Scottish National Party (SNP) Westminster leader Ian Blackford backed the Free Movement migration regime and said Scotland actually needs even more migrants, to replace its “declining population”.
“Scotland relies on the skills and labour that the EU offers for its economic growth,” Blackford claimed, without providing evidence, during a parliamentary debate on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new Brexit deal.
“Brexit will serve only to weaken our access to a vital labour market,” he added, indicating that his broadly leftist party buys into the neoliberal dogma that bosses must have access to cheap foreign labour.
“Considering that Scotland’s native population is declining, we need more migration to our country, not less,” he added.
Scotland’s total population is, in fact, at a record high, and polls show a plurality of Scots think immigration levels are too high, compared to just 6 per cent who think, like Blackford and the SNP leadership, that it is too low.
The SNP bills itself as a “civic nationalist” party and seeks to separate the Scotland from the United Kingdom, but it embraces left-wing orthodoxy with respect to mass migration, gender identity, state-sponsored multiculturalism, and other social justice issue.
It is also devoted to the European Union, with the form of “independence” it hopes for entailing continued subjection to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the supremacy of EU law over Scots law, essentially no control over EU immigration, and EU management Scotland’s farm policy and fishing waters — despite the enormous damage this has done to the Scottish fishing industry, which the SNP used to opposed.
The stance of Scotland’s left-wing “nationalist” part on mass migration and demographic change contrasts sharply with that of right-leaning national populist parties to the east.
For example, Fidesz leader and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose country has also faced declining native birth rates and also mass emigration, as Free Movement sucked people to Europe’s west and north in search of higher wages.
But he has refused to countence mass migration as a solution, decrying its impact of social cohesion in Western European cities like London and Paris, and opting to offer more support for mothers and families intead.
“[I]n our minds, immigration means surrender,” Prime Minister Orbán said in early 2019, explaining that “If we resign ourselves to the fact that we are unable to sustain ourselves even biologically, by doing so we admit that we are not important even for ourselves.”
“The fate of such peoples is slow but certain obliteration, until they become a mere cloud of dust on the highway of nations,” he added.
Leftists in Western Europe and the United States have denounced Orbán’s stance and his government’s pro-family policies as racist.