Even our servile mainstream media might blench at this Enoch Powell style racist message. That is why the Tories are not deploying it openly, but in highly targeted Facebook adverts
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If you have received this on Facebook, you have been identified by sophisticated billionaire funded analytics.
The Conservatives have decided that you are old or poor or uneducated, or a combination of some of these, and thus particularly likely to respond to racism.
I urge you to use Facebook’s reaction buttons to let them know they are wrong.
While there is no doubt that this Tory ad is designed to appeal to racists it does not follow, as Craig invariably insists, that any policy proposal to cut immigration is racist. As one of the posters puts it :
“Bombing countries, or pushing their economies toward complementing the needs of the west rather than meeting the needs of their own citizens, or encouraging or installing compliant governments willing to do very little for their citizens but happy to encourage a favourable investment climate for commerce, or all three, is obviously going to create enormous numbers of refugees and economic migrants. ”
There are many good reasons to prevent immigration at source. The most obvious being to stop making life in foreign countriies unendurable in much the same way that life in the Highlands was made impossible in the C18th, that life in Ireland was made impractical in the C19th and that life in the villages of the midlands was made unendurable for English labourers.
The argument that immigration is good for the economy is one of the most repulsive that there is: to ‘grow the economy’ on the basis of docile, biddable, foreign labour is the worst thing that can happen to an economy like the UK’s. It allows the ruling class to sidestep the necessity of educating and providing proper subsistence for the masses, reducing large parts of the population to precarious lives of poverty and declining life expectancy. Immigration, from the capitalists’ point of view, is designed to make people surplus to economic requirements. Unless that is, they prove themselves ready to do as they are told.
Similarly the argument that the NHS would fail without immigrants implies not only that the UK has a right to cream off medical professionals from poorer countries but also that it is unnecessary to make jobs in healthcare sufficiently attractive to tempt people away from casino jobs or to train native youngsters to become physicians etc.
The truth is that immigration is, for most migrants, a last resort. And this is why they deserve our assistance and equal treatment. At the same time that we welcome and assist migrants however we should be doing everything that we can to stop people from wanting to jump onto rafts in the Mediterranean and run terrible risks to escape our bombs or our, equally noxious, ‘businessmen.’
Excellent comment.
This kind of micro messaging is pushing us further and further into the realms of identity politics. The problem with identity politics isn’t that race or gender are brought into the discussion, the problem is that Hillary Clinton goes into a Southern Baptist Church and says one thing and a New England college campus something else entirely. There is no genuine political discussion, it is simply a marketing exercise. And as is typical in the modern era the people who complain most loudly about identity politics are massively engaged in it themselves promoting a white/male/straight identity.
Discussing immigration is not racist in itself but the kind of analytics which allow the Tories to aim this advert directly at people who have displayed racist traits online creates an incentive to inflame racist tensions. There is chain of production going from the established right wing media (Sun, Mail) to alternative online media (Breitbart, Britain First) which results in both the creation and identification of potentially racist voters.
To think of what is going on here is quite chilling. Facebook essentially monitor the behaviour of their users, categorise them and then sell these databases to polticial parties who then create individual propaganda messages and deliver them directly to individuals. If we are not already living in a dystopia we are heading towards one.
I am 62 years old and would not vote for a tory candidate if the alternative was drinking piss out of a boot.
How magisterial. You are truly the heir to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Not.
‘I’m standing with Theresa May’
Conservatives
Yesterday at 09:11 ·
..
LIKE and SHARE to show your friends you’re standing with Theresa May for strong and stable leadership in the national interest.
https://www.facebook.com/conservatives/photos/a.288165009278.146725.8807334278/10154992268539279/?
because the Tories have taken all our chairs away.
May and the Tories are the true risk because they can’t be trusted to tell the truth. They are proven to lie, to tell half truths and to distort information for their own gain.
This is confirmed by representing Corbyn and Labour’s position on a complex issue, immigration control, by a 2 second clip.
They clearly intend this to mislead and misrepresent.
Tory electioneering comes down to this. Focus on personalities which is assisted by media attacks on opponents and soft balling of Tory politicians. Offer no detail, just focus heavily on slogans such as the one line in the 2015 manifesto which stated ‘£15 billion of welfare savings’ with no further detail or the ‘Worker’s Rights’ launch this week which was a load of hot air and actually watered down previous Tory pledges.
That they can get away with this is incredible. Attempts to cut immigration to the tens of thousands have failed yet they still stick with it. Fiscal austerity has massively failed yet they are still attempting to claim economic competence. You can only do this when you have a media who will not highlight the contradiction between record FTSE highs at the same times regular incomes are being hammered. Who will not highlight the national debt increasing from 72% of GDP to 85% of GDP over the course of the current Tory reign despite the most vulnerable people in society being hammered by cuts and no major infrastructure spending taking place.
May had ample opportunity to do something about immigration when she was Home Secretary, and failed spectacularly on every count!, but she is STRONG and STABLE…
@ Ian Parkes May 18, 2017 at 09:57
So was the ‘Titanic’ (or was it the ‘Olympic?).
Which Moron thought this up showing an edited version of Jeremy’s reply is not on, this is the sort of thing that Snora Kunsberg would try on the Basically Biased Conservative news service
Stupid article. This advert’s got bog all to do with race. It’s about controlling immigration from the EU (+/-85% white) into the UK (+/-85% white). I mean, you do realise that the UK’s population is presently increasing at a rate of about 440,000 per year, and is forecast by the ONS to continue doing so for several decades to come? So, unless we exert at least some control over immigration, where do you as an advocate of open borders propose that everyone should live?
I wonder whether, Craig, you recall item 4 on Miliband’s Edstone. Just in case not, here’s a link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdStone#/media/File:Edstone.jpg
The Tories are haemorrhaging popular support with every passing day. Panic has already set in and the fear has brought their true – racist – colours to the surface.