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.
Ba’al; “Simplistic. Promoting the immigration of cheap labour, rather than being prepared to (a)train your workforce and (b) pay fair wages is a classical profit-enhancer for these very people”
Sorry Ba’al but a) & b) were never & could never happen under the system that has put the “elite” on top, namely Capitalism; it’s the sacred creed that our societies are based on, and the funny thing is that you would expect that the richer a person is, the more of a true believer they would be, however it seems that it’s strongest amongst the poorest, that there exists such blind faith in the system that they regards any alternatives as blasphemy.
You quote mumbo-jumbo from ImmigrationWatchUK to debunk BBC reported Government “Press Releases”, which are actually based on academic studies by the University College London’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, which also concurs with reports released by the Office for Budget Responsibility, tasked with providing independent analysis of public finances.
Statistics, especially of the economic variety, can easily be manipulated to argue any pov, or to cloud any issue, just like the in the Climate Change debate, etc. So I tend to evaluate issues using commonsense logic, combined with personal empirical knowledge; I know & have known over the years, hundreds, or maybe even more, immigrants who have settled here, yet I cannot recall even one breadwinner, (so excluding housewives & children), who did not work all the hours that they possible could; I have never seen any hint of a “welfare culture” amongst the immigrants I have known, so all this talk of immigrants uprooting themselves simply to come here because of generous UK Government benefit handouts, is as far as I’m concerned, complete demonizing nonsense.
Predominately, immigrants are abled bodied working age people who have already completed the expensive business of being educated, unlikely to be in need of expensive Health Care, and paying taxes, so this burden business is yet again commonsense nonsense. Funny that those who get so hot under the collar about the “financial burden” of immigration, barely raise an eyebrow over the billions the elite & corporation steal from the Treasury through tax avoidance, via purposely designed loop holes; if they could exhibit, never mind match their rage for this, there would be a Revolution !
If people want to object to immigration, why can’t they be honest and dispense with these bogus justifications masquerading as arguments, and state that their concerns are to do with social cohesion, loss of culture, etc ?
A man with a Polish name was called when I waiting to be seen in A&E the other day. You should have heard the muttering and mumbling from those remaining.
I’m not getting hot under the collar at all, and particularly not about the ‘financial burden’
It must pay someone, or it wouldn’t happen. Ask yourself who. And I will state it explicitly and in plain, I am worried about social cohesion, loss of culture, wages earned in the UK being sent back home, the effect on already appallingly overstretched public services, and, as you say, etc. But that’s incidental. As far as I am concerned the benefit issue you raise is a straw man. Yes, immigrants have a point to prove, and yes, they work hard. And undercut local rates wherever they go as a result. Only if our own workforce is made as insecure as they are will it be competitive, eh? That’s where your logic, and that of the globalists, is heading.
Wouldn’t those highly-educated incomers of whom you preach be better employed making their own countries more habitable? And don’t you see education being somewhat devalued when Polish PhD’s are picking our cabbages? There’s no shortage of native graduates, after all; the execrable Blair saw to that with his idiotic proposal that half the population should have tertiary education,education,education; the proportion of graduates going into graduate jobs is falling year-by-year, and some of the remainder would be happy to get out of Tesco and into the fresh air, I reckon.
Fuck it, anyway. If you can’t see what’s going on, hell mend you.
Make the people who employ the immigrants responsible for their medial needs and bills and also their accomadation and see how cheap they think their labour is then ,after all local people are already paying for these things and as it stands paying to treat and accomadate the immigrants as well the only winners are the buisiness people as usual
O/T The recently privatised Royal Mail have revealed poor financial results due to increased competition we are told. The concept of a single price universal delivery might prove to be unsustainable. Who’d have thunk it!!
It seems according to the ONS, average workers wages have gone up over the past year by ONE POUND per week !
So it seems the economic effects of mass and uncontrolled immigration is working very well.
Well done Lib Lab Con !
There’s plenty of space in the Highlands for at least 5-10 million people from Third World countries. It’s a wonderful idea, and would add a vibrancy to our own pathetic culture.
