Coming Clubbing?

Remember singing “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club.” Or, if you prefer, “I’m in with the in crowd”. It doesn’t matter whether or not Groucho Marx said “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” we all really want to belong to something. Whether it’s a family, a church, a cult, an exclusive private members organisation, the jet set, the golf club, even just comfortably fitting into an age group - the justified and ancient – being part of something seems to be a fundamental human desire. Even the Sydney siege-artist appeared to want to be part of something, albeit a murderous, barbarous something which would see the rest of us dead. My club’s better than your club, perhaps?

Clubs have rules and generally you have to abide by them to become a member and continue to abide by them to remain a member. Most people have no problem with this. The more desirable a club, the more stringently it can vet its applicants and the greater the rewards for those who make the grade. As your club’s success becomes visible and unless you actively enforce uniformity, diversity will ensue. Successful companies attract diverse workforces from the cream of the world’s talent; mistaking diversity for the cause of their success is just a trap the left willingly fall for. Over and over again.

They do a lot of that, the left, conflating, concatenating and coming to crap conclusions. And so yesterday, just after the leaking of the ‘don’t talk about immigration’ strategy, Ed Miliband launched his ‘let’s talk about immigration’ pledge. It seems Ed may not even be a part of the inner circle of the club he was elected to lead. And as for his latest offering, criminalising employers for… what, exactly? The Labour spokesthing was crucified by John Humphrys on the Today programme, unable to answer whether a prosecution could be brought for pay discrimination against an immigrant worker paid above the minimum wage. Fag packet politics again, Labour? Come on; you must have one coherent policy at least?

The sudden rush to recognise uncontrolled mass immigration as an issue after years of denial, of trying to paint it pretty, after years of denouncing as racist anybody who dared point out the obvious is pitiful. How about this for a policy: People are dying – quite literally – trying to get into our little exclusive island club; we must be doing something right. So, why can’t we control our membership? This just doesn’t seem like such a tricky principle to grasp; we have something people want, but not enough of it to go around. It strikes me that raising the bar to entry is a no-brainer; funnily enough it seems exactly that amount of brain has been exercised in debating the issue to date.

New club memberships available!

And if the EU will not allow us to do just that, doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know about the subjugation of our sovereignty to unelected foreign rule? Why should we give a fig about staying in the EU club when it is quite clearly Europe’s citizens who appear to be queueing up to join ours? I don’t know how much chocolate you prefer, but making that decision for you without your consent would surely be taking the biscuit?