October 4, 2023 - 3:40pm
Left-wing economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has suggested that British Home Secretary Suella Braverman should be “expelled from the country” for her remarks about immigration.
In a fiery exchange with Freddie Sayers on UnHerdTV, he also said that she is a “ridiculous idiot” and a “poor excuse of human nature”, while claiming that the UK should not be having a debate about immigration. The exchange is reproduced below.
YF: Are we liberals or are we not? Do we really want borders?
Once upon a time there were no passports — the world was a much better place. When Lord Byron went to Greece, where he died, or Lord Elgin for that matter, he didn’t need a passport. What was wrong with that? I think borders are a sign of failure of the human species.
FS: That’s very relevant now, as there’s a big debate going on about immigration.
YF: You shouldn’t be having that debate — it is a misanthropic, stupid debate, and you have a minister who should have been expelled from this country for having these ideas. She even challenged the United Nations Charter on refugees — I mean this is…
FS: She suggested that it might be an outdated legal mechanism to resolve that problem —
YF: A ridiculous idiot. She’s a dangerous poor excuse of human nature, that Suella Braverman of yours. Be very ashamed of her.
FS: But the people who are anxious about this issue are the people you are trying to look after.
YF: Sure, but my job is not to pander to anxieties that are absolutely false consciousness examples. Look, we Europeans exported hordes of people — we emigrated to the four corners of the planet. We populated the earth, from Latin America to North America, to Asia, to Africa — millions, usually armed, as imperialists. We had no qualms about that for a thousand years.
All that has happened is that we’re getting old. Demographically, we are aging. So migratory flows have reversed. We need migrants — the more the merrier.
[…]Why do people worry about the Romanians living next door to them? It’s because the flats have been privatised. They used to be council houses and now they have been privatised. And austerity, together with largesse for the financiers through quantitative easing, has destroyed the foundation of society — even if you didn’t have a single foreigner. So all this angst and rage is being diverted, as in the mid-war period, against the Jew, the Muslim, the Romanian, the Brit, the German, the foreigner. We must not tolerate that, and we must never pander to that and say, “Oh, the solution to that is to erect taller fences” — no, it is not.
FS: But those people you don’t want to tolerate —
YF: You mean the politicians?
FS: I’m talking about voters who might have ideas that you don’t like.
YF: No no no, I tolerate every voter and I respect every voter. But I engage in conversation with them, whereas Ms Braverman is trying to poison the soul of everyone for her own very narrow interest — of political survival of a government that is nasty, evil, and its life should be as short as possible.
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SubscribeWhy is this hysterical dimwit given so much airtime on UnHerd?
So that we are reminded what the true nature of “liberals” and “progressives”
Seriously, anyone who hasn’t, listen to the whole interview, don’t just read the transcript. Hearing him speak makes your skin crawl, vile, self centred, hatred for the majority”plebs” or any politicians who don’t share their “vision”, disdain for common sense.
The part between 0:26 and 0:52 is especially unbelievable.
It’s scary, especially given how much power this sort has in the media, education, bureaucracy.
It’s vital to hear this garbage.
Yes, very few of the Open Borders brigade are prepared to speak so openly about their opinions. Good to hear it out loud.
And God bless Suella Braverman.
He doesn’t suggest Open Borders MM. You know that. He’s objecting here to the use of language in a deliberately incendiary fashion.
He doesn’t even get onto how ineffective as a Govt minister Braverman been for more than 5yrs. No return deals. Not sorted timely processing. No multilateral strategy for stopping the Boats in the med as quid pro quo. No resolution to Courts backlog. If Home Office a broken Dept what’s she doing about it. Been mugged off by Rwandan politicians milking us for their own gain etc etc? She talks like she’s in Opposition. She’s in Power, and just scapegoating for political benefit.
While my urge to vomit from this rubbish will take time to subside, you are right. We expected idiocy to vanish if ignored, and ended up with harebrained wokes ruling over us. I wish I could shake the hands of Suella Braverman. I hope she has supporters unashamed to stand for sanity with her.
Err, Braverman been in the Govt for 5+yrs. She’s in power. What’s she done? Sod all but sloganeering. She benefits from lots of mugs cheering.