Or maybe not. It’s a pity that the more extreme left (especially the ‘human rights’ branch) appear to be heading to the top of the campaign for independence. The more they speak, the less appealing independence becomes.
In August 2014, Baroness Sayeeda Hussain Warsi resigned from David Cameron’s government over its Israeli butt-licking policy against Palestinians. Tuesday, on a Twitter post she likened the killing of four Jew worshippers in occupied East Jerusalem synagogue to the Jew extremists storming Islam’s third most sacred building, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Grant Shapps, the Jewish president of the ruling Conservative couldn’t take Warsi’s comparison sitting-down. He called her statement “racist” and said she doesn’t speak for the Tory party.
http://rehmat1.com/2014/11/19/uk-baroness-warsi-irks-jewish-lobby-again/
Conflating hairless apes and hairy apes with a view to explain away the conduct of animals, overlooks the simple fact that human are bred as farm animals have been bred, with certain characteristics suppressed whilst others encouraged and promoted. Further human re not hard wired and their interaction with the outside world is based on their education/training that is a learnt process, ie someone teaches them; promoted characteristics.
Fact that chimps eat each other infants, overlooks Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, there again those apes would not know that, and their only concern is; anything for an easy meal.
The fact that hatred of others is so promoted is the age old; “divide and rule” policy/tactic/technique as any predatory entity would, to ensure the herd of prey is scattered and divided to proceed to kill the lone prey. The simple notion of we hate because we are pack animals, is simplistic at best and lazy at worst.
Stop your government exploiting the resources of the third world and destroying their economies through the many constructs of financial repression, then there will not be any immigrants to worry about!
But that is not the issue, instead; best beat upon the immigrants and they will stop coming! Now that is a really clever policy that has been working for many years, and still does, after all these years, ie doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results! Was that the definition of insanity?
What are the causes of immigration?
Cheap money ie benefits, and houses, free education, free health care, free phones, free cars, and free everything. The swine of immigrants, are here to take our jobs, benefits, ……….. because we are so wonderful to them, and we are ever so nice, and don’t remind everyone of them everyday at least umpteen times that they are not welcome in our sceptic isles?
Nothing to do with abject poverty and crushing hopelessness promoted through financially repressive policies, of course, that is further not coming home to affect everyone of the previously better off poor.
Macky said : “If people want to object to immigration, why can’t they be honest and dispense with these bogus justifications masquerading as arguments, and state that their concerns are to do with social cohesion, loss of culture, etc ?”
If you read above, you’ll find that objections to mass immigration were outlined in a quite cohesive way. Ba’al questioned the notion that immigration was – as a given – a huge benefit financially, but that certainly was not the only argument here.
You seem to assert that anybody who doesn’t welcome open-door immigration has no concern at all about tax dodging corporations, or corporate welfare generally. I see no evidence for that at all. Could you provide something other than your say-so for this conclusion ?
Finally, immigrants often are able-bodied, I agree. But that does not mean they are going to get anything better than a minimum wage job, as many able-bodied residents here already could tell you. So how can they support their families in places like London, where a grotty flat will cost £500/week, without massive benefit payments ?
Mary says, “A man with a Polish name was called when I waiting to be seen in A&E the other day. You should have heard the muttering and mumbling from those remaining.”
A fascinating anecdote, Mary. What do you conclude from it?
Peacewisher
19 Nov, 2014 – 2:16 am
“…it seems that in 2016, the US presidency will be fought between a Clinton and a Bush…”
……………
Well I don’t want to imagine Hillary Clinton without a Bush thank you very much.
Passerby, Mackey and Ba’al.
Thanks. Much food for thought. I think we need to be able to examine our experience and understandings of this issue.
When we see millions of people on the move, leaving home-places and loved ones, to do the worst, most poorly paid jobs surely we see just a single symptom of a global kleptocracy that exploits, exhausts, degrades and destroys everything it touches. New York and the City of London are the centres of power right now but debt-based fiat currencies could just as easily be run by central bankers and their associates from Moscow or Peikng. Armies that do the bankers’ bidding have caused an unprecedented rise in desperate, traumatised immigrants. Unless the inherant temptations of letting any clever ape run the bank are removed by, for example, an increasing use of local and bio-regional currencies, encrypted crypto-currency peer-to-peer networks like bitcoin and LETS systems we’ll just get more of the same after the demise of the dollar.
