According to Sargeant, “the arrival of large numbers of skilled immigrants” is what “sidelined disadvantaged working class boys”.

The shocker here is that the implied solution is to get rid of the foreigners. Is British mediocrity is better than European excellence? Clearly the solution is better education an training, but the argument is what to do in the meantime? The Socially conservative argument put forward by the Mail is to protect the English workers at the expense of economic excellence, presumably because such a policy would preserve social cohesion. But does it? Conversely, does a more economically sound policy of getting the best workers help social cohesion in the long run?

My initial sense is that multicultural, fluid cities do better when compared to more homogenous areas. How to best put this argument? Can someone like Harriet Sargeant ever be persuaded?

“[T]he local job agencies warned him he had no chance because he was English”.

Yeah, did they fuck.

“The percentage of jobs that went to foreign nationals is between 52 and 53 per cent.”

That’s still a pretty big figure. The answer to this problem is not to say “kick ‘em out” but to ask why the “natives” were unable (or unwilling) to take them.

The daily mail are middle class people. why do they care?

Someone really needs to do a decent post contrasting the attitudes of the right towards the miners (who had to learn ‘market discipline’ and be shown ‘tough love’) versus how they’ve now decided that british labour must be protected from foreigners at all costs.

“The daily mail are middle class people. why do they care?”

Nah, they’re not, unless you’re talking about ‘middle class’ in the US sense, where everyone is ‘middle class’. Mail readers are the aspirational working classes who for some reason, think that by identifying with middle class ‘values’ (railing against and inherent tax that will never affect them, for example) they too can drive a new Volvo and spend two weeks in the south of France every year.

It’s well enough pointing out the crap the Daily Mail do spout when it comes to immigrants and foreigners, but as long as it’s not at the expense of bashing of people who already live here, for not taking jobs that don’t pay enough to live on (especially if it’s someone with a family v a single young person who may be able to afford to work for less for a few years) or simply can’t get any jobs in the first place.

#3 Richard

“That’s still a pretty big figure. The answer to this problem is not to say “kick ‘em out” but to ask why the “natives” were unable (or unwilling) to take them.”

That may be a “pretty big figure”, but it’s the market. And the market seems to have managed quite well in that sense (until the recession kicked in, but that’s not the immigrants’ fault nor the non-immigrants’). The point is how casually and smoothily the Daily Mail can literally LIE. So a 52% becomes 81% just like that.

Can you imagine if the same type of journalism was applied to every other area of reporting?

Imagine a piece that goes: “Margaret Thatcher, she’s so old and frail, she’s 134″, instead of 82 (or eighty-whatever), so that it looks more dramatic.

Or, “Liverpool have won more Champions Leagues than Man Utd, they won it 27 times”.

Or “Gordon Brown has now been Prime Minister for ages, 23 years and still counting”.

Or “inflation is spiralling out of control. A pint of milk is now £4-57.” etc

That would be hideous, wouldn’t it? But apparently, not when it comes to “immigration”. With that, churnos can spurt any, and I mean any, crap.

“When a concoction of outright falsehoods and half-baked myths is regurgitated and interiorised by millions of readers everyday, it’s not surprising that social cohesion is going out of the window and right-wing extremism is on the rise.”

While the papers undoubtedly play a part, politicians are hardly helping. We were one of the few countries to take a open stance with regards to the new countries in the 2004 EU expansion; apparently our politicians do understand the advantages of immigration. Unfortunately, they’ve also done everything they can to avoid *ever* making that case to the British public. ‘British jobs for British people’? It seems to have been assumed that the British public simply couldn’t/wouldn’t accept the position, so it should be pushed through quietly while underhandedly attacking it. When’s the last time a Cabinet Minister (or PM) said something unequivocally good about immigration? Unfortunately, this leaves a vacuum our right-wing media is only too happy to fill.

This may sound incredibly naive but shouldn’t this go to the PCC? There is no excuse for this.

