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No, but it is what the Brexiteers said they were going to do. Vote leave campaigned in existing Commonwealth immigrant communities saying that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for Commonwealth immigrants, told business leaders that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for work permit immigrants, and told the electorate that the Australian and Canadian points systems were good models for a post-Brexit immigration policy at a time when Australia and Canada had much higher legal immigration than the UK.
While the Boriswave was happening (but before the small boats became the dominant media narrative around immigration), Dominic Cummings said that the British people were not unhappy with the Boriswave because, unlike immigration of EU citizens under freedom of movement, it was under democratic control. Reader, he was wrong.
Boris was always planning to do a Boriswave, and made no effort to conceal this.
I really think Cummings is probably the single best example of a midwit and a midwit magnet there is. Shirking responsibility is one thing, it’s hard to ‘hate’ Boris for the Boriswave because really he’s clearly never thought much about anything and likely signed off on it without thinking. A terrible leader and vacuous jester of a person who cheated on every woman who ever loved him? Sure. But there was no pretense of anything else. Cummings painted himself as an intellectual and then pretends he was bamboozled at the consequences of his actions and words and every bad thing was just someone betraying him or not listening correctly.
Cummings' real-world achievements, including leading the successful Vote Leave campaign, are incompatible with being a midwit. What Cummings does appear to be is a high-IQ quokka who sees himself as a political genius because of his proven success in manipulating the great unwashed with carefully A/B tested and focus grouped nuggets of emotional manipulation. But as soon as he tried to be a political player in his own right rather than Michael Gove's henchman, he had to engage in conventional political intrigue, at which he proved to be about as cunning as Baldrick after eating too many turnips.
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