…if the left does want to win the battle on immigration…

What on earth does this mean? It has to be explained , it can’t just be assumed that we all know what it means and that it’s taken as given. I’m finding this kind of rhetoric more and more dishonest.

Here is a short interview on Radio 4 where a woman speaks of her experiences of coming from Jamaica to England as a girl of seven back in 1954.

Clive will explore with Sylvia what her experience has been of living in the UK, but also of the changes she has seen since she moved here and her feelings about the waves of immigration that she’s seen from other parts of the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0213yfm

It doesn’t sound like a very happy story, from her experiences of racism in the playground, to her own prejudices about Asian people. She doesn’t like the way that Soho Road in Birmingham went from being a West Indian Community to a majority Asian one. But she says that West Indian people can only say these things in private amongst themselves. Asian Post Office staff cheat black people with their money she alleges.

How do you ”win the argument” about immigration with people like her? Or do you just call her a swivel-eyed loon?

A 1/3 fall from a very high number can still be a very high number.

And of course the issues about which Damon’s “swivel-eyed loon” Jamaican immigrant complains have nothing to do with *net* immigration.

But this also underline another difficult point – that if the left does want to win the battle on immigration, we cannot rely on politicians ‘to lead’.

Bluntly, no one trusts or believes them when they try.

Oh, puh-lease.

The reason no one trusts politicians on this issue is that they are manifestly untrustworthy. The solution is not therefore to find a new group of people to lie to and deceive the public but to start to behave in a trustworthy manner.

They [i.e. the Conservative Party] created the Immigration Frankenstein Monster, and now it’s devouring them.

Nonsense. There is no “Frankenstein Monster”. This is another self-serving lie that the political class tells themselves and anyone else who will listen — and one of the reasons that nobody trusts them — in order to rationalize a course of action to which they are both committed and unprepared to compromise over. People simply don’t want their country to be repopulated with foreigners, and they don’t want to be told that they are hysterical racists for felling like this. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

When people are asked which party they trust most to handle immigration, UKIP comes top, chosen by 25% of the public as a whole, followed by the Tories (18%), Labour (14%) and the Lib Dems (6%). However, as many as 29% trust none of the four parties.

So the more that a political party loves immigration, the more that the public distrusts them? That roughly 43% of British people hold to a position that this site views as racist? That roughly a third of British people have views on immigration so extreme that even UKIP does not represent them?

The fact that something like 20% of British people find the Labour Party’s position acceptable is not, I would have thought, good news for the Left.

I find it utterly amazing anyone can take a news report that says four fifths of British people distrust both the Lib-Dems and the Labour Party on immigration and spin this as a problem for the Tories.

Btw, just on the ”Frankenstein Monster”, did you see these horrible anti-facists on Saturday laying in to one BNP bloke?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b02_1370111676

There’s about seven of them who have hit him. They look like such w*nkers I can’t think of myself as a leftist anymore if that’s what being left is these days.

I know a lot of people can’t stand him … but Brendan O’Neill is right.

Dear Everyone, please stop using the word ‘fascist’

It’s these left twat anti-Nazis who have invented the idea of the ”monster” of the far right. It’s all in their heads.

As Damon says @ (1), what on earth is “the battle on immigration”?

Anyone care to suggest an answer?

Of course ‘people’ don’t believe that immigration is falling. The immigration problem which caused ‘concerns’ among people who are not at all racist (how dare anyone suggest such a thing?) never existed. If you’re concerned about a problem that only ever existed in your imagination changing the facts isn’t going to alter anything.

6. Churm Rincewind

The battle on immigration is about hoards of predominantly black people entering our country and using our social services,housing etc disproportionately without contributing anything to british (white) society. Moreover ‘they’ (being a homogenous group of dark faces) are dissolving our culture and violently ,on occassions, trying to undermine a basically Christian culture to something alien.The Poles are a different case .They are not black but they are out to steal our jobs by working hard for next to nothing. That broadly is true for anyone from the EU although the richer ones are OK.

Coming back to reality for a moment though, I have pointed out that ultimately countries should be largely able to organise and train their indiginous population for all neccesary employment roles. If we have skills issues these are indicative of educational/motivational deficits which should be addressed through a proper educational system.

Further that immigration allows the capitalist a greater labour pool which ulimately will depress wages and also create higher levels of under/unemployment in downturns.

Whilst that brings benifits to immigrants in the short term it nonetheless strips available labour and hence development opportunity from the host nation which in my view is not desirable.

if your against people living/working/whatevering in another country why not complain about people leaving here to move to other countries? Or why no complaints about the movement of capital + resources across national boundaries

in short why is it ok for a British company to own stakes in Nigerian oil fields but its suddenly unacceptable for a Nigerian to clean the toilets of that company in London.

I find it utterly amazing anyone can take a news report that says four fifths of British people distrust both the Lib-Dems and the Labour Party on immigration and spin this as a problem for the Tories.
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