The BNP was never really an issue for me. They were racist and socialist and I was never either (being an hereditary lefty did not make me economically illiterate). Then I got married.
Suddenly I have a stake in the fight. Not a massive stake, after all if the BNP becomes really active in my area and wins a council seat or two I could probably ignore it and if I couldn’t then let’s be honest I could get a mortgage and move somewhere where the BNP were still coming fourth. But it is a stake.
The problem is that the BNP is not simply responding to a perceived failure in the system, they are responding to a real failure.
I’ve had a fairly senior Ipswich Conservative chiding me for saying that immigration was too high. It was something along the lines that people like me had to understand that employers really needed immigrants. I know that this person has since defected and become an immigration reformer, but that’s what the Digby Jones of this world still do say.
And that’s the root of the immigration argument. That’s who’s driving it. Employers, particularly employers who like cheap labour. After all who needs to pay the minimum wage when the reserve army of the unemployed is global?
The big employers also have a whole coterie of useful idiots on the left. I know Andrew Coates would bridle at the term useful, but he does fit the description. His latest post is a call to close down the debate on immigration. Anything that even hints at enforcing border controls must, per se, be “stirring up fear”. Well, no. It’s reflecting that fear, and perhaps hoping that this fear doesn’t go anywhere else. Like the real fascists.
The fear is already here, because getting more people in when jobs are declining will lead to greater unemployment, especially in the short term. Subsidising immigration through benefits, as we are, means that wage earners are subsidising their replacements. It also means that services are crowded out, unless you can afford to go private. And as for rents and mortgages, we all know what’s happened to them in the last ten years, much to the glee of the school teachers and local government middle managers in the Labour Party who had no idea what high rents and house prices did to their most loyal voters.
There is racism among much of the response to immigration, but that’s largely due to frustration. If the attempts to suppress debate by people such as Andrew Coates, or to dismiss it as “nasty” and ignorant by Ipswich Spy (or one head of the hydra), succeed then so will the BNP.
I don’t want that. Neither does my wife. That’s why she appeared on Ben Gummer’s leaflet. If we are to have a tolerant society then we shouldn’t be using uncontrolled immigration as a battering ram to force down wages, crowd out services and force up prices for the most vulnerable.
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