'Most Britons support BNP policies' reports the ever-so- liberal 'This is London News' online edition of the Evening Standard.
Over at Harry's Place the sites progenitor has been kicking around the nature and causes of BNP voting with the sites usual array of political exiles and slavering lunatics from both fringes.
I agree with Harry about the waywardness of Patricia Hodge' statement that BNP support was growing because Labour had ignored voters legitimate (sic) concerns over immigration (thus leading to a danger that Labour voters in her Barking constituency will allegedly defect en masse to the BNP in the upcoming Local Council elections). As Harry reminds his increasingly right of centre readerhip BNP votes are racist votes and the answer to racism is not to pander to it.
However Hodge' statement hides another side of the story which our Stalinist friend of New Labour is less keen to acknowledge.
This is what I call The Blunkett Effect, or looked at another way New Labour's passive aggressive love affair with Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail. I feel a fisting analogy coming on...
Well, lets put it this way, Tony and co's strategy of trying to out-do the right on immigration hasn't exactly contributed to a growing liberal consensus on the virtues of foreign workers joining the great British egg race.
New Labour has never been keen to try and lead public opinion. It has always tried to 'respond', though in fact less to that opinion itself than to the right wing of a popular press which has no qualms at all about leading it - though of course under the guise of 'expressing' what real people - or at any rate White Van Men - think.
In fact while Tony Blair and in particular David Blunkett, during his time as a muscular Home Secretary, argued that Paul didn't like it up him and that they could play an ID card to his race card and deport a few refugees to Zimbabwe , Iraq and various other places of safety while they were at it, it was nonetheless New Labour and the long arm of its anti-asylum-seeker legislation that came out smelling of shit.
In this sense, if no other, it is New Labour which is responsible for the rise of the racist right. And if YouGov's dubious looking Pole (sorry poll) is true, then they bear some responsibility for that too.
However, maybe those whom YouGov polled would feel different, if they looked to the facts, rather than demostrating how fascinating cognitive dissonance is by changing their minds (in distressingly small numbers) according to whom is proposing a policy, rather than what the policy is. The Refugee Council has attempted to rebut a few myths; while Nigel Morris, Home Affairs correspondent of the Independent, recently reported that an Amnesty on illegal immigrants is worth six billion to the UK - the hidden story here being not 'how many immigrants there are' but how productive they are.
Even in 2003 when asylum applications were higher than last year there were less than 50,000 while there were nearly 1.4million (mostly white) overseas workers in the UK. It is estimated that over a quarter of a million French people live in the Greater London and South East regions alone, then there's the Americans, the Canadians...
But the 'immigrants' the barking population of the expatriate east end (in Barking and Dagenham) are howling about are more than likely taxpaying productive UK citizens (as if it matters) contributing to the cost of the public services that they, those 250,000 French people, the Americans, the Canadians and Patricia's barkers are all using every day.
Is it just me or are YouGov's polls starting to get as odd as Mori's?
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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8 comments:
Not really sure what you're getting at...
Did Labour cause the problem? What is the problem? Does it exist?
I think there is a general malaise afoot for which all the parties bear a modium of blame - by tageting those 12,000 swing voters (or whatever) who will decide the next election, they are failing to respond to great swathes of the electorate who feel disenfranchised by New Labour, New Tory...
The BNP is a symptom of this, as is Respect.
Voting for nazis is not a symptom of disenfranchisement though Patty Hodge might like to portray it that way.
Its a symptom of a dishonest and non-transparent debate about immigration and the fact that there are apparently a lot of racists living in Barking, as there are in other places.
Newe Labour in government has virtually always debated immigration on the terms of the right ('its a problem', 'we don't want too many of 'em and mines a vindaloo', etc)
So, are you saying anyone who has a problem with the UK's policy on immigration is racist?
No, not necessarily but anyone whipping up fears about immigrants using scarece resources, lowering house prices, damaging the area, being scroungers (when the opposite is almost invariably true) and generally ranting on about damage done to our national way of life, IS racist.
Anyone whosays they 'understand people's fears' is also condoning and pandering to racism. Fear of difference is born of ignorance - it does not benefit from being understood. Understanding fear legitimises ignorance rather than challenging prejudice.
It was German 'ignorance' of exactltywhat a 'labour camp' was which allowed an awful lot of people to die.
It is 'ignorance' of the true nature of the BNP which allows people to be intimidated and abused in their own homes by racist thugs who are of course in no way related to the rise in racism against (oops soryy legitimate fears about) immigrants.
If you see my point!
If understanding the fears of an 80-year-old lady in, say, Barking who increasingly finds her bus full of people speaking a foreign language is racist, then I probably am.
Obviously she should get with the programme and see the benefits of international cuisine and a vibrant service sector. How appallingly unsophisticated!
This is not about old ladies for goodness sake - they are not the mainstay of BNP support (yawns in tired manner) ...no you're right of course the working class are all too stupid to understand other cultures or indeed foodstuffs - don't be so condescending!
I hope the alacrity with which you, like New Labour, are prepared to embrace the analysis of the far right that otherness is scary and that stasis should replace entropy in the best of all possible authoritarian utopias, is merely a passing phase!
Less sophistry, more reality would come in handy Mr B...
Politics is about opinion not reality and by legitimising the BNP as a party of protest Patricia Hodge - a woman hated almost as much as the party she represents by a fair minority* of 'her' constituents (*on a typically low turnout) fed the BNP's myth and waved a red rag at her opponents who decided to rise to her challenge and make Tony (& Patricia's) bloody nose in Barking a red, white and blue one.
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