The post you are reporting:
Farage writing in the Telegraph.
I like Boris Johnson and believe he played a crucial role in the campaign to secure Brexit in 2016. But a comment on migration and Brexit which he made in an interview with the Telegraph today is plain wrong and I cannot let it stand. He said: “Countries are democratically entitled to decide how open they should be. That was the problem with the EU - it fundamentally took away people's democratic ability to decide who could come. That was why it was right to take back control. It's not about migration, it's about control. It's about who calls the shots.” Although I agree with a lot of the points in this paragraph – the idea of taking back control being the most obvious - Boris is being disingenuous on the matter of migration. Millions who voted for Brexit did so precisely because they regard it as a massive problem.
What is worse is that Boris knows this full well. Regrettably, he appears – publicly, at least - to have been infected by the political correctness bug which has turned the British government into the biggest band of virtue signallers to run our country in its history. Of which more later. First, though, it cannot be said too many times: the EU’s open border policy has been ruinous for some parts of the UK, particularly communities in Essex, Lincolnshire and the North. In the decade from 2004, the year that the Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU, about 2,000,000 EU citizens – many lacking professional qualifications and skills - came to live in Britain. That’s the rough equivalent of twice the population of Birmingham. There was no consultation about this. It was simply a consequence of Britain’s membership of the EU.
Socially, towns and cities changed significantly through the sheer concentration of numbers in which these EU citizens settled. Economically, the existing workforce was undercut, costing jobs and businesses. And practically, this influx put schools, housing, transport and medical services under huge pressure. Only a fool would pretend that this wave of immigration didn’t change the lives of those Britons most affected by it. And only someone with no experience of such upheaval would deny that it eventually caused widespread resentment.