The wealthy right-winger Yvette Cooper has just been on television intoning Labour’s new mantra “It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration.” This should be challenged robustly at all times. Above all, it is very, very racist for politicians to go around saying “It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration” when they are using it nakedly and cynically to bid for the votes of racists.
I can never recall any by-election that got as much BBC publicity as that in Rochester, not even Hillhead or Warrington. The BBC and media establishment are continuing their massive promotion of UKIP at all times. The Labour Party is responding by pandering to racism. Yvette spoke of the “race to the bottom in the labour market”. The country’s real problem is the race to the bottom in the fascist market.
Promising 1.000 new uniformed border guards as their headline policy initiative is a pretty impressive spurt by Labour in this fascist race.
It shows how sour politics have gone when it takes the Confederation of British Industry to inject some sense from a liberal perspective into the immigration debate. Over 60% of CBI embers say that immigration has benefited their company. Only 3% believe it has hurt their company. Immigration is a tremendous boon to the British economy. Without it we would be deep in recession. Nor is it in the least responsible for the growing wealth gap. The period of highest immigration into the UK coincided with the period when social mobility and social equality were making the most progress.
That people still fall for the old con-trick astonishes me. Don’t blame Britain’s 100 billionaires, multi millionaire bankers or grasping landlords for your poverty – look! blame that foreign-looking poor man over there. He is eating a bit of cheese. He has taken that cheese from the mouths of your children!
It is primal and it is ludicrous, but the appeal to atavism can work and Labour are seeking to profit from it.
The Labour Party’s deliberate conflation of the unrelated questions of corporate, banker and executive rapacity, the exploitation of the workforce, and immigration is deeply, deeply, shameful. There was very little Yvette Cooper said that Nigel Farage would not second. But that, after all, was the purpose of the exercise.
I think that Craig’s correct. Try this on for size. We zip back in time to Germany in 1934. Interviewed in a German newspaper a Nazi offers this opinion. ‘It’s not racist to be worried about the Jews!’ How does that sound? Racist or not? Who would have thought we’d be back there again? The key word here is ‘worried.’ The assumption is that one should be concerned or worried about immigration, but why exactly? Some people, probably Craig among them, remember the famous, or infamous, ‘rivers of blood’ speech by Enoch Powell almost half a century ago. He was worried about immigration too, black and asian immigration, and like the Roman he saw into the future and gazed opon the Tiber frothing and foaming with much blood when the inevitable race war started, wow!
Today of course making that kind of speech would mean the end of one’s career in UK politics. Times have changed and a new danger has emerged for demagogues to whip up hysteria about, fear and worry, immigrants from eastern europe, the newest in a long line of threats to our way of life and our prosperity, shiver, shiver.
All that stuff was bollocks then and it’s still bollocks.
Of countries with a population over 1 million the UK is 22nd, over 10m 13th and over 50m 8th. Without Scotland the UK would be higher in the list, roughly 16th, 9th and 4th respectively. This makes the rump-UK the most densely populated western country, exceeded only by the Netherlands and Belgium which have a much smaller population.
So it is quite reasonable to expect immigration to be a political issue, though probably nothing like as much as UKIP have forced people to believe.
The related issue that needs to be addressed is that in certain parts of the country, from my experience particularly in certain northern towns and cities, the social environment has changed significantly over the past decades. The people who have stayed behind are unhappy with the result. This is a failure of integration rather than immigration, the downturn in the social environment being caused more by the failure of the industrial economy in these places.
This unhappiness is probably quite a legitimate unhappiness, and one that many politicians fail to properly understand, for example Gordon Brown in Rochdale.
It is something UKIP is keen to exploit and conflate with the issue of current immigration.
Craig,
It seems to me that globalisation means:-
1. International movement of capital.
2. International movement of people.
3. Trade interactions on a global scale.
I recently watched a documentary where a US company shipped base produce to China, then there more value was added – then it was shipped back to the US for high end sales. The Chinese themselves ( the affluent ones) bought this furniture – as re-shipped from the US and sold in China.
Not that I am the economic expert to make all the sense out of the process. The documentary did, however, state that the move to China permitted the US based company to keep open some 90% of its operations in the US. The disparity between US and Chinese wages was also highlighted. No doubt, the US company was major beneficiary in the exchange disparity. A really telling point was about the US worker who had lost her life long ‘secure job’ who also loved shopping in Walmarts ( i.e. where inexpensive quality products produced by Chinese workers was sold).