In the meantime there is fertile ground for the hate-mongers of many hues and it certainly isn’t only a UK issue.
“Rabbin Dieudonné descend du singe”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0VhHq7DSIU
Let’s go easy on the denunciations. Ba’al may really be a foul-breathed, cyclist-devouring reptile but I see no hatred in his analysis. Far better IMHO for us to have these debates than to allow the hate-mongers use to divide us.
Nuff said.
Correction: Far better IMHO for us to have these debates than to allow the hate-mongers use the issue” to divide us.
Sofia; I regret that families must flee oppressive governments seeking refugee status. Who can refuse safe harbor?
It is dumb to be worried about immigration.
UKIP is using USA Republican Right tactics. Pick an emotive subject and give it all your attention and lots of publicity. Quote anecdotal bizarre cases, especially exaggerated claims about what someone could get(as opposed to someone actually getting it). Never let the truth in actual statistical facts get an airing.
The MSM schmucks in the electorate will follow like puppets on strings.
The real problem – our out of control financial industry will continue to prosper at our expense as long as our attention is diverted from them by this stuff.
IT IS NOT THE IMMIGRANTS – ITS THE BANKERS.
Buffalo gets more snow in three days than a normal year. Whooda thunk climate change would result in new glaciers more southerly.
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!
This is of course the ‘fire in the belly’ of Craig’s piece. The ‘foreign looking man’ or that damn ‘darkie’ is the subliminal spear that penetrates our minds and elevates our fears. This is the ‘Establishment’s modus operandi, the MO, technique, the mode of operation.
When I look into this breeding ground, I will not find love; when austerity bites and disenchantment with mainstream politics multiplies, we witness the racist far-right in flux, producing new formations, shifting alliances and a cross-fertilisation of ideas pushed by the manipulated dread of “rivers of blood” from an ‘Islamic State whose numbers have now exceeded 200,000.
For the likes of those public school educated City brokers, Eton treasurers and investment bankers making their fortune with derivatives trading and insurance brokerage this new fertile breeding ground suits their interests. After the British secret service shaped Woolwich, Islamophobia flowed smoothly into calls to “kick out” the murder suspects, who are black men, the ‘boogeymen’ born in Britain.
Can we leave EDL to build our streets? -Will memes and campaigns such as ‘Love Music Hate Racism’ and ‘One Society Many Cultures’ push back THE GROWING RACISM? Never will! Hate and despair in our hearts means we are prostate, impotent and lifeless, content to blog here stewed, stoned and sloshed, leaving the hard arguments to others.
Mr Goss
“Habbabkuk, thank you for giving me an opportunity to outline Syriza’s platform for reform as regards their policy towards immigrants. When Syriza takes control, due to the failure and corruption of capitalism in Greece, it will be the first new Socialist government in Europe since the Second World War. I can understand this will worry certain people from privileged backgrounds in other western countries which make a few individuals rich at the expense of millions in poverty. It is under: 6. Deepening Democracy: democratic political and social rights for all: but the whole policy document is well worth reading.
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/645.php”
____________________
I have read your link carefully but have not found a single reference to the question of immigration/illegal immigration into Greece.
You’ll recall that my question to you – since it was you who raised the issue of the Greek political party Syriza within the framework of this thread about immigration – was the following:
**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? **
Not only does your link not mention immigration, but even your own text only goes as far as to say:
“Immigration reforms:
Speeding up the asylum process
Abolition of Dublin II regulations and granting of travel papers to immigrants
Social inclusion of immigrants and equal rights protection”
I think you will agree that this is rather general and rather vague and only addresses a small part of the question. For example:
– “speeding up the asylum process” would no doubt be good. But does that mean that the criteria would become more generous, and what would Syriza do with those who are not granted asylum?
– “Abolition of Dublin II and the granting of travel papers” is more concrete, but is equivalent to saying “we will grant inward travel facilities to immigrants and let them become someone else’s problem.
