Will Britain soon get its own Geert Wilders?
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It’s been a big week for big hair. In the Netherlands, the silver demi-pompadour of Geert Wilders swept the leader of the Right-wing, anti-Islam PVV party to victory in the Dutch general election. A few days earlier, Argentina voted in an even more magnificent mane with a small politician attached. Javier Milei’s hair “is baffling the world,” gasped The Wall Street Journal, which is not exactly known for its coiffure reportage. The former economics commentator and anarcho-capitalist “rocks a mop that reflects his nonconformist campaign,” it reported. If you had to describe the style of Milei’s tempestuous barnet it would be “Englebert Humperdinck dragged through a hedge backwards”.
Not only has the pending president Milei promised to take a chainsaw to Argentina’s corrupt and bloated state, the libertarian revs an actual chainsaw at his rallies. My favourite thing, though, is his advisers; the first people he thanked during the presidential primaries in August – Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas. Except they’re not people. They’re all dogs cloned from the English mastiff, Conan, whom Milei adopted in 2004 and referred to as “literally my son” and my “true and greatest love”. He says his “four-legged children” are the “best strategists in the world” and credits them with advising him on a host of issues.
We think our country has gone to the dogs but Milei, ever the optimist, thinks that if you want to run the country to the dogs is precisely where you go. The man who just got the highest percentage vote of any presidential candidate since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983 reportedly consulted a medium after Conan died in 2017 to seek the late pooch’s advice.
Apparently, the ghost of Conan woofed that it was God’s mission for his master to become president, and look how that turned out. Can’t help feeling Jeremy Hunt missed a trick not consulting a deceased pet over his dog’s breakfast of an Autumn Statement. Both Wilders and Milei are often compared to Donald Trump who has his own spun-sugar edifice glued atop his head, although it has been known to take off in a breeze. Boris’s well-rumpled haystack was part of his appeal. Is big hair a sign of virility in leaders? There is something in that, I think, but exuberant locks also signal something wilder in a nature that voters find appealing, a willingness to disregard conventional, short-back-and-sides politics.
Wilders’s triumph took Right-thinking commentators (aka Leftist progressives) by surprise. All the journalists, including the BBC, are said to have been waiting for the result at the wrong party headquarters. Not the PVV (Freedom Party) but the VVD establishment party, formerly led by prime minister Mark Rutte. If they’d bothered to listen to the Dutch people, they would not have been shocked. Rutte’s downfall came when he tried to persuade his coalition government to make it harder for migrant families to reunite (of the 48,000 asylum seekers who entered the Netherlands last year, 10,927 arrived via family reunion).
The Dutch are a famously laid-back people, but it was obvious they’d had enough. As Wilders, who has supported a ban on Muslim immigration, shuttering all mosques and leaving the EU, said in his victory speech, “The largest party in the Netherlands, and I tell you, the voter has spoken. We are sick of it and we are going to ensure that the Dutchman comes first again.”
Wilders is certainly “far Right” but, across Europe, millions of reasonable people who are not far-Right are sick of their governments failing to stop high levels of immigration which put a strain on crumbling public services, make housing unaffordable, increase community tensions and jeopardise national security. (Such fears have only intensified since the pro-Palestine marches; they played a key role in getting Wilders over the line.) Ignored by politicians and enraged that anyone who doesn’t go along with this enforced “diversity” is accused of racism, voters are increasingly drawn to nationalists who feel their pain.
The AfD in Germany, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen edging ever closer in France and now Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. And to think it was Brexit Britain they accused of being xenophobic!
After yesterday’s disgraceful record net immigration figures – an extra million people admitted in just two years; totally unsustainable at four or five times the level of three years ago – the betrayal of the British people is complete. For a decade, the Government has promised a reduction in immigration while weakening the rules to increase it.
The Conservative Party is dead to me now as it is to millions of its formerly loyal supporters. Out of the ashes at the cremation we pray there will come a party which cares about the British people.
Foodbank scandals
What are some of the consequences for the British people of the tacit open door immigration policy pursued by our sorry excuse for a Conservative Government? A reader called Nick tells me about a scandalous development at the foodbank where he volunteers. “Lately, we have been getting a huge influx of overseas mature students and their relatives seeking support. Many of them large, extended families from India, Sri Lanka and Nigeria,” says Nick, “How do we spot them? Because they are better dressed and presented than our standard local clients who are in genuine need.”
Surely, says Nick, “those students and their relatives have to come to the UK on the basis that they can support themselves? It’s not where our gifting supporters would expect their donations to go.”
It sure as hell isn’t. Nick also reports that many of the actual students using the foodbank “can barely speak English so how do they study and how will all this end?”
Don’t be silly, Nick. The overseas students aren’t here to study! They’re here to get a “degree”, pay huge fees to our university sector, price out bright indigenous kids while enabling the Government to snuggle up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by offering squillions of visas. A total of 142,848 student visas were granted by the UK to Indian nationals in the year to June 2023. That’s a staggering increase of 54 per cent (49,883 more visas granted than in 2022). On top of that, those who graduate get to stay on for two years to do any job. Absolute lunacy.
“We have opened up a huge door here,” says Nick “and I’m sure the Government has no idea what is going on at ground level. Even my Left-leaning foodbank colleagues are appalled at the abuse of the charity.”
Offhand, I find it hard to think of a story that better illustrates the perfidy of a political class that has sold out its own people. It fills me with a kind of helpless rage. How dare they! Do we need our own Geert Wilders to stick up for British people?
Supporting our Jewish Community
Once again, huge thanks to the thousands of Telegraph readers who signed the October Declaration to show our Jewish community that we have their backs at this deeply anxious time. I’m thrilled to say Suella Braverman just added her name to the list. She joins Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Elaine Paige, Sir Tim Rice, Sir Tom Stoppard, Andrew Neil, Dame Maureen Lipman, Countdown whizz Rachel Riley, a host of lords, ladies, historians, brigadier generals, air commodores, air marshals, rear admirals and many more terrific people from all walks of life.
In London, on Sunday, there will be the first National Solidarity March Against Anti-Semitism. If you can get there, please join me, Toby Young, Laura Dodsworth and other members of British Friends of Israel at 1pm by the Gladstone statue outside St Clement Danes Church. The church is a memorial to those who have lost their lives while serving in the RAF; I hope their valiant ghosts will approve of us protesting against the kind of genocidal Jew-haters many of them died fighting. We will channel the Spitfire spirit that is never quite extinguished in the British heart.
We need at least 50 people to carry an October Declaration flag, one for each of the days in captivity endured by the hostages, including ten-month-old baby, Kfir Bibas, and Emily Hand who spent her ninth birthday this week with Hamas terrorists. Let us pray that those beautiful little people, and all the other children and sisters, mothers and grandmothers are released today or tomorrow.
If you can’t make it, please do sign the declaration and encourage others to do so (britishfriendsofisrael.org). A Jewish author I met was in tears the other day when she told me how very much our support has meant. It would be so lovely to see you in person, and for such an important cause.