People were hostile towards immigrants long (i.e centuries) before tabloids were invented.

“People were hostile towards immigrants long (i.e centuries) before tabloids were invented.”

Tell me, are you decended from Saxon or Norman or Viking, or Roman or Celt or uncle Tom Coberley and all. We are all descended from some sort of immigrants even you.

Er I’m a second generation immigrant – as in mum and dad both migrated here a few years before I was born and I’ve known that ever since I’ve been capable of understanding spoken language. I’m white though, so probably not a “proper” migrant in your eyes.
What does any of that that have to do with my comment that hostility towards migrants is universal and pre-dates tabloids by centuries, millenia probably ?

Oh, so glad that you were the one who brought up the word ‘white.’

Becuase that is what you brownshirts really mean when you talk about immigrants. Colour of skin is all important. That is why there is hardly any mention in the tabloids about all the Whites from South Africa who are coming to live here.

But then they are not seen as real immigrants.

People were hostile towards immigrants long (i.e centuries) before tabloids were invented

So what?

Actually its a bit of a mistake to assume people have always been hostile to migrants. Or that people are less racist now than they’ve ever been. Hostility to immigrants and racism are both something which you learn.

Although there have always been reasonable numbers of people opposed to migrants there are also vast numbers that are okay with them, indifferent, or positively glad.

The Mail lie, and yet there are still people out there who think it couldn’t be printed if it wasn’t true.

While some will doubt the veracity of whether Megan Fox really does have a clubbed thumbs or if it matters, the threat which has been created in “immigrants” is not question as much as it ought to be.

@ 16 “Actually its a bit of a mistake to assume people have always been hostile to migrants. Or that people are less racist now than they’ve ever been. Hostility to immigrants and racism are both something which you learn.”

Not true – everyones brain innately shows the “alarm” response (activation of the amygdala) in response to someone from outside what’s perceived as their in-group. Has (or had) obvious adaptive advantages. People can unlearn it (by modifying their perceptions of their in group) but it’s bollocks to suggest that racism is “learned”.

@ 15 “People were hostile towards immigrants long (i.e centuries) before tabloids were invented

So what?”

So maybe it’s absurd to suggest that tabloids are the cause of racism, seeing as they haven’t been around for that long ?

17 Not true – everyones brain innately shows the “alarm” response (activation of the amygdala) in response to someone from outside

You are much more likely to be killed by someone you know than a stranger. But that does not fit with the stranger danger the brown shirts like to push. Which is why the McCann child gets acres of coverage yet the 2-3 children killed by their own families every week hardly gets a mention.

But always amusing to watch a troll who could not find his arse with a map trying to give a science lecture. Priceless.

The original people in the Uk were probably from the Iberian Peninsular. The Celts arrived about 500BC. Romans,Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Normans were all conquerors. The first peaceful immigrants were the Flemish weavers followed by the Huguenots , Dutch ( William and Mary ) and then Hanoverians ( George 1).
If the UK had started an assimilation programme in the 50s and pehaps followed a system which makes immigrants into the citizens , such as in the USA we would have a better situation.

An East Eurpean I know who emmigrated to Australia in the 40s said he had to work in a logging camp for two years. He said it did not matter the immigrants’s background, everyone worked together, which broke their cultural ties to the home country causing people to become assimilated and Australians. Mr friend believes the end of such a system in Australia has greatly reduced the assimilation of new arrivals and lead to conflict.

If we had a work permit system ( a green card as in the USA) and properly worked out assimilation programme rather than laissez faire sort of multi-culturalism, I think there would be far less racism.

“properly worked out assimilation programme rather than laissez faire sort of multi-culturalism,”

Like have a system where migrants who want to stay have to earn points for good things like learning english, but can have them deducted for bad things like expressing political views that the tabloids find unpopular. Once they have enough points they can take a citizenship test and if they pass, pledge allegience to the queen like the rest of us do.