So – you said:-
” That people still fall for the old con-trick astonishes me. Don’t blame Britain’s 100 billionaires, multi millionaire bankers or grasping landlords for your poverty – look! blame that foreign-looking poor man over there. He is eating a bit of cheese. He has taken that cheese from the mouths of your children! ”
And the world turns on its economic axis – love it or leave it.
CB
Briar
Really? The Britain of the sixties and seventies was far more
racist (and sexist) and cruel than it is now.
Writeon, quoting a 1934 German Nazi, “It’s not racist to be worried about the Jews!”
That – with all due respect – is entirely different to worrying about being ran out of town, basically, with mass immigration of people wanting your jobs, taking benefits, requiring social housing, and availing themselves of free medical attention and schools in the meanwhile.
Not to mention finding yourself suddenly a stranger in your own town, because you no longer “fit in” with the new culture that has descended.
The comparison between that, and Nazis worrying about a particular race amoung their own countrymen, is non-existent.
Nice try all the same, old boy!
The anti-immigration mantra is mostly carried out by Western politician who are known for their support for Israel. Their fear of immigration stem from the fact that the great majority of immigrants, both Muslims and Christians, are from countries occupied by Western colonial powers. They’re not racists or brainwashed as the native Europeans.
American Hindu academic and author, Deepa Kumar PhD, in her 2012 book, ‘Islamophobia and Politics of Empire’ wrote: “The vilification of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) has a long history. It goes back to the eleventh century when the Papacy was trying to gain public support for the Franks (crusaders) invasion of more rich and civilized Muslim kingdoms around Jerusalem. The Vatican was horrified that Islam gave Muslim men and women to learn not only religion but also science, gave wife divorce right and widows and divorcees to remarry plus inheritance rights. Therefore, Vatican decided to vilify prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by labeling him a sexual deviant, fake prophet and spreading a false religion,”
http://rehmat1.com/2014/11/15/hindu-author-on-wests-islamophobia-roots/
I’m so far removed from the current political scene I could as well be living on Mars. Immigration is an issue about which I care little. Of course, as soon as you say this you are accused of being ‘out of touch’ ‘typical lefty’ etc. Not really. It’s just a nonsense discussion, and I really can’t be bothered. We have freedom of movement and a benefits system. Adjust the latter accordingly, if it worries you so much. Getting on a soapbox and echoing the workds of the UKIP is pretty pathetic. They’d win more marginals by having some decent policies anyway, but they can’t have decent policies because the Nu Lab cabal will destry any leader which tries. Solution? The Labour Party should split once and for all. Nu Lab and Socialist Lab. They hate each other anyway.
Just thinking outside the box, as they say. Personally I also think Ed should sack all the Blairites just before the election. They can’t knife him that late, and it sets the tone for his Government. Oh, they’d get him eventually, but wouldn’t it be fun?
Writeon
you say this “I think that Craig’s correct. Try this on for size. We zip back in time to Germany in 1934. Interviewed in a German newspaper a Nazi offers this opinion. ‘It’s not racist to be worried about the Jews!’ ”
Yet you don’t give any kind of reference.
I would question whether the concept of ‘racism’ as understood now,(the way you have used it) had any traction in those far off days. Sounds like some kind of anachronistic nonsense. Racism was more or less the norm. A Nazi officer would have likely classed all human life other than white anglo saxon(preferably German speaking) as inferior, not just Jewish people. The anti-semitic hysteria that was whipped up in those days had a lot to do with the fact they were ‘there’, reasonably distinctive and identifiable and a reasonably easy target for asset theft, owing to the prevalence of anti-semitism. .
Indeed, the situation w.r.t. the ideology of racism in this country would not have been so very different to that in Germany in the thirties, when Darwinism and genetics came together in the idea of Eugenics. The perfectibility of people by selective mechanisms and methods, otherwise used on animals, and plants, was based on a powerful belief in the power of technology to have a role in defining humanity. I would even suggest that ‘perfectibility’ is also an idea associated with religious belief, not unique to Christianity, but certainly it sits easily with the self-righteousness so prevalent in it.
Please don’t make stuff up out of thin air to suit whatever bee buzzes beneath your bonnet.
