In recent days, two Labour politicians have repeated two myths beloved of those hopelessly enamoured of the European Union: that Brexit has actually been responsible for higher immigration levels, and that it worsened the state of the economy. If they insist on regurgitating these canards, it needs restating why both are untrue.

As the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, said last week: ‘In the 10 years since Brexit… we’ve lost immigration control in the way we once had.’ Intimating that one event led to the other, he added: ‘The small-boats crisis has arisen in the past 10 years, because we lost that returns agreement’, a reference to the Dublin Agreement, which stipulates that refugees can be returned to the first EU country they arrived in.

Yet there is no cause-and-effect relationship between Brexit and increased levels of immigration. We have ‘lost immigration control’ because subsequent governments have chosen not to control it. Had a sovereignist party been elected in 2019, it would have not only executed a decisive Brexit that allowed us to control movement from the EU, it would also not have permitted rocketing immigration from outside it. In reality, we voted in a Conservative Party still impaired by its centrist bloc, and one that was panicked by post-pandemic labour shortages into admitting more than four million migrants.

It’s legitimate to imagine that things could have turned out otherwise, because we accept the concept of causality. We presume that what happens in the future is dependent on decisions we make today. It’s why we value choice and experience regret. As that most rigorous of thinkers, Immanuel Kant, put it: ‘All alterations take place according to the law of the connection of cause and effect.’

The increased levels of illegal immigration, most conspicuously by small boats, have nothing to do with Brexit. In the years when Britain was still bound by the Dublin Agreement, between 2016 and 2020, we continued to receive more illegal migrants than we returned. Illegal entrants are now choosing boat crossings because there has been a crackdown on people smuggling inside lorries, with the seaborne method being far more effective: in that way, passengers are actually picked up by British boats and escorted inshore. Furthermore, illegal immigrants are coming here in greater numbers than they might have been because the Labour government scrapped a promising deterrent: the Rwanda scheme.

Migrants who break into this country are being enticed by welfare benefits, access to the NHS, accommodation and residency rights – an arrangement that this week Édouard Philippe, the centre-right contender for the French presidency, rightly called ‘shocking’, ‘incoherent’ and an ‘absurdity’. Brexit is irrelevant to this state of affairs, as is the situation in which those who entered legally under the Boriswave have been lured by the possibility of similar privileges. UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood confirmed on Monday that hundreds of thousands of these foreign workers in the care sector will be able to qualify for permanent residency five years after the granting of their visa. A future, sovereign British government, and it alone, will have the power to reverse this situation.

A few days after Burnham made his remarks, Rachel Reeves piped up to repeat another fallacy, namely that ‘Brexit has made us poorer, weaker and less secure’. This argument is usually accompanied by the magical conjecture that GDP per head is now lower by eight per cent than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. This argument is made by those who seem to believe that, after 2016, the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t happen, that Russia never invaded Ukraine, and that the economies of Germany and France have flourished – in reality, the UK has just about outperformed both. In the fantasy, alternate universe these people mentally inhabit, Rachel Reeves herself never became chancellor of the exchequer, and didn’t inflict untold damage on our economy.

Rejoiners appear to confuse causation with correlation. Whether they do so out of stupidity or mendacity, that cause is yet to be established.

Put that phone down

The lead story in the November edition of Scientific American, headed ‘We’re addicted to social media. How do we get sober?’, does exactly what its title suggests: it approaches the problem of smartphone and social media overuse foremost as a physical addiction. Many of those interviewed for the article certainly understand their compulsive behaviour through the prism of substance addiction and express it in the language of 12-step programmes, speaking of their ‘dopamine detox’, of their journey of ‘recovery’. As another respondent reflected: ‘I was constantly in a battle for my sobriety.’

There’s no doubt that a dopamine release induced by ‘likes’ online can become addictive, or that the 12-step model has worked for countless many. But the problem with this addiction model is that it is contradictory and doesn’t help everyone. It at once calls addiction a ‘disease’, which it simply isn’t, and tells people to admit that they are ‘powerless’. Yet it simultaneously exhorts us to be ‘fearless’ in taking the necessary steps ourselves. It preaches passivity and agency at the same time.

For some, forgoing the former and embracing the latter is a preferable route. One of the primary and best pieces of advice from Alcoholics Anonymous is: ‘Just don’t pick up that first drink.’ Compulsive smartphone users might benefit from a similar injunction to themselves: ‘Just don’t pick up that phone.’

Alastair Campbell: mad and bad

Most of us just wearily accept now that Alastair Campbell is an unscrupulous sharper, the ‘Mr Dodgy Dossier’ who conned us into getting involved with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Since leaving politics, he has become better known as a podcaster, pro-EU obsessive and garrulous know-it-all. Online and on television these days, with his trademark supercilious indifference and a cosmic lack of self-awareness, he forever inveighs against the ‘lies’ of Brexit and ‘post-truth politics’ of Trump. Now, it seems, he has lost touch with reality altogether.

His new book, Persevilience, outlines his future political vision, one that would combine perseverance and resilience, hence its ludicrous portmanteau title. Not only has he petitioned the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to incorporate his neologism into their next edition, but, in an even more remarkable display of delusional arrogance, he also proclaims in his book’s pages that he has ‘completed the morph’ from ‘alleged war criminal’ to ‘a national treasure’.

Is Alastair Campbell mad or bad? Evidently, he is now both.