Oh wait….

@ 18 – Sally, try and break out of your obsession with “brownshirts” for a second and consider the distant past – you know that mystical time before i-pods, starbucks,blogs and tony blair. When people lived in small communities when everyone knew each other and collectively fed and looked after each other. Maybe back then, if you’d spent all day trying to catch and kill dinner, (notice how i’m being non-sexist, women can be hunter gatherers too) and it was the only decent meal you’d caught in a week (try and imagine you aren’t a vegan and pret a manger hadn’t been thought of eitherl). You get your dinner back to your cave, spend a couple of hours trying to light a fire (we haven’t gone smoke-free yet either) to cook it, and you saw a couple of shifty looking people who you’d never seen before approaching your cave, looking a bit hungry and carrying big clubs. You might be just a teeny bit worried that they might, just might, bash you over the head with their clubs and eat your dinner. Remember, you can’t call a community support officer, and no one is going to give these guys an asbo. And then consider that maybe that’s why we are hard wired to see strangers as potential threats, nothing to do with 1930′s European extremists, or with the Daily Mail.

#21 Matt Munro
Alright. but your comparison hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
The world has virtually nothing in common with “those days”. Everything, even the way we procure our food, eat, sleep, interact, have sex, play, dress, you name it. It’s all changed. So I really don’t get what you’re trying to say.

It’s like saying “you can’t blame people’s suspicion of knives and forks, cutlery was not widely used until very recently”.

Following your approach, whichever atrocious behaviour can be justified by saying that “this was the case for hundreds (if not thousands) of years”: from slavery, to the subjugation of women, from war to burning people alive, from getting pregnant at 12 to cannibalism, from homophobia to not using cutlery.

The fact that “people used to do a certain thing” is totally irrelevant.

#21 Matt Munro
Or, alternatively, the family in the cave might think, ‘oh, they’ve got big clubs, I bet they’re good at hunting’, invite them in to help eat the leftovers, get their daughter married off to one of your sons, send them out to hunt another mammoth, plant seeds, build a hut, build a town, a community, communicate, co-operate, help each other out and become healthier and wealthier.
Which is, more or less, what happened. Otherwise we’d all still be living in caves…

When we were hunter gatherers( up to 10,000 years ago) survival depended on the food resources within a certain area . If people moved into your area and ate your food, your survival was put at risk. If one looks at the violence between tribes in certain part of Papua New Guinea , then newcomers are not exactly always welcome.

The movement of tribes which caused the collapse of the western Roman Empire was probably due to hunger on the steppes leading to mass migration. With regard to the UK later on there are the Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions and the moors taking sailors into slavery from vessels off the western coast of the UK and a village in Ireland. There used to be a fund in Cornwall to buy back people from the Moors had taken into slavery- they were very keen on fair redheaded women. The US MC finally destroyed the bases of the slavers s in N Africa in the early 19 century. I am not sure the predominantly Christian and Animist Sudanese in the south of the country are joyous at the site of Janjaweed appearing in their villages.

After all we still teach children not to accept sweets or lifts from strangers.

@ 22 Claude – that is the standard humanist/constructivist answer – and it amounts to saying that evolution is over, or it’s somehow no longer relevant. When exactly did it stop ? 1965 ? 1997 ? Evolution is incremental, you don’t get to choose which bits of it to keep.

The fact thet we get our food from shops doesn’t change our evolutionary drives, the need to eat remains, its just satisfied differently (although someone, somewhere, still has to kill for you to get dinner). You fondly imagine that we’ve left our basic drives behind, but I wonder how quickly they’d “come back” if food became scarce again ? “Civilisation” is just a veneer.

@ 21 Indeed they could have good intentions, as could a gang of skinheads in a dark alley at 2 in the morning, but with more at stake than a kicking, I’d hazard a guess that your average cavemen was cautious to the point of hostility.