Due to a minor health crisis, I spent much of last weekend in the A&E unit of my local hospital, an experience that gave me a direct insight into the enormous pressures on the NHS. Even when I was finally discharged at 2am after almost 14 hours, the unit was still crowded with patients, some lying on trolleys, others on corridor floors.

The struggles of the health service are variously blamed on underfunding, mismanagement, and staff shortages. But perhaps the most important factor is the explosion in demand caused by mass immigration. Only this week, the Office of National Statistics revealed that the British population grew by one percent to 68.3 million in the year to June 2023, the greatest increase since records began. And the statisticians emphasised that this phenomenal rise was entirely driven by the vast influx of new arrivals.

It is not just the NHS that is creaking under the strain of demographic upheaval. Our roads are congested, our sewers overflowing, our energy prices soaring. The welfare system is unsustainable, just as the supply of housing is hopelessly inadequate for current needs.

Our social cohesion is being eroded by imported misogyny, sectarianism and Islamist extremism. Once a beacon of liberty, Britain now finds that its tradition of free speech is gravely threatened by authoritarian zealots. Ours used to be a well-ordered, homogenous society, but now the dark shadow of chaos hangs over our urban landscape, reflected in the incidence of knife crime and gangland violence.

This has been a social revolution without any mandate. No mainstream party ever campaigned for an open-door policy. On the contrary, the leading politicians all promised tighter controls, only to move in the opposite direction once they reached office. In fact, the impact of their dishonesty may be even greater than is often recognised, for the absence of rigour from the authorities has created a climate of laxity, characterised by a vast black market, an absence of deportations and a dangerous ignorance about the numbers who really live in Britain.

The British people are among the most tightly monitored in the world. There are more proportionately more CCTV cameras here than in any other country, while so many transactions with the state involve the provision of endless personal details, even down to ethnicity. Yet, paradoxically, officialdom is almost clueless about the true size of the British population. A study by researchers at Oxford University this week maintained that one in every 100 British residents is a foreigner with no right to be here, which implies a total of around 745,000 illegal migrants.

But the historian Ed West argues in a brilliant essay just published online that the real figure could be far higher. He notes that the number of patients registered with GPs is six million more than the official estimate of England’s population, just as the roll-out of the vaccine during the Covid pandemic involved five million more people than the bureaucrats’ records implied. Similarly, supermarket receipts for basic necessities appear to show that that state’s calculations of the British population are far too low.

The failure to plan effectively, based on real figures rather than wishful thinking or cynical deceit, is a prime reason our country is in such a mess and our public services are so badly over-stretched. Contempt for the British people shines through the Government’s refusal to get a grip of the numbers. Just as the authorities continually lie about the scale of the influx, so they pump out their hollow propaganda which claims that “diversity is our strength” or that immigration is the key to growth.

At times, they blatantly just hide the truth, as in the Home Office’s refusal to publish statistics on the nationality of criminals in Britain. But the attempt to conceal reality is no longer working. The public knows what is happening in their own neighbourhoods – and that makes the sense of betrayal by the politicians all the greater.

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Labour and the Liberal Democrats are said to be gleeful about the outcome of this week’s votes by Tory MPs in their party’s leadership contest. “Here is one gift we don’t have to declare,” jokes a Downing Street insider.

Such smugness is based on the belief that by whittling down the final choice to the two most right-wing candidates, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, the Conservatives have effectively retreated into the wilderness. Yet the Tories lost the last election not because they were insufficiently progressive but because they failed to uphold their pledges on immigration, crime, welfare and tax.

An attempt to move on to the so-called centre-ground would amount to nothing more than a further surrender to the fashionable woke orthodoxy which has already done so much damage to Britain. That is why James Cleverly would have been the wrong choice. He was too complacent, too keen on his avuncular image.

The Tories need someone who will bravely take up the challenge of renewal rather than allow them to remain in their comfort zone. In 1975, the biggest issue facing the country was the industrial chaos caused by irresponsible trade unions. Margaret Thatcher won the Tory leadership, not by clinging to the centre ground of compromise with the militants, but by promising to tackle them. She was rewarded by three successive General Election triumphs. Today, immigration is the greatest issue facing this country. The spoils of victory will go to the party that can restore our national integrity.

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Sue Gray was meant to be a brilliant administrator, the ultimate Whitehall insider who knew how the Government machine really worked. But in practice she turned out to be a disaster as Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff. Her brief reign of dysfunction, however, pales in comparison to the behaviour of Sir William Armstrong, the top official in the dying days of Ted Heath’s Government in early 1974. In the grip of a nervous breakdown, Sir William lay naked on the floor of a waiting room in Downing Street one afternoon, babbling incoherently about the imminent end of the world. The next morning, having dressed, he called all the top Whitehall permanent secretaries to a meeting, where he told them to go home and prepare for Armageddon. Before he could issue further instructions, he was hospitalised under the Mental Health Act. Soon after his release, he was made Chairman of the Midland Bank.

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The feebleness of the water regulator Ofwat has been on display again this week. Its decision to punish the water companies for their dire performance by ordering that bills be cut by £159million is almost meaningless, given that most consumers will see a saving of just a few pounds. The truth is that, like so much of our civic bureaucracy, Ofwat is part of the problem, not the solution. A top-heavy, slow-moving organisation, it has a chief executive, David Black, on over £220,000-a-year, plus a phalanx of directors on over £160,000.

Like most of the ‘woke’ public sector, it’s drowning in social inclusion initiatives, such as its network of “Being Ourselves Champions”; its “Reverse Mentoring Programme”, to learn about racial inequalities; and its “Diversity Pay Gap Reporting” system. No wonder the water companies have little to fear from this virtue-signalling blob.

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The phenomenal England cricketer Joe Root makes a nonsense of the saying that “nice guys finish last”. There is no more modest, or generous figure in the game, yet yesterday, with a double century against Pakistan, he became the greatest run-scorer in the history of English Test cricket.