Because getting anti-immigration right-wingers in perpetuity is hardly in the spirit of Unherd. Are your own views so fragile that you can’t listen to other perspectives occasionally?
Would you care to identify the “anti-immigration right-wingers” who contribute to UnHerd? Paul Kingsworth? I jest. There is no right-wing equivalent of Thomas Fazi on this site, still less the execrable ‘YV’.
But look at some details of what Braverman said:
“More than one in five births are to foreign-born mothers. Due to immigration and high birth rates among foreign-born mothers, English secondary schools will need to find an extra 213,000 places by 2026 compared to 2020.”
Interesting why she picks secondary schools and 2026. The children she is talking about have of course already been born. But 2026 is the high point after that it all starts to go the other way – and thats with things as they are.
The Department of Education statistics project that the state school population will shrink from just under 8 million this year to 7 million by 2032. By that year it is anticipated that the secondary population will be nearly 6% lower than last year. Already local authorities in many areas are closing or merging primary schools due to falling rolls
So I really don’t know what she is on about. Look at countries with very little immigration – Poland and Japan for example. Their birth rate is catastrophically low – they will be in serious trouble in 20 years time. Immigration will save the UK from that fate.
Agreed, our demographic profile dictates that we desperately need migration. We’re just going about it the wrong way. I would favour a system that the left would probably hate and accuse me of modern slavery, where people could come to this country and work for a period (say 5-10 years) on whatever task the state needed (e.g. construction of the necessary housing and new infrastructure, or the care sector – jobs that are not going to be replaced by AI or robots). After that point, they would be granted citizenship and could do whatever they wanted.
On that plan, there must be no dumping of migrants in working-class areas and no ghettoing. We DO need a compromise; people need to accept that it is not racist to say that multiculturalism has problems. We need better integration to have a cohesive society, but we most certainly don’t want homogenisation either.
None of this is easy, and it cannot be the case if it is going to work that native workers have poorer living standards or wages during that qualification period (which should also be a probation period – a criminal offence should result in instant deportation).
This will get downvoted, and I am sure it upsets both the left and the right.
If you don’t think our demographic profile is a problem, read Peter Zeihan’s ‘The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization’.
Why does it? Our population is growing, mostly due to migrants and their children. South East England is one of the most densely populated large areas in the world (yes, I know Hong Kong etc).
The problem with your analysis is that it is a complete Ponzi scheme – the population grows indefinitely to maintain a sufficient number of under 50s or whatever.
It’s not a giant Ponzi scheme because population growth will flatten in the second half of this century and then likely decline. Also, the UK is stuffed long-term because once the North Sea runs dry, we have no resources, and other countries have now ‘recolonised’ Africa. As time goes on, we will become less and less attractive, and people will leave again.
Japan has managed to ameliorate its demographic crisis by shifting its industrial production abroad, but we have lost our manufacturing expertise and will struggle to pull off the same stunt. China will attempt to pull off the same in the face of their coming demographic disaster with their belt-and-road ‘colonies’ in Africa.
Japan’s elderly, however, are something else entirely. Dire straits for them. We’re only a couple of decades behind here.
Japan is doing fine. The Chinese demographic crisis is a myth. Belt and road ishg colonisation.
Our demographic profile may indicate that we need more children but that should be by our indigenous families having more children.
We only need to raise the average to, say, 2.8 which is still historically low, for things to be fine.
All the trans identifying females taking ‘affirming’ sterilising drugs is not helping either.
Trouble is RN that ain’t happening quickly is it. Even if somehow our rate jumped back to 2.2+ (i.e the replacement rate) it’s 20+yrs before those children become tax paying, working adults.
Thus if we need some immigration why isn’t she saying that and sorting it? The Boats etc are a small fraction of the total. Her Dept signed off net legal migration of c600k. She could have left the Govt if she objected. She could be proposing a better naturalisation process for those we do take.
She’s utterly incompetent and she’s in power.
It’s as if mass immigration is completely innocuous with no downsides whatsoever. There are many. That politicians are pivoting to piling in immigrants to save their balance sheets is some sort of act of goodwill.