– “social inclusion” is, to say the least, not very concrete.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So I must ask you again to answer the question:
“**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? **”,
giving greater detail and being more specific.
Could I also ask you, as a supplementary, to give us an insight – in as much detail as possible – what is the position of the UK “Left Unity” (to which Syroza is affiliated) on the issue of immigration, whether legal or illegal?
Thank you.
“Ba’al may really be a foul-breathed, cyclist-devouring reptile but I see no hatred in his analysis. Far better IMHO for us to have these debates than to allow the hate-mongers use to divide us.”
_________________
I have read all comments carefully and have not so far seen any evidence of “hate-mongering” – except, perhaps, in a couple of the off-topic comments.
Rather, I have seen some rather good – and measured – discussion going on; this discussion obviously reveals differences of opinion and emphasis, which is fair enough in any discussion and can only be interpreted as efforts “to divide us” (who are the “us”, by the way?) by people who believe that there should only be one opinion on any question.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
En passant, I wonder if the good tone and seriousness of these exchanges has anything to do with the fact that they are about an internal UK matter of relevance to almost everyone rather than about aspects of foreign policy, more conducive to wild conjecturing, insults and dIsplays of utopian posturing? As govts well know.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jerusalem-synagogue-attack-palestinians-homes-to-be-destroyed/
“Israel halted its much-maligned practice of home demolitions in 2005 after officials determined it was not an effective deterrent. But they have had a change of heart recently and begun to renew the tactic in certain cases.”
Family members arrested, homes set to be demolished. Civil war imminent.
‘Reluctant Observer
A fascinating anecdote, Mary. What do you conclude from it?
I think you know very well.
Do you come here in other guises btw?
O/T Good luck to Nicola and all the best.
Nicola Sturgeon becomes Scottish first minister
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-30105262
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/11/it-is-racist-to-be-worried-about-immigration/#comment-492433
The Resident Inviligator has spoken.
Mary
“The Resident Inviligator has spoken.”
________________
Which is more than you’ve done.
But thanks for your immigration-related posts on Reluctant Observer, Nicola Sturgeon, the Royal Mail, the NHS and Mark Reckless.
“Anybody seen Neil Findley’s new twitter feed?”
“Looks impressive.”
_______________________________
Fred
The thread looks mediocre at best, Neil Findlay however, is a powerless muppet.
http://wingsoverscotland.com/the-leader-who-wont-lead-anyone/#more-63373
“Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a former minister of state at the UK Foreign Office, was denounced by the chairman of the Conservative Party on Tuesday for a Twitter post in which she compared the deaths of five people in Jerusalem’s synagogue terror attack to protests at the Al Aqsa mosque.”
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/11/18/british-peer-slammed-for-comparing-victims-of-jerusalem-synagogue-attack-to-al-aqsa-mosque-visitors/
Mary says, “I think you know very well.”
Actually, I don’t – which is why I was interested in -your- opinion. If you’d be so kind. I’m curious as to why you posted it.
“Do you come here in other guises btw?”
A slightly pointless question, if you’ll forgive me. If I say “no”, you would not believe it. If I say “yes – Macky” (for example), what would be the point of an alternative guise?
Mary
Apart from the bit on Phillipino nurses, you have not really participated in this discussion, characterised by a large number of substantial and thoughtful posts and some vigorous but largely polite exchanges.
I’m sure there are several on here who would like to hear any thoughts you yourself might have. How about a contribution from you?
“Today’s attack in the synagogue in Jerusalem was on the site of the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.”
“How many western newspapers are going to mention that?”
_______________________________
Yesterdays attack and today attack have been the state broadcasters top stories, the BBC along with Murdoch’s Sky news have pushed these event relentlessly. Even Ed Milband who’s a die-hard Zionist mentioned the incident and PMQ’s today.
Now tell me but what the hell has an attack in a foreign country got to do with PMQ’s in the UK.
Such was the coverage yesterday of the attack, that even John Kerry and his UK stooge Phil Hammond commented on it both with their sky blue ties and white shirts, to show their loyalty to you know who.