Guy Dampier
speaker
49 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Guy Dampier’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So he made these remarks at a press conference for the government's new immigration white paper. And he said that he wants to take back control of our borders. And he's called the previous era of mass immigration squalid. So here's a little bit of that speech.
He's also blamed the previous Conservative government for the large increase in immigration since 2021, which saw net migration quadruple in only a few years. In 2023, migration was actually over a million people, which is nearly the same size as Birmingham, the second biggest city in the whole country. And he's called this a one-nation experiment in open borders.
And he's warned that Britain's at risk of becoming an island of strangers. So although he praised diversity and described migration as part of Britain's story, he said that immigrants have got to commit to integrate. They've got to learn English. And he's also extended the period required to apply for permanent settlement. So it's gone from five years to 10 years.
And that will reassure a lot of people who are very worried that the millions of low skilled immigrants who come here in the last few years would very soon be eligible for settlement, at which point they could access the welfare state. And we could have been looking at a bill in the billions of pounds.
So immigration policy has been dominated by this idea that immigration is always good for the economy and it's only ever illegal immigration, which is bad. So this is a big rhetorical shift.
We have a Labour government at the moment, their left wing. And as you expect, there's been a lot of outrage from their base. They had a few councillors resign. Some of their MPs have come out against the speech. With that said, most people agree with what he said.
People can see all around them that mass immigration has been bad for the country, whether we're talking about the low economic growth and stagnant productivity, or serious things like rape gangs who prey on vulnerable girls, and hate marches where we've seen people carrying pro-Hamas banners.
So in a lot of ways, the prime minister is really reflecting the mood of the country rather than driving it. Very recently, we had local elections, what you probably call municipal elections, in which the Labour Party did very badly. And the Anti-Immigration Reform Party, which is led by Nigel Farage, did very well.
So some people will think that this is an attempt to win back voters and stem that collapse in popularity. But for people on the right, this is also a vindication. The prime minister is saying things we've argued about for years, but a lot of us are going to be skeptical about whether the prime minister is actually going to achieve what he claims he's going to do.
Thank you very much for having me on.
So the ruling is all about what constitutes a woman. And it starts with the Scottish government. So the UK has a slightly unusual system of devolved governments. So there are governments in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland who've got powers devolved to them from the main government in Westminster.
And in Scotland, the Scottish nationalist government, which is very left-wing, have been seeking to extend what they call trans rights. The most controversial part of this is that they've been pushing for a self-ID, which essentially allows somebody to declare that they are a woman and be recognised as a woman without any doctor being involved, without any surgery, without anything else at all.
So that's very, very open to abuse. And we've seen some bad cases, as in the United States, of individuals using that as a cover for sexual fetishes or for other things. Now, the particular argument here was about a new law to increase the number of women on public boards. It's what Americans call affirmative action. In Britain, it's called positive action.
And it's allowed by something called the Equality Act. The Scottish government argued that this positive action should include transgender women. as long as they had a gender recognition certificate. So they would be counted as women and you would basically be allowed to hire more of them, even if they had lower standards, just to reach a 50-50 level.
The campaign group for Women's Scotland disagreed and they said that this should be restricted only to biological women. They had a long court battle. There's been judicial reviews. They've won some things. They've lost some things. And it's finally gone all the way to the Supreme Court.
And that court has now decided that the use of sex and the use of women in the Equality Act refers to biology and to biological women, which means that transgender women are not protected against discrimination as women because they aren't women. They are still protected against discrimination as people who've undergone gender reassignment, however.
It's going to be a very far-reaching ruling. Britain, much like the United States, this has been a really contentious topic over the last few years. There's been a huge battle. And in fact, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was famously once unable to say whether or not a woman has a penis. He sort of flip-flopped on what he considers to be a woman. But at the same time, he's a former lawyer.
So this should hopefully be professionally clarifying. And I hope that going forward, he will now be able to confidently say that the law is clear that a woman is a biological woman. What it means in practice is that the Gender Recognition Act, which is the law in Britain that covers transgender people, is going to be pretty null because the law is now saying that sex is biological and not social.
That said, transgender women who have a gender recognition certificate can still have all their legal documents describing their sex as female. And as I understand it, it's discriminatory to ask somebody if they have a gender recognition certificate.
There may well be. I mean, the ruling has now gone out, and that is clarifying, but it's going to change a lot of things. So, as the Supreme Court said, Parliament is going to have to legislate to deal with those issues, including the fact that the Gender Recognition Act has now basically been superseded and will need to be amended in some way, probably.
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