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 She even challenged the United Nations Charter on refugees — I mean this is… FS: She suggested that it might be an outdated legal mechanism to resolve that problem — YF: A ridiculous idiot.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.