Sunday 10 July 2016

Why the British poor are worried about immigration

I sense a serious divide between the so-called progressive so-called liberal left and the poor working class or unemployed in Britain - which helps explain the recent referendum result here.
It's well-nigh impossible to explain this to the former group, because I think they are, at bottom, fanatics. They are so sure that they're the tolerant, rational people. The only problem arises when there's a small error in their logic, and they've got the whole damn thing wrong.
Anyone with half an education is getting a message about what to think (which they often dutifully follow) from the internet and from mainstream news sources. The message seems to be boiling down to an obsession with racism (not an easy concept to define). That and xenophobia. These are the 2 main evils in the world, not greed or envy, not pride, not casual violence.
And the only virtue is a negative one, not being racist. Forget kindness, hard work, keeping a family together, stoicism.. Comfortable middle class folk in Oxfordshire have nice parties together and indicate to each other that they're not racist, not like those other people.
And who are "those other people"? Well our "liberal" friends need someone to despise, and in this case it's anyone who expresses any concern about immigration. To even suggest (quite rightly) that we might control immigration is to be accused of xenophobia or the r word, and to stand accused of wanting to stop immigration altogether, and to send anyone home.
Poor British people want there to be jobs available, and they don't want to compete with a million new people every 3 years for those jobs. This isn't racism, but I've watched privileged Oxford students sneer at the plebs who they think need educating. These are students with the best possible start in life brainlessly patronising poor folk with no A-levels, it's quite sickening to watch.

Monday 4 July 2016

The dishonesty surrounding the immigration debate in the UK

The EU referendum in the UK has once again focused out minds in the issue of immigration.

In a nutshell, you have on the one hand working class British people, worried about uncontrolled immigration, worried about jobs, about services, and - yes - worried about their whole culture being changed as they get older.

On the other you have relatively comfortable middle class folk accusing the first group of wanting no immigration at all - and damning them all as racists and xenophobes.

Do I need to make that simpler?

As a nation, we seem obsessed with denouncing each other as racist, to the point of extending the definition of the word, so they can use it to label more and more people.

However, it is not racist or xenophobe or even isolationist to want to at least have our own controls over immigration, or wanting to limit it. We have every right to ask for this, it seems like common sense.

Those voting Remain never addressed this issue, preferring to misrepresent (and show contempt for) those who disagreed with them. Which is part of the reason they lost themselves a referendum...