In 1958, after being beaten in the race to be Governor of Alabama by his racist opponent, moderate Democrat George Wallace reportedly said, ‘I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again’. Wallace then used his newly declared and cynical opposition to integration to court racism and the populist vote. He eventually became Governor of Alabama.
I don’t know what made me think of him.
Anyway. Immigration, immigration, immigration. They do go on about it, Miliband, Miliband, Balls, and how they’re going to hammer Johnny Foreigner. New to the party is Andy Burnham who’s running on a ‘Fewer Darkies, More Mascara‘ platform. Diane Abbott tries to speak on the issue with a little sense and compassion while everyone agrees that her entering the Next Labour leadership contest is some kind of joke.
James Macintyre in the New Statesman went as far as to tell us ‘The problem with Diane Abbott‘ (‘She is not highly valued in the Labour party,’ apparently, although Macintyre doesn’t say how he conducted his research. Did he canvas the members?). I look forward to the problems with Mililband, Miliband, Balls and Burnham being similiarly aired.
Still, it serves Abbott right really. That’s what you get when you don’t back disastrous and bloody wars or don’t try to cover up torture or don’t come over all Enoch Powell on the subject of immigration. You can’t expect to be taken seriously with a record like that, can you?
She prats about on the telly with Michael Portillo and sent her kids to public school but those don’t add up to voting for cluster bombs and white phosphorus or trying to hide a torture victim‘s mangled genitals. Her leadership bid is apparently all the poorer for it. She’s being laughed out of town while these two are a serious prospect.
Meanwhile, the Con-Dems, remain considerably and shockingly to the left of Next Labour on immigration at this early stage. Not only have they committed to releasing child refugees from internment (however that works out), they’re also promising to ‘stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution.’
Needless to say we’ll have to see how that works in practice but you have to admit it’s a step up from telling gay people to go home and be ‘discreet’. An early test of the Con-Dems’ resolve is the case of gay Iranian actress Kiana Firouz who risks the death penalty if she’s deported. Will the Con-Dems save her?
This isn’t to say the new government has gone all soft and stopped trying to look hard and tough and ruthless themselves when it comes to the notional swarthy horde poised to steal our lands. Their promise to ‘introduce an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work’ is already both looking unworkable and idiotic.
So it is going to be interesting to see how the cap “mechanism” might work: set the limit high and there’s no point in having it; set it low and Britain deprives itself of workers which benefit the UK.
In trying to please the knuckle-dragging tendency it looks like both sides could end up hurting the country. Doing the Daily Mail’s and Rupert Murdoch’s work is not, it seems, in the national interest. Fancy that.
