STEPHEN Pound has said only Zack Polanski and politicians “in the wilder outer fringes of lunacy” believe in open borders anymore.

Speaking on GB News, Pound said: “There’s about a dozen [Labour backbenchers] who will rebel against anything. If you say today’s Monday, they would vote against it. I mean, we’re used to that. We know that happens.

“She [Home Secretary] may be trying to actually put this through the House through an order in council, or some sort of directive. That won’t stop the Parliamentary Labour Party actually debating and discussing it.

“However, I think there’s a slightly different mood in the Labour Party at the moment. There are certain people, one of the most high profile rebels, he represents Poole in Dorset. Now, I very much doubt we’re going to hold that seat at the next election. Obviously, I hope we do because I want Labour to win.

“But the reality is there are a lot of people who think we’re in the departure lounge here. What can we do about it?

“And yet, by contrast, if you look at Mike Tapp, the MP for Dover, who’s actually taking an entirely different tack.

“Where GB News has actually shifted the dial, and to some extent Nigel Farage has shifted the dial, is that it was considered absolutely infra dig to talk about immigration in these terms.

“As recently as 10 years ago, we, all of us, were in the House. We all remember anybody who started to talk about it, people would start shrieking about Oswald Mosley and black shirts, and God knows what.

“Now I think we recognise, with the possible exception of Zack Polanski and half a dozen other people in the wilder outer fringes of lunacy, nobody believes in open borders anymore.

“But what absolutely should boil my blood, we all dealt with thousands of immigration cases as MPs. It was never, ever the poor, brutalised housewife or farmer’s daughter from Afghanistan. It was always the rich farmer’s son who would be able to pay the agent, as he used to call them, to come over here.

“So look, there’s two ways of dealing with this. One, you can actually do what the Dutch do and process at Schiphol Airport or on the borders, and actually they don’t even get into the country.

“Or the second thing is, we can actually process the whole procedure a lot quicker.

“But the idea of sending somebody back is very difficult, because there will be no right of appeal. Here’s the final problem. I remember one case where there were 17 appeals; a Nigerian man…a multiple bigamist, a drug dealing scumbag. And all those appeals, and I hate to say, we funded those.

“This could actually be the cold wind of reality blowing across the green benches where the Labour party sits.

“But the reality is that in the real world today you simply cannot go along with this old nostrum of open borders.”