“Point taken. Check a map of Caithness. When you discount the few scattered villages round the coast, then divide the rest amongst half a dozen estates, then do a sum on a beermat, the population density of landowners is 1 cu*t / 300 sq km.”
It isn’t so.
Most crofters in Caithness own their own crofts. Things are far better under crofting laws than in the rest of Britain. Tenant farmers have the legal right to buy their land. Owners of land under crofting law have the legal obligation to rent it out.
@Brendan : “Getting on a soapbox and echoing the workds of the UKIP is pretty pathetic.”
Actually, though I hold no brief for UKIP, it’s only fair to point out that they – UKIP – are actually echoing popular sentiment. Not the other way around.
A lot of people are – rightly or wrongly – concerned about immigration. UKIP have done a fine job getting in front of that parade, and hoisting their banner. But it’s a bit rich to tell everyone that they’re just mouthing UKIP’s words, if they express the same, and are therefore all racists.
It’s a transfer device. Associate a position you don’t like with someone you don’t like, and suddenly that position – regardless of its merits – becomes toxic. For instance, Cameron expressed revulsion at the beheading of an aid worker by ISIS. That must mean we’re all true-blue Tories now, right?
However far removed you feel from this discussion, immigration is of huge importance to a lot of people right now. Attempting to shut it down with an accusation of “racist”, or association with UKIP for that matter, will not make it go away, nor diminish its importance.
*
Your suggestion for Ed Miliband is rather good – I’d send it to him if I were you.
Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)
18 Nov, 2014 – 5:46 pm
“Do you think it is good that nurses who have been trained (often at govt expense) in the Phillipines (sic) should work abroad, thereby depriving their own country of sorely needed human capital and contributing to a brain drain?”
……………
Do you think that Filipino nurses should be banned from taking jobs abroad Habbabkuk?
Or that nurses (or doctors even) trained at tax payers expense in the UK should work for the state for a minimum period to pay back society for their free education?
Let’s hear it.
And why is that Fred ? Which party have been fighting for crofters rights ?Which party has been fighting against absentee landlords ?
Ignorance. That’s why relatively decent people are ‘concerned’ about immigration:
Opposition to immigration is often strongest where the fewest immigrants live, the Demos research found. More than 75 per cent of white British people are opposed to immigration in areas where fewer than 2 per cent of residents are immigrants.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-typical-ukip-voter-has-little-experience-of-immigration-9659499.html
You can show that immigration benefits the UK economically:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/14/immigration-beneficial-uk-economy-treasury-independent-advisers
You can show that the NHS needs immigrant workers:
http://news.sky.com/story/1155532/nhs-has-immigration-saved-the-health-service
You can show that other industries, like farming, rely on immigrant workers:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/may/5/migrant-jobs-fruit-farms-kent
You can show that the increasing numbers of elderly people in the UK population mean that immigration is necessary for the country’s survival:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10185342/Britain-needs-millions-more-immigrants-to-reduce-strain-of-ageing-population.html
You can show, as someone has done above, that the UK is neither overpopulated or overcrowded, through easily available facts.
You can point out that the UK, for some reason, counts foreign students as immigrants. The US and Australia, on the other hand, do not. Perhaps this is because students are not immigrants. They are visitors who come and study for a fixed term – and pay for it. And yet, the UK currently defines a “long-term migrant” as anyone who “changes their country of usual residence for a period of at least a year”
And you would then expect people to shut up graciously about it. But, even then, ‘immigrants’ will deliberately be made a hate target for people who know nothing about the subject, by people who do, and who have the most sinister of agendas – and there are those people, in power and out of it. And meanwhile, the nurses, the students, the doctors, the careworkers, the families, the grandparents, the children, are painted, by them, with the layers of suspicion, resentment, prejudice and fear.
Do better.
“That people still fall for the old con-trick astonishes me. Don’t blame Britain’s 100 billionaires, multi millionaire bankers or grasping landlords for your poverty – look! blame that foreign-looking poor man over there. He is eating a bit of cheese. He has taken that cheese from the mouths of your children!”
