British Members of Parliament must consider an official petition against the United Nations Global Compact for Migration after it smashed 100,000 signatures.
The British government is committed to issuing an official response to any petition which reaches 10,000 signatures — although it has left the UN compact petition unanswered for 12 days now — while petitions which break the 100,000 signature mark must be considered by Parliament’s Backbench Business Committee for a full debate.
Hugely controversial for provisions which allegedly make migration a universal human right and expand the definition of hate speech to include criticism of mass migration, a large number of countries have already pulled out of the compact.
Out in front was the United States under the pro-borders administration of President Donald Trump, which deemed the compact “simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”
Australia, which has been under sustained pressure from the mass migration lobby for its Operation Sovereign Borders policy — which has slashed the number of dangerously unseaworthy smuggler-boats bringing illegal migrants to the country to near-zero by imposing a blanket ban on asylum for anyone travelling to Australia illegally by sea — has also rejected the compact.
The government complained it “fails to adequately distinguish between people who enter Australia illegally and those who come to Australia the right way, particularly with respect to the provision of welfare and other benefits.”
The Global Compact is also increasingly embattled in the European Union, despite being championed by the bloc’s High Representative and largely devised by the government of Angela Merkel in Germany, its dominant state — with most of the anti-mass migration, pro-sovereignty governments of Central and South-Eastern Europe having pulled out, and Italy’s populist coalition referring the matter to parliament due to opposition from Matteo Salvini’s nationalist League party.
Even in Belgium, the base of the EU’s main capital of Brussels, the government was on the brink of collapse over the compact, with the Flemish N-VA bitterly opposed to left-liberal prime minister Charles Michel’s desire to sign it.
In the United Kingdom, however, despite the prominence of mass migration and the public’s concern over it in the national discourse in recent years — and despite the Tory government having made unfulfilled pledges to reduce net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” in three successive elections — the compact has barely registered in the mainstream media, perhaps as a result of Brexit dominating the news-scape.
The petition rapidly acquiring over 100,000 signatures despite the near-total lack of coverage, almost entirely through online word-of-mouth and grassroots activism, therefore seems highly significant — especially with the embattled prime minister due to sign the compact in Morocco just days before a seminal vote on her “deal” with the European Union, in which she looks set to go down to a historic defeat.
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