The growth in technology and AI will easily replace the need to always have an ever increasing population.
Technology and AI will not replace manual work any time soon, and robots will not provide care for the growing numbers of people who need it.
All the people who are currently shuffling paper in soon to be replaced office jobs can do manual work.
Only by limiting immigration will firms invest properly in AI and automation. When they can get the next cheap worker off the boat, why not stick with the current systems?
A deeply demoralised workforce, as opposed to one with aspirations, is not great for productivity.
Moving from white collar to blue collar work is not necessarily a downgrade. I have known many people chuck in an office job to do something manual. In fact my brother-in-law went from middle management in the public sector to landscape gardening and loves his new job.
I imagine the reaction will be mixed. Going from getting your degree in coding and finding yourself wiping backsides is unlikely to be very satisfying for some.
Until he’s a bit older, got bad back etc and manual work becomes more a struggle. And retirement age extending away too.
Must admit I loved my work when younger for some of the physicality and outdoors nature involved. Now close to my state pension it’s not something I think I could do now as easily. No simple answer to this if you have no choice, but worth pondering.
There may be something in this MM, but can you point to a Govt policy, or a Braverman statement, on how they intend to realign our economy in this way, and how they’ll manage the transition?
Is not the problem they secretly love cheap labour as reduces investment costs?
And just one specific – yes it may be ‘paper shufflers’ have to move more to ‘manual’ caring professions/work as population ages. Robots will never help an elderly person get washed and fed when they are struggling to stand up. So what we doing to fund care sector properly to encourage more to go into this work? Heard any Policy emanate?
Automation and nation state democracy is preferable to the ponzi schemes of demographic grieth advocated by the wealthy elite. Their interest is in making society insecure so their property rights are not subjected to democratic threat.
Well, that’s brilliant Martin. May I suggest that they all stay at your place?
Please send 1000 refugees to go live at Varoufakis’ house. Same applies to all the open border fanatics.
‘Once upon a time there were no passports — the world was a much better place. When Lord Byron went to Greece, where he died, or Lord Elgin for that matter, he didn’t need a passport. ‘
Once upon a time there was no welfare state.
If you have a welfare state, you need borders.
You don’t, because, as any ‘economist’ of the stature of Yanis Varoufakis could tell you, when your population gets bigger you can just print more money to pay for their welfare.
I don’t think uncontrolled printing of money ends well. The Weimar Republic springs to mind, more recently Argentine, Venezuela.
I was being sarcastic, Lesley. MMT is so stupid that only a complete dunce like Yanis could find it plausible.
Suella Braverman is one of those voters he claims to “tolerate” and “respect”.
Whether you agree with the content of her speeches or not, the bile Varoufakis is now producing (presumably in a sad attempt to stay in the limelight) is both intellectually and emotionally bankrupt.
I respect the right of him to spout it, and the right of Unherd to give it space, if only to demonstrate how out of touch those who seek to act as moral leaders have become.
When Lord Byron went to Greece, where he died, or Lord Elgin for that matter, he didn’t need a passport. What was wrong with that?
Maybe if Elgin had been required to have a passport, you could have denied him entry and he wouldn’t have nicked those marbles your government always seems to have its panties in a bunch about.
Greece was occupied by Turkey at the time.
Turks did not care about Parthenon. They used it as ammunition storage.
How many Turks does he want living in Athens?
Or in southern Cyprus?
Doesn’t matter, as long as none of them live in his neighborhood.
He has as little concern for fellow Greeks as he does for ordinary Brits or Germans.
All he cares about is his reprehensible “philosophy”, and taking care of number one.
I am in Istanbul at the moment. It is much nicer than Athens, though I do acknowledge its problems!
Varoufakis makes David Lammy and Diane Abbott seem coherent and incisive. Every utterance contradicts the one that came immediately before.
There goes a man
(YF) who has completely lost it.
Sorry I meant YV! More composed now!
🙂 I missed the typo(?). I know how you feel. There are some good, thought-provoking comments though, as always.
Wow!! The arrogance and hubris is breathtaking. The dogmatic conviction of his luxury belief is truly stunning. Everyone is welcome – unless you share different beliefs – those people must be shipped out.