Exactly. Bellesa Perfecta. Though he never experienced it himself because he was only a lad my dad used to tell me about the out-of-work Yorkshire miners waiting at the pit-gates from the early hours for the moment when the owner arrived. Then subserviently doffing their flat-caps and asking or even begging “Have you got a job, Sir?” The indignities of starvation and want reduce good men to grovellers and there are multi-millionaires who would like to see the return of those ‘good old days’. There were no blacks or Asians (or very very few) in the thirties in this country. It totally eradicates that racist argument that blames the foreign man. The culprits are the bankers, big money, the owners of property, the thieving rich warmongers, Tony Blair, Tony Buckingham and all the Buckingham’s at the Palace.
Reluctant observer;
“Of course not, but if the unskilled work needs doing, the employer needs to pay the rate necessary to get people to do it.”
How would that work? Employers want cheap labor. If voluntary for businesspeople to pay a living wage and they refuse, what is the alternative?
The war on RT news and Russia continues. Every problem they see seems like alternative solutions to me.
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/11/17/anonymous-helping-push-ferguson-storyline-in-russia/19196327/
“And why is that Fred ? Which party have been fighting for crofters rights ?Which party has been fighting against absentee landlords ?”
The right to buy came in in the 1970s I believe.
If you are referring to the more recent crofting legislation the words “pissup” and “brewery” spring to mind.
NB Outside the reciprocal agreement with the rest of Europe (and it was interesting to see the poll which showed that most British people, even those opposed to EU ‘immigration’ – for which read ‘workers’ – felt they should still have a right to work in Europe) the UK already has controls on immigration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Points-based_immigration_system_(United_Kingdom)
In addition to my last comment I should like to add that there is a solution, in England, as well as Scotland. It will soon, please God, be demonstrated in Greece, where in two years a party opposing the fascist Golden Dawn party has come from nowhere and is currently poised to democratically take over parliament. It is a party that believes in re-nationalising the integral industries and public utilities with which private ownership and banking misappropriations, in line with the reat of European policy, crippled Greece.
On Saturday I went along to the 1st anniversary of the National Conference of Left Unity in London. One of the speakers, Marina Prentoulis, from Syriza spoke of how Syriza had grown from nowhere snd how this moment was the moment, to eradicate the corruption, and how it was necessary to seize the moment. It would surprise me if Syriza in Greece does not seize the moment. They already have a near majority in parliament. There was a livestream of this that Left Unity produced and if anyone has retrieved a copy of Marina’s speech I would very much appreciate a copy, because here, in a second language, was a speech to inspire anyone and everyone. Here is a report not mentioned in MSM. But are they ever?
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2af0ls_uk-s-left-unity-holds-first-annual-conference_news
The limitations of globalisation are becoming apparent. increasing inequality, rising massive income gaps, increasing child poverty in western countries and old colonisers.
if it is racist to get worried about immigration, is the racist to get worried about the same issue in Africa?
Should African countries be worried about immigration and immigrants, the arch colonisers and would it be equally racist to rid themselves of the ticks on their backs, bloodsuckers and leeches galore.
Would Africans be racist to be worried about immigrant influences from China, USA, France, Britain, Germany and Portugal?
This thread is piggybacking on Labours pile of election shite, a pure British variety of election shite, which now, thanks god to the saviours of mankind, the TTIP and competition, has to compete with Ukrainian elected shite’s, the perils of an EU market.
It looks like the SNP will pick up on all the issues that are going to be raised by the Westminster party politicians, playing the game, rather than playing Scotland’s game.
I don’t mind waiting a day or two for a real article to be born, for whence enough fresh sea air has flared your nostrils and salty mist has soaked your chips soggy.
The globalisation that has allowed companies to rule democracies, with ease outwit tax regimes, rigging economies with algorithmic speed and the logic of the City of London corporation.
It is racist to exclude free travel and mobility for the workforces of this world, borders should be torn down.
Is it racist to drown little Englanders, or would one do the wolrd a service? Do chickens cluck or gurgle?
Britain grants a quarter of new EU citizenships
Richard Ford Home Correspondent
Last updated at 1:02PM, November 18 2014
The UK granted almost a quarter of all new citizenships granted within the EU, according to official figures published today.
Migrants from India topped the list of people being given a UK passport, followed by those from Pakistan, Nigeria and the Phillipines in 2012, the statistics showed.
The UK granted citizenship to the highest number of migrants of any of the 28 EU states in 2012, giving passports to 193,900 people. The official figure from Eurostat showed this represented 23.7 per cent of the almost 820,000 people given citizenship by EU states.
