Why did Labour open the doors?

That Labour betrayed its own supporters after 1997 by allowing tens of thousands of people into the country is a simple fact, but we are still left to debate the reason why the policy was created. Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail thinks that it was because Labour could no longer take the working class for granted and needed to import a new working class that would vote Labour. 

The problem with that argument is that Labour had to get elected in the first place, so the idea that it had to introduce new voters having just been put in power by the old ones strikes me as an idea that is ludicrous in the extreme. Not only that, but during the Thatcher years the Tory Party went from being a competitive force in Scotland, Wales and Northern England to near extinction. Today the Tories have one solitary MP in Scotland, just eight in Wales and hardly any in the great cities of  Northern England. Furthermore, the days when people in those cities voted Tory at local level seems to have ended, and a party that cannot win council seats is very much a spent force. So if Labour did not open the doors to the world's flotsam for electoral reasons, why did it order them to be opened?

In opposition prior to 1997 Labour strategists had argued that what destroyed previous Labour governments was wage inflation. The way to prevent that happening, ran the argument, was to allow mass immigration. This rather forces us to ask the question why did the Labour Party rank and file not object as their wages were undermined by the party when it got into power.

The obvious answer must be that Labour members are no longer employed in manual jobs in the private sector, they are lower middle class polytechnic graduates who enjoy cushy numbers in the teaching trade, social work  industry or as generic managers in local government. These people are pretty much insulated from all and any trade cycles, and are more likely to want to patronise the new comers to prove how liberal they are. The fact that those newcomers also provided these middle class types with cheap nannies, gardeners and tradesmen goes without saying. Members of the middle class are past masters at concealing their self interest behind a wall of sanctimonious self-righteousness.

We need to also remember that the Blair regime really believed that it had cured boom and bust. They  presided over a country where pretty much anyone who wanted a job, outside of the urban black spots that is, could have one. The few naysayers around were more or less silenced by the cry of "racism," which mouthy middle class Labourites were encouraged to parrot at every opportunity. 

Was revenge a factor?  Andrew Neather said that  "rubbing the right's noses in diversity" was involved in the policy, and I suspect that the people he had in mind were the Loadsamoney chancers of the Thatcher era who were genuinely loathed by most leftists.

However, basing a government strategy on doing over a few thousand Essex Men makes no sense, and neither does the idea that it was all about replacing the old working class with a new one.

What does make sense is the notion that Labour wanted to ensure that wage inflation did not damage the government, coupled with the hubristic notion that they had cured the trade cycle.

What also makes sense is that Labour is no longer fit to claim any working man's vote.

Nigel Farage & the Scottish Question

So Nigel Farage went to Edinburgh yesterday and was barracked by fifty or so middle class types who disrupted his press conference. The police were called and he had to leave in the back of a police van, before telling anyone who would listen that the demonstrators were "fascist scum," and the matter is still rumbling. My guess is that our Nige will emerge the victor in all this in the eyes of ordinary people who tend to regard students as a privileged rabble who should really keep their gobs shut around normal people.

Now, clearly the rabble may have been scum, but they were not fascist by any stretch of the imagination. They are just the children of privilege  who think that their puerile views are of interest to the rest of us. Once they graduate they will go off and earn a fortune in the City, but in the meantime they are letting off steam. What they have managed to do over the past couple of decades is to define certain terms and concepts themselves and then judge other people by the yardsticks that they have created. So they accused Farage of being xenophobic on the grounds that they said he was xenophobic. The fact that he is married to a German and speaks German fluently is neither here nor there: these people set the terms, remember?

The question is why do we allow them to set the terms of debate? The sensible thing to do would be to ignore them and let the voting figures do the talking. It would also help if Farage took a leaf out of the others parties' books and held his meetings in secure venues, guarded by party stewards.

Eleanor Jackson, English councillor, ashamed of England's flag

Meet Eleanor Jackson, a university lecturer, and a member of not one, but two councils. She sits on Bath and North-East Somerset Council as well as Radstock Town Council. In the latter role she announced to the assembled body that Radstock should not buy an English flag to fly over the small town  Her reasons were fairly straightforward: “My big problem is that it is offensive to some Muslims, but even more so that it has been hijacked by the far right. My thoughts are we ought to drop it for 20 years."  

Now, the fact that there are exactly 16 Muslims in Radstock is neither here nor there, and why the press is running around interviewing them is anyone's guess. What is important is that this is England's flag and an English councillor is ashamed of it.

This woman is a Labour councillor but that is not important, either. What she represents is not a particular party, but a particular middle class mindset. People with this mindset are riddled with self-loathing and filled with a desire to abase themselves as some weird act of penance for the perceived wrongs of their fathers. They are also filled with hatred for the drink beer, shag women, hate the boss British working men, whom they dismiss, sotto voce,  as chavs.

Come the next election I hope that a fine representative of Chavdom stands in this harridan's seat and takes it.

Sign the Stephanie Bottrill Petition

This is Stephanie Bottrill, a 53 year old grandmother who was driven to kill herself by the bedroom tax.

This is a petition that has been got up to try and pressure Ian Duncan Smith into resigning. Why him? Well, he is  the Tory who created the polices that led Stephanie to kill herself.

Obviously he will ignore the petition but you will feel good about yourself once you have signed it and distanced yourself from Tory scum and everything that they stand for.

Imprisoning the poor

Imprisoning the poor without trial helps keep the privatised American prison system in customers as this Russia Today report from Ohio shows.

Could it ever happen here? Best to remember the old adage that what America does today, the British do twenty years down the road. If that is the case, then this is  what is waiting for us in about 2030

Who has Cameron fucked the most?

Says it all really, doesn't it?

The Future of UKIP, Part Two

If neither of the two main parties splits, then history has shown that the future for a third party is bleak indeed. However, the lesson of the Liberal party in the 1950s, when with less than three percent of the national vote, it still managed to get six MPs elected, does give some hope to UKIP.

The Liberals managed to do that because their tiny vote was concentrated in specific areas of Scotland and Wales. UKIP, by way of contrast, has a vote that seems to be spread evenly across the country, and on that basis the party will not gain any MPs at all in 2015.

Would it not be a good idea for UKIP to copy the post-war Liberals and concentrate on a particular region? The party gains roughly two percent of its vote in Scotland and about six percent in Wales, with over 23 percent coming from England. Not only that but a massive 27 percent of UKIP voters are from the D and E social classes - the traditional unskilled and semi-skilled working class in other words that has been abandoned by Labour. These people are concentrated on northern council estates, and spend their lives doing McJobs that are interspersed with long spells of unemployment. They used to be Labour's bedrock, but now the party treats them with derision, with the result that many do not vote.

Basing a strategy on people who do not vote is dangerous in the extreme, but following the election of 2015 when UKIP will wake up to find that it has no MPs, it may very well turn out to be the only policy that is worthwhile.

It would mean turning UKIP into something akin to the Labour Party that existed when the Liberals only had their six MPs. The party would be socially conservative and economically radical. It would advocate taxing the middle class to pay for the national investment needed to get British industry working again once the country has left the European Union.

Would that be enough to get a majority in the Commons? Of course not, but that is not the point. It would be enough to gain a sizeable number of MP's for the party and on that basis deals could be cut with either Labour or Conservative, depending on which party was willing to offer UKIP the necessary  number of political goodies.

The alternative is probably political oblivion.