I’ve said it many times before. I support immigration. My parents were immigrants. But open borders will destroy the west – unless you are privileged enough to shrug it off.
I would suggest Mr Varufakis spends a day with his family at the centre of Luton or Hatfield to see how safe and merry these places are and then perhaps be given a chance to reconsider his position.
He doesn’t need to stay in places like that, hence his “position”
He would learn nothing: Melbourne Australia has been a crime-ridden hellhole for more than a decade, where Victoria Police officers* (our sole law-enforcement) are giddy with the amount of power they wield without any risk of prosecution.
Victoria Police officers flash their uniforms in broad daylight participating in crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/more each. Yet our woke lefty politicians – one of them is the MP** of my electorate – expect us to go teary eyed over a “statement from the heart”: while being reduced to surviving crime-to-crime in inner-city suburbs of million $ homes.
—
* three of likely thousands I am forced to get to know each day, every day, since a stalker ex-coworker’s onslaught of crimes against me started in 2009. I never even dated the stalker, and I was only 1 of at least 7 of his concurrent targets just at our shared workplace:
Graeme MAYNE Country Security Manager DHL Supply Chain Australia since Apr 2015
Mario MARCUCCI “Investigator” advertising his surveillance services
M.A.A. “Purana Taskforce”/”Beer-gut” MEEHAN (it’s the walrus moustache)
** Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs (no less)
I suppose if one wanted to crash the social welfare systems of European countries, have a population with numerous groups with deeply entrenched historical hatred for one another, overwhelmed infrastructure and inevitable civil war, no borders is a good idea.
Varoufakis has the same fatal flaw as all thinkers on the Left. He looks at society and humanity through a theoretical lens, seeking to devise some system or model which with deliver utopia, but doomed to failure because they omit to factor human nature in to how they will play out in reality,
Sad Eurocommunist. And he admitted to being as much in his radical chic heyday after the banking crisis.
Nobody uses that much hyperbolic, thought-terminating language when they’ve won the argument
Good morning, Varoufakis argument is just another example of a non-democratic approach to a democratic feature: The exchange of meaning and free debate. In addition are home secretary Suella Braverman’s concerns about immigration legitim. And she is right that the UN’s refugee convention from 1951 has to revised .
Hanne Herrman
Yanis seems to see it entirely as an economic matter, a world where people are pawns without culture and character. Consistent with his socialism it is, and as another commenter noted, makes David Lammy look good.
Astounding!! How naive as well as crude.
Well quite, Yanis. We know what a large influx of westerners did to the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australasia and we don’t want it to happen to us. Obvious really.
Having spent a lot of time working in Africa I don’t particularly want Europe to become a new Africa.
Ask the embattled citizens of Lampadusa how they feel about no borders and illegal immigration
“ Why do people worry about the Romanians living next door to them?”
Because they are often lacking in the ‘nians’ department.
I understand that the Unherd redaction struggles to find talent and quality articles, but this t**d might have been replaced by a commercial and it would have been a net improvement.
Sincerely
An Unherd subscriber
For a good few years at this point I’ve been wondering what is it about Yanis Varoufakis that makes him a Marxist, and now I know.
Up to now, I’ve tended to agree with him on many things. Not this histrionic nonsense though.
The U.K. population is growing rapidly and has increased by around 10 million since 2001, mainly through mass migration. It is often argued that even more are needed to come, but given the all too obvious negative impact on public services, infrastructure and social cohesion, it has been difficult to identify the economic and social benefits derived from this population growth. Nor is it easy to identify how countries such as Sweden, France, Belgium, Spain and Greece have benefited from mass immigration.
Spot the obvious differences between then and now:
* We have a welfare state
* Many more people can afford international travel
Hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries now have means and motive to come here, but extreme differences in culture and values still remain.
No desirable country can survive the influx that open borders would enable.
25 potential tenants competing per rental property not a problem then?
His party won less than 2% in the recent Greek election.
I didn’t bother to read it. A foreign socialist has no right to tell Britain what it should do.
But allowing him to voice his opinions is great.
There are many like him in this country but they keep quiet about their views.
