almost changed my mind
You know, in recent weeks I was actually toying with the idea of voting Labour again at the next election.
This morning I heard Charles Clarke on the radio describing 'people coming here' who are a 'burden on society'. Then Blair said that people who are worried about asylum are 'rightly worried'.
Nice one chaps. There's a couple of choice phrases for the Tories to put in their campaign literature.
My labour vote, meanwhile, has fetched it's coat.
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6 comments:
catch up! everyone else decided not to vote labour again years ago!
The exact quote was:
"Migration for work, migration to study is a good thing. What is wrong is when that system isn't properly policed and people are coming here who are a burden on the society, and it is that which we intend to drive out."
Which sounds to me like an admission that the system - which Blair has already bizarrely claimed needs a radical overhaul - lets in people who are a burden on society.
what a total c*nt.
Well I'm happy to criticise him. It's ridiculous for him to start talking about economic migrants in these terms, knowing that the way he chooses to define them will inform the debate in a significant way. By opting to call certain migrants a burden to society, even if he only means a minority of them, is to tar them all with the same brush - because those words will pass into currency as an apt and endorsed descriptive term for a much-maligned target of right wing hysteria. The man is, to use my anonymous commenter's words, a bit of a c*nt. Although he might have chosen a better phrase for that, too.
Well, I'm confused. I don't think that the Labour Party are anti-immigrant, no. Which is why I'm all the more surprised by the raft of new measures which they've announced - measures which will deny refugees permanent protection and ensure that that there is a vast increase in tagging, finger-printing and detention, which will create a system which takes skilled workers but not the less skilled, who will be forced to live on in developing states which have lost their upper tier of workers (and who presumably will have to resort to illegal routes of getting into the country), forcing them from economic migrancy to the role of illegal immigrants. EU immigrants will no longer have the right to appeal when seeking work or study permits, will see their possibility of bringing over family members and dependents vastly diminished; those already integrated and working in the system are given none of the protection which some might say they have earned.
It's a complete sham, and it all amounts to a load of cliches and claims with no timetable or objectives. It's a bit of crass electioneering and nothing more, and it raises the bar for this ridiculous debate even further. They're not engaging with racist debate, they're fuelling it.
Incidentally, David Aaronivitch's article in the Guardian was good today, his usual mix of aggressive posturing and self-aggrandisement, and yet he finished:
"Think about Rodney Hilton-Potts, the insurgent proto-populist who won that silly competition on ITV and will now stand for parliament at the next election. Asked by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight whether he would have allowed Jewish refugees to enter Britain in the late 30s, Hilton-Potts replied that his answer would have been, "Sorry, we're full!"
What sensible demographic policy would stop the Turkish shopkeeper coming in, while permitting a troglodyte like Hilton-Potts to remain?"
You'll get no argument from me there!!!
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