prime Minister told a whopper so spectacular it obliterated his entire back catalogue of deception.
Appearing on Sky News with Trevor Phillips, a rattled Johnson brushed off every critique of his catastrophic immigration record as “nonsense.” He brazenly claimed total innocence for the tidal wave of mass migration that unfolded on his watch: the catastrophe now known as “the Boriswave”.
His first line of defence was that the Boriswave was a temporary blip. He never said so outright, but he strongly implied that the spike was largely the result of emergency recruitment in the care sector. That conveniently ignores every other migration surge that took place on his watch.
His second excuse was that “nice” Remainers in Whitehall had talked him into importing foreign care workers. This is laughable. Johnson was the Prime Minister. Nobody forced his hand. Instead of importing cheap labour, he could have redirected part of the foreign aid budget into social care, lifting wages and making the profession attractive to British workers.
But Johnson's most brazen falsehood was claiming that civil servants had somehow sabotaged his immigration system. According to Johnson, he and former immigration minister Kevin Foster had used their “legal powers” to bring the Boriswave under control once the numbers became impossible to ignore. This is the biggest lie of the lot.
The truth is that Johnson’s love affair with an uncapped border system dates back to his time as Mayor of London. He was a relentless thorn in Theresa May’s side over her cap on non-EU workers, and by 2014 he was actively selling the public on an “Australian-style” points-based system.
The Boriswave was neither an unforeseen blip nor a bureaucratic accident. It was the logical and entirely predictable consequence of the system Boris Johnson himself championed.
Was the Boriswave a blip?
Watching Johnson on Sky News, I found myself torn between sheer disbelief and blind fury. His opening gambit was that the Conservatives took back control of immigration after Brexit, only to be forced to turn on the taps to rescue the care sector.
His only real regret, apparently, is that his successors in Downing Street (read: Rishi Sunak) didn't turn the taps back off quickly enough:
To describe this as an evasion of responsibility is far too charitable. The post-Brexit ‘points-based system’ opened for applications on 1 December 2020 and came fully into force on New Year’s Day 2021. Care workers were not even added to the Shortage Occupation List until 15 February 2022.
Yes, the decision to put care workers on that list poured petrol on the fire. But Johnson and his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had already built the machine that made record migration inevitable.