Kier Starmer wants to give votes to non-citizens.
One of the ways to undermine national state.
So Starmer and Labour are not that far from Voroufakis in their views on immigration and what it means to be citizen.
You are right. We ignore views like his at our own peril too.
The guy who bottled it when he was told to out his money where his mouth was? I’ve gone off him now – his advocacy of sweeping and irreversible change to the UK being outside of the democratic mandate is truly disgusting yet he projects that on others? Nah, guy’s an absurd hypocrite who talks a good game but does little
I am ashamed of Suella Braverman that she took so long to say what she did. This immigration is obviously going to result in the destruction of our country and must be stopped and reversed as much as possible.
Large scale immigration is always detrimental to the indigenous population. And oddly is something the ‘left’ want the populations of western countries to apologise for while insisting it happens here.
Very pleased he’s about to remind us all how truly hateful the far left is…..
Saying the quiet part out-loud, and Freddie looks surprised.
Who does this moron think he is?
You can’t fix stupid, especially when it’s coming from the left.
The man behind the Greek financial meltdown and the Eurozone crisis should not have any credibility outside of the asylum. He is useful only as a poster boy of the lunacy and incompetence of the European left; ruled by ideas that have proven themselves to be ruinous for more than a century he keeps repeating them over the backs of this countrymen and now claims that anyone who disagrees with him should be expelled? He is like a Covidian madman standing on top of the graveyard of his countless victims telling Covid skeptics that they should shut up, or else.
Pretty libellous stuff from an unhinged guy in a country where he benefits from free speech.
And he plays on that (because he can).
Europeans exporting “hordes of people” in the past: there were no free handouts and no safety nets to those who left Europe over centuries. People either sunk or swam. The fittest survived.
By “fittest”, you mean those with bigger guns.
Suella did go a bit Cruella…but to counter this by saying she should be expelled from the country? Come on, Yanis – you can do better than this. People have every right to be concerned about illegal immigration and not have their worries swept under the carpet. And it is perfectly OK to debate outdated legislation: nothing is untouchable. But you need a rational, intelligent discussion – to which Yanis is contributing absolutely nothing. Suella might calm her rhetoric down somewhat too.
Demanding that a woman born in the U.K. should be deported seems pretty racist to me. He clearly wouldn’t say it about a white Woman.
Like I keep saying, the only good far lefties like Varoufakis are dead ones.
Whatever your views on that exchange, his new book is very good. Finished reading it an hour ago, and will write a review very soon.
Are downvotes because you read the book and didn’t like it?
I neither downvoted your comment nor have I read the book. I’m interested to know what you thought was interesting about it, however. My own tendency (based mostly on his journalism and punditry) is to agree with the view that he focuses on theory with no considerations regarding implementation or consequences.
In short, because I think he is correct, capitalism has already been replaced by technofeudalism. Further, I learnt a great deal about the difference between rent and profit (‘rent’ is not a simple concept). The application of his theory offers a different take on Sino-US relations. His escape route is somewhat optimistic (which he admits), though, and his vision of utopia leaves many questions unanswered – that may accord with your impression of his work.
I will have a review up on my substack in a few days. I need to reread a couple of the later chapters of the book a second time to be sure I’ve understood them – not because they are poorly written, but because there is a lot in them to think about. There is also a rather challenging appendix that, to be honest, I doubt whether I will ever be confident that I have fully comprehended.
I am sorry, but anyone who believes in communism with all the historical evidence of its murderous failures available, is either an idiot or nasty piece of work.
I doubt he has anything useful to say about anything.
But I am looking forward to your review.
Braverman is right on immigration, but that doesn’t detract from her status as Britain’s dumbest AG – see my blog on her stint:
https://ayenaw.com/2022/01/26/britains-ag-is-in-pr/
He still doesn’t realise how he was played by Merkel and Schauble in 2015. Or that Tsipras was a EU mole.
Spot on Yanis
!00% correct. Suella Braverman is a hideous creature. As such she will no doubt be Tory leader after their evisceration at the next election.
God help you.
Contrary to The Verve’s averment the drugs do work and the mental health team are not fascists (but that’s exactly what a fascist would say!)