I’ve been criticised by Andrew Coates for not “engaging” with Suffolk Unison’s attempt to sacrifice services in order to preserve jobs (I will talk about that particular failure of the left later) and instead talking about the East Anglian Children’s Hospice.  So in that spirit this is Ben Gummer‘s itinerary on Sunday:

8h30  – Meet at Ben’s current office, IP-City, 1 Bath Road, Ipswich, IP2 8SD

9h00 – Start cycling through Bridge

11h00/11h30 – Finish Bridge at  Stone Lodge Lane (just outside Bridge)

11h30/12h00 – Start Stoke Park

14h00/14h30 – Finish at The The Kingfisher, Hawthorn Drive, Ipswich.  Break for lunch.

14h30/15h00 – Start Sprites

17h00/17h30 – Finish at Hawthorn Drive Shops car park.

Sorry for the European times, but it’s from Ben Gummer so what do you expect?

The Battle of the Anoraks, sorry Ipswich political blogs
OK, this is a quick and (very) dirty break down of the influence of blogs. But there are three blogs, all of whom who have linked to me, and only recently, and I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of incoming links.

Ipswich Spy 105
Tendance Coatsey 17
Alasdair Ross 1

Now, I know that this is not perfect. Ipswich Spy has mentioned me a few times although I’m way down on the side bar. I tried to get in as a Conservative link because, well, I’m sad and I saw that the Conservatives were much higher. It should also be pointed out that it is only recently that
The Ben Gummer local links page sent me 30 hits, but I’ve been on there for a much longer time.

The former National Socialists of the BNP are attracting a lot of excitement. The courageous anonymous bloggers of Ipswich Spy have openly stated that they will censor any mention of the BNP and their candidate (except that a few posts later they didn’t) and Andrew Coates accuses Ben Gummer, Chris Mole and this website of the crime of understanding.

Both of these strategies are based on encouraging ignorance and that’s probably not going to work.

The first thing is that the people who vote for the BNP are in most cases not members, activists or even core supporters. The voters have to be engaged. Andrew Coates has a strange view of the working class when he reads himself in as a member and he reads out anyone who has ever voted for the BNP.

The BNP voters that I’ve met are largely people who believe that they have been hurt by the increased job competition, increase in house prices and rents and the crowding out of public services that have been bought about by immigration. And in most cases they have. Until recently both parties, for different reasons, largely avoided this area while it shot to the top of people’s concerns. It was this avoidance of the topic that fed the rise of the BNP.

Is Immigration too high? Asking that question is not playing to the BNP. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.

The Rock Against Racism and Blair Peach demonstrations of the 1970s did nothing to combat the National Front who grew throughout the high point of activity and everything to boost the esteem of middle class leftists. It was Maggie Thatcher’s “swamped” comments and some actually reasonably tough immigration policies that broke the back of an emerging fascist electoral force. Chris Mole is right to emulate Maggie.

The BNP can’t be beaten by an appeal to ignorance. The fact that two left leaning blogs think that it can says more about the poverty of their world view than any facts on the ground or light of experience.

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.