Germany was in second position, granting citizenship to 114,000, followed by France on 96,000, Spain 94,000 and Italy on 65,000. Almost one in six new UK passports went to Indians, 10 per cent to Pakistanis and 4.6 and 4.2 per cent respectively to Nigerians and migrants from the Philippines……
Paywall
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4271077.ece
This particular blog spot by CM is a very surprising disgrace. Not something I am likely to forget or overlook if I consider whether to re-visit his blog. Astonishing. Maybe moving house has dislocated something in his brain department. He has made some valuable interventions but this latest is crudely very different.
Doug
Hasbeen’s veil is slipping. I like it. Maybe he’s a Scottish Widow.
I want to tidy up a little unfinished comment of mine from yesterday on the previous thread about the ZBC interview with a balaclava-ed supposed to be jihadi yesterday.
The Owen Bennett-Jones so-called interview was a device by the BBC to place two major whoppers on the main News slot of the day, firstly that the man in charge of Islamic Sausage, ( a rendition of fat , offal, gristle , bones , feathers , rat-infested carbohydrates and sheeps’ brains dyed pink and contained inside an animal’s intestine ) Mr Mossad Baghdadi, is very clean-hearted. Allah knows best.
Secondly they managed to recite the key false testimony of the Muslim Brotherhood and other deviant jihadist sects like Al Qaida that spring from them that Allah judges an action by the end result. That is completely untrue in all Islamic teaching.
Allah judges every action by its real intention, whether it is done by the Ways/Sunnah of Islam, Hadeeth or Qur’an, to please him. Only He knows the true intentions.
If I knew where the political philosophy of the ends justified the means came from I would tell you. Robespierre? Anyone?
Google suggests this one:
http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/Outline_of_Great_Books_Volume_I/machiavell_bfa.html
Was Machiavelli a Muslim. The Scottish Widow’s veil is slipping.
Mr Goss’s posts on Left Unity and more particularly his praise of the Greek political party Syriza are slightly off-topic, but I shall endeavour to re-insert them into the topic by asking him the following question. I actually know the answer, but should like Mr Goss to provide it since it was he who brought Syriza into the discussion.
**Can Mr Goss tell readers what is the declared position of Syriza – which might indeed be the winning party if there are early elections at the beginning of 2015 -on the large number of illegal immigrants currently in Greece? **
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(As background for readers, I should tell them that those illegal immigrants are mainly from Africa, Irak, the Kurdish regions, Afghanistan, Pakistan,, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Many of the immigrants from Ukraine and Georgia (they are mainly women) find employment as house cleaners, maids and private live-in carers for old people and are not generally the object of public hostility. Most of the others are unemployed save for occasional work (usually agricultural) and street and market trading. There is also a certain amount of legal immigration from the EU (Bulgaria, Romania and some from Poland); these people are either self-employed and/or do the same sort of work as the illegal immigrants from Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.)
And can others – Guano, Nevermind, Ben, Fred…- please play the game and stay on-topic?
The topic, ” It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration ” is pure Miliband Hasbara eye-wash and that’s why the zionists are going to put him in power, possibly with omni-spoon Clegg, at the next election. Cameron exudes huff, puff and bluff in posh English tones mixed with deep lies, and delivered with the air of deep integrity and concentration.
Miliband is dough in the hands of his cartoon creators and can deliver huff, puff and bluff in the gullible tones of a children’s cartoon. That’s yer man.
Hasbeen – fuck off you half-veiled, half-baked, Scottish Widow.
“And can others – Guano, Nevermind, Ben, Fred…- please play the game and stay on-topic?”
Anybody seen Neil Findley’s new twitter feed?
https://twitter.com/Neil4Scotland
Looks impressive.
David Icke says he feels vindicated as revelations of authorities covering up or turning a blind eye to widespread pedophilia by the elites become more common in the UK news media.
@ Glen_UK
“A lot of people are – rightly or wrongly – concerned about immigration.”
Yeah, fair enough, I’m just far removed from current politics, on many issues. But I guess the question is, how much of this exists of its own accord, and how much has been created by the political classes, and the media. It’s an old question. And I don’t know. I suspect that the flames are being fanned, for cynical reasons, using lies and false populism. Immigration will always be an issue for some, that’s life. Politicians have to be careful though – and they are not being careful.