Rubbing Noses

What is the Labour Party up to, eh? Are they working on the selective-memory principle that voters will forget what they did ten years ago yet still blame Thatcher for what happens today? Is the succession of garment-rending non-apologists their attempt to say, “Hey guys it happened, nobody could help it but now the coalition need to have a grown-up discussion about it.”? What they should be saying - Mandelson, Straw, Blunkett, Johnson et al, is, “Wow! We really did fuck it up, didn’t we?” then quietly falling on their swords.

So, all this lovely, vibrant, colourful, thrilling diversity – how’s that working out for you Sheffield? And Leeds, and Manchester… Bradford, Birmingham, Burnley, Oldham, Luton, Leicester, London… every last city in the land? While the Guardian is still pathetically fighting a rear-guard, you’re-all-racists action, the rest of the country – especially Labour’s traditional working class strongholds – has been dealing with life at immigration ground-zero. And of course the latest ‘revelation’ has been the un-British ways of Sheffield’s Roma.

Overcrowding, antisocial behaviour, littering, loitering, noise. This is not refugeeism; these people are not fleeing bombed-out villages; if anything they bring their wrecking ways with them, along with the fears of imported disease: George Orwell died prematurely in 1950 of tuberculosis but over the next thirty years it was all but eradicated. Now it is on the rise, apparently, along with other diseases long absent from these isles. And only recently Defra has been urged to increase the rabies risk status of the UK.

Talking about this is not racism it's real, yet still the debate is stifled with soundbites. Over the weekend the boy wonder, Owen Jones was on the radio touting his ‘owen’ particular brand of jaw-jaw polemic. Frequently citing the flawed conclusion of the recent study that found exactly what it had been tasked to find he repeated “immigration is a net benefit to this country” whenever he was challenged, oblivious to the simple truth that this says nothing useful. A company with loss-making departments doesn’t accept their failure on the basis that, overall, the company limps along and scrapes a tiny profit.

Owen’s other, principal argument plank was that some people cried that immigrants took their jobs while others blamed them for living off benefits. “Which is it?” demanded the ferocious fighter for social justice,  ”you can’t have it both ways!”. Well actually, Owen old chum, you can. You see, some immigrants are imported to be cheap labour for Britain’s large-scale employers; they come, they work, they go home again. Bully for them. But others undeniably come over with no intention of working, simply seeking a generous benefit system they don’t have at home.  

And of course under New Labour’s glorious project the borrowing in ‘boom’ times to extend the welfare state to workers too means that you can - at one and the same time - be both a tax payer and a net recipient of benefits. And the importation of cut-price workers has had a big hand to play in that.

One argument that Labour used in favour of mass immigration was the state-dependent pensioner-heavy balance of the population. They had a point. With more and more elderly becoming economically inactive and with successive governments raiding National Insurance as just another tax pot for current spending, where indeed was the money to come from? As always, they argued, by squeezing current tax payers, so the more the merrier. I’d be very keen to know how that situation is going to be improved by the free movement of people with giant families who have no intention of ever working. Perhaps Owen has an answer?

Once again, I saw the documentary “Cold War, Hot Jets” at the weekend and watched, misty-eyed , at the world I was brought up in. A Britain that had won the last war, was winning the cold one and looked very much like the envy of the world. But now it’s as if you spent your whole life building something – a nice, modest house with a well-tended garden amongst contented neighbours – only to find that the government has spent your savings and the only option you have is to open your doors to lodgers. Soon, you have a family of six living in the shed, helping themselves to the contents of your fridge and garden, selling off your possessions and making your life hell. Fuck your huddled masses – it’s every man for himself now.

It's vibrant multiculturalism, innit?

And the worst of it - whatever Miliband, Straw and uncle Tom Blunkett and all are now saying – whatever mumbled excuses they are spouting we know that this was their intention all along. Blair and Brown set out to deliberately destroy the very notion of Britishness and simply refused to listen to the ‘ignorant’ fears of those who would have to live with the consequences. And the current coalition has no power to turn the tide, the next influx of which is expected in a few weeks.  A tiny part of me wants to see a massive influx of Roma in January to rub the LEFT's noses in diversity!