Damned Nation

Guardian contributor John Harris thinks we are a nation of bigots. Interesting that people with his views also tell us we’re a nation of immigrants. Is this where we get all that bigotry from, I wonder, because it is all I hear whenever anybody tries to raise a debate about the pace, the type, the morality of immigration into a country supposedly so filled with bitter hatred of ‘the other’. Once again, wilfully, mistaking an objection to unfettered, uncontrolled, free-movement for racism, Harris launches into the sort of dressing down we’ve long come to expect from our superiors in the ‘progressive’ elite.

Assuming that everybody holds his ‘correct’ views he denigrates what he sees as nastiness pervading society, presumably because he has only ever sought out the opinions of those similarly disposed towards what will in the future be seen as a form of invasion; a cultural replacement. Maybe he should ask the northern towns where white working class people have been displaced by waves of muslim immigrants from Pakistan. Maybe he should ask the agricultural towns where all the employment has gone to formerly itinerant, now settled eastern Europeans, who have come in such numbers that integration has been unnecessary.

But, the apologists (and, to be fair, the employers) say, we can’t get the British to do the work. Is this the vision of socialist Britain that was intended by Blair’s third way? I think not – I hope not – but sadly, the once powerfully industrious British have been enfeebled and addled by a sense of unearned entitlement and belief in a self-worth which they may never be worthy of. So much for New Labour’s education revolution – if you say it three times, it is writ, the spectre of Tony Blair will appear, although now as a ghostly piñata rather than a symbol of awe.

You want young people to be empowered? Then give them the tools to earn a living and take charge of their destinies. Education doesn’t have to mean degrees and you need no degree in basic life skills. Like many of his ilk Harris actually believes in inherent ‘Tory nastiness’ and that asking companies to declare the makeup of their work force is a ‘monstrous, illiberal idea’. But what if identifying where most overseas employees are utilised is a first step in analysing where our young are deficient so that steps can be taken to plug that gap?

But Harris isn’t really all that interested in saving Britain or the British. He says ‘London speaks for itself’ and indeed it does, but London is no longer regarded as an English city by the English themselves. Oh yes, it is the English particularly with whom Harris has a problem and he genuinely appears to swallow the Farage-as-Hitler narrative touted by the left, dismissing all talk of national sovereignty as proof that we are the bigots he has portrayed. Interestingly, he also seems to label this as a Tory plot, when much of Ukip’s support comes from the very people recently abandoned by Labour.

A crowd that white would now be called racist

As for his admiration for the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, sure we all had the badges in the seventies but most of us grew up and moved on. Even at that age we didn’t need an assembly of pop stars, with their half-formed ideologies to tell us how to behave. No, you can’t blame it on the English, Mr Harris, but you may want to examine what decades of social engineering has produced – and the ANL and RaR are a part of it. I don’t think the Tories have all the answers, but I do believe their more pragmatic approach and their having the guts to take on the problems rather than gloss over them is a far better way than the third one.