Donald Trump could not have scripted this moment on key policy better himself

The flowing tears and bitter words were the most powerful endorsement could have wanted for his tough stance on immigration. As the law enforcement agencies in America rounded up , two planes carrying Columbian deportees landed at Bogota airport.

Having emerged from the aircraft with her baby, one young mother was asked by the press if she had a message for others like her. In mournful tones, she replied: “Don’t leave. Don’t go to the US because they’re deporting everyone. The treatment is terrible.”

Trump could not himself. After barely a week in office, he has already had a dramatic impact on the protection of America’s national integrity. That is because, unlike most politicians, he means what he says, as Columbia’s socialist regime found this week. When the country’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro first learnt that the US was planning to kick out around 200 illegal Columbian immigrants, he grandly announced that his Government would refuse to take them back.

In response, Trump warned that if Columbia maintained its opposition, he would impose punitive sanctions, including a 25% tariff on all Columbian goods. The threat worked. With bad grace and a barrage of socialist insults, Petro backed down.

This episode is part of a massive crackdown by the new White House. Immigration arrests have already reached 1,200-a-day, four times the average in 2024, while the southern US border has been heavily reinforced by troops.

Even more significantly, the President has just signed an executive order to turn the military facility at into a mass detention centre for up to 30,000 illegal migrants. Fiercely denounced by left-wing critics, Trump is fulfilling his mandate from American voters alarmed at the destructive scale of immigration.

The contrast with Britain could hardly be greater. It is impossible to imagine our governing class acting with anything like this resolve. As reflected in his campaign slogan “America First”, Trump believes that his Presidency should be focused on the needs of the US people. But that idea is alien to much of our governing class, with its ideological embrace of diversity, suspicion of nationhood and obsession with a perverse version of human rights.

Tellingly, on the day that the first Columbian migrants were removed, a judge here decreed a Jamaican drug dealer should be despite five serious criminal convictions since he arrived here in 1991, on the grounds his teenage daughter – currently questioning her gender identity – is only willing to discuss the issue with him.

This is the kind of nonsense we have come to expect from our judiciary and most of the establishment. Britishness means little to these adherents of progressive groupthink. once said that he preferred Davos – the spiritual home of the globalist elite – to Westminster because the latter was too “tribal”, a view that shows both a worrying contempt for democratic sovereignty.

The tone is also exemplified by Lord Hermer, a radical human rights lawyer like the Prime Minister and now the Attorney General, who has in the past represented notorious Republican leader Gerry Adams.

Today, as highlighted by his enthusiasm to give away the Chagos Islands, he seems much keener on submission to the globalist agenda than the maintenance of British interests. The same equivocation about standing up for Britain runs throughout the Government.

So the Home Office presides over border anarchy and soaring numbers of arrivals, just as the Border Force operates a quasi ferry service for illegal migrants across the Channel. Unlike Trump the British ruling class are unable to challenge the current shambolic immigration system because it is their creation.

They are the ones who recklessly decided to open the floodgates to millions of foreign nationals without any requirements to integrate, speak English or integrate. As the architects of the social revolution, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

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There is a fundamental contradiction in Labour’s economic strategy. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor pose as the allies of business, determined to unleash the dynamic forces of enterprise by deregulating the economy. Yet so many of their other policies have moved in exactly the opposite direction.

Employers’ taxes have been cranked up dramatically through the rise in national insurance, while job creation has been further undermined by the extension of new workplace rights and trade union powers. In the name of promoting diversity, equality and inclusion, the scope for interference in business is now being widened, with companies increasingly used as test beds for experiments in social engineering.

Sir Keir complains about bureaucracy growing like “Japanese knotweed” yet he has added fertilizer to its spread, creating a new quango every week since the party took office in July. Even more absurdly, is driving up costs and making our economy less competitive through his fixation with net zero emissions. Miliband loves to blather about “sustainability” but there is nothing sustainable about Labour’s two-headed approach.

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The great US economist Milton Friedman said that “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state”. The proof of those words can be seen in modern Britain, gripped by economic stagnation, unaffordable welfare bills and net migration of almost one million-a-year, though less than a quarter of this influx actually come here to work.

This week it was revealed that in some London boroughs more than 70% of social housing tenants are foreign nationals. This insanity is a sure for national bankruptcy.

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The Royal Family’s contribution to , held on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, was deeply moving. The King found exactly the right words on his visit to Auschwitz while the Princess of Wales’s embrace of genocide survivors at an event in London could hardly have been more poignant.

But amid such reverence, there were two jarring notes. One was the shameful speech by Irish President Michael Higgins, in Dublin, who managed to crowbar a moan about Gaza into his politicised text. The other was the abject performance by the TV station Good Morning Britain, whose presenter Ranvir Singh performed the remarkable feat of talking about Holocaust without any reference to the Jewish people, though she mentioned Poles, gays, the disabled and other ethnic minorities.

The station later apologised but it was an extraordinary insult.

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It is exactly 60 years ago this week since the state funeral of one of the most memorable ceremonies in our modern history. But the event was nearly marred by a disastrous mishap.

Determined to pay his respects despite his own frailty, 82-year-old former Labour leader Clement Attlee – who had been Churchill’s deputy Prime Minister for most of the war – was walking up the steps to St Paul’s in front of the party of eight guardsmen carrying the heavy lead-lined coffin. Unfortunately Attlee stumbled, which caused the guardsmen to rock back on their heels.

To their horror, they began to feel the coffin sliding off their shoulders. But with shrewd foresight, the regiment had placed two additional soldiers at the rear of the party. With all their strength, this pair halted the coffin’s slide, pushed it back in position on their comrades’ shoulders, and allowed the funeral to proceed without a hitch.

As a brave soldier himself, Churchill would have appreciated the party’s toughness and composure that saved the day.