Immigration: are you thinking what Labour are thinking?

It was noticeable in East London before the election the number of “white working class” voters who commented on immigration – when commenting on housing, or schools, and such like.

A short conversation generally revealed that they didn’t really much care about immigration at all – and were really bemoaning the other issue – just in language and with a direction they had come acustomed to because of media attention on immigrants rather than housing, schools and so on.

“But it’s not about race and we should have no truck with racism, in our leaflets, in our campaigning or in our party. And nor should our immigration policy be about race. And we need an immigration minister who understands that and is unequivocal about racism.”

For an immigration minister to be unequivocal about racism, they should be prepared to admit the racism that exists within minority groups.

Asians and blacks are racist about each other, and both are racist about whites. The Afro-Caribeans are racist about the Somalis.

‘Everyone’s a little bit racist’ and until the left stops obsessing about WWC racism, they will keep leaking WWC votes.

I couldnt find anything to disagree with in your quote from Ed M but actions speak louder than words & your leader did appoint Woolas to an important position in his Cabinet. The obvious implication is that Milliband & his advisors saw no problem with the things Woolas said & wrote.
Woolas has been suspended now because he was caught, if the Libdem candidate hadnt brought the legal action Woolas would still be a Shadow Minister.

Paul

In defence of Ed Miliband – it would hardly have been appropriate to effectively pre-empt the court case by taking action against him. This probably works out as well as Ed Miliband could have hoped. He gets rid of some one poisonous – and he can take a strong stance now that it is in the public eye.

. The obvious implication is that Milliband & his advisors saw no problem with the things Woolas said & wrote

I’m told they didn’t want to look like they were pre-judging the case, but I agree that it doesn’t look good.

@ #4

“Woolas has been suspended now because he was caught, if the Libdem candidate hadnt brought the legal action Woolas would still be a Shadow Minister.”

So? Woolas was/is an experienced junior minister who had done the job he was shadowing, he knows where the bodies are buried in a difficult brief that Labour aren’t strong on.

Immigration is an issue where most people are closer to Enoch than LibDem party policy. Your condemning Ed yet quite happy to be in coalition with Cameron who wrote the 2005 manifesto which was mainly about pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment.

@6

However good or bad it looks, the concept of “innocent before proven guilty” remains a valid one, and it would appear to be the card thad Ed Miliband is now playing.

As for Woolas himself, playing politics by pushing racial buttons should have no place in the Labour Party if it wants to stick to its original credo of a better life for all from the working class on up.

@2 – Totally with you. Most people aren’t stupid, and in this day and age immigration is a fact of life. The fault lies squarely with elements of the media conflating the issues of housing and schools with immigration, when in fact the primary obstruction to the former was NIMBYs opposing any new builds – particularly of social housing – and the latter with the ridiculously over-competitive situation that arose out if the introduction of the league tables.

And as for the numpty at @3 – no-one’s denying intra-minority racism, but right now there are no national Asian newspapers blaming Afro-Caribbeans for lack of housing, and no Afro-Caribbean newspapers blaming Somalis for, say, a rise in crime. And there are no national organisations of any stripe fomenting hatred and violence towards the other. In short, it’s a problem, but we’ll get to it.

Racists are idiots at the end of the day, and an idiot is an idiot no matter what colour their skin is or where they come from.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about ‘working class racism’.

The tabloids (as well as Woolas’s party) run endless hate campaigns against immigrants.

It’s a testament to the this country that we are so resistant to this nastiness. If many people actually believed the Sun/Labour/Etc then the BNP would be in government!

I was on the doorstep a lot in the summer in an almost wholly white and strongly Labour area (though much of it middle-class-Labour), and “immigration” was the number one issue people raised.

That’s not to say any distinction was made between, say, asylum seekers, and 3rd generation British Asians.

But I don’t think it is as bad in less homogenous areas, suggesting a WWC problem.

On the other hand, I think there is a big problem with Labour’s core ideology which is – or at least has been understood as – taking a class of “working” people and saying to them that they deserve more – a bigger share of the pie, and that the people above them deserve less. What happens to that ideology when you introduce into society a class of people below (in some sense) your original deserving class? It has two options, one of which is morally unsatisfactory, and the other politically unsatisfactory.

I suggest that Labour appointed a race-baiting candidate because Labour, as a party, are more than happy to play race politics to their advantage. whether that means pro or anti immigation, they don’t care at all, as long as votes are delivered.

The litmus test is “what did they say” vs. “what did they do”. I’ll let you decide for yourselves, but two relevant words – Phil woolas.

This is an interesting blog.

Take Margin4errors point about concerns about immigration actually masking concerns about other things like housing.

Then take Joe Otten’s point about Labour’s core ideology being to tell people they deserve more than they can make.

Put them together and you can see that Labour is a political party which needs it’s supporters to believe in scapegoats.

If I deserve a nice new house without having to pay market value for it then why don’t I have one?

It must be SOMEBODYS fault!

So step forward the wicked darkies the party who haven’t built a council house in fourteen years have warned me about.

Immigration is an issue where most people are closer to Enoch than LibDem party policy.

Err, that is simply untrue if you look at the polls. People may not favour unfettered immigration but the kind of rhetoric and doomsday scenario Enoch raised aren’t bought by most people.

I have a real difficulty in seeing this:

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

Well, he could have argued against it, he could have gone against the flow. But he didn’t. He wanted it .

That is who Enoch Powell was. A populist demagogue.

It is also apparent that the idiot – Enoch Powell, esq – gave his speech in 1968.

I have checked my back for scars, but they are sorely lacking:

In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

Really?

What a lot of pish.

Brilliant post from Chervil. This isnt about ‘working class racism’. It’s amazing there’s so little of it when we’ve had a dozen years of a Labour government which pushed the racist agenda of the tabloids for all it was worth.

This is about the racism which is rife in the Labour party. It’s the Labour party that thought it would be alright to invade someone else’s country because they’re brown people so the Labour party didn’t think they deserved any rights. It’s the Labour party that put walls around our country and used racism to justify it.

Being a member of the Labour party is, and only can be, the act of a racist. It’s a tremendous testament to the British people that they’ve ignored the pressure to accept Labour’s racist agenda so much.

“We want to be a voice for the white working class” Shouldn’t everyone be their own voice?

Prejudice against incomers operates in every area. Northerners moving south, southerners moving north. Kids changing school. Townies arriving in a village. And so on endlessly. Suspicion of the newcomer appears to be a instinctive reaction of the human mammal. It is natural. It is regrettable. It is wrong. Expressing one’s disapproval of such atavistic impulses should be the duty of every humane and principled person, whatever their class, whatever their party. All this talk about how it can be manipulated and exploited in an election (which Woolas clearly engaged in) is despicable. If Labour intends to continue it, they will be unworthy of office.

AN instinctive reaction.

Sigh.

bluepillnation @6 wrote;
“Racists are idiots at the end of the day, and an idiot is an idiot no matter what colour their skin is or where they come from.”

I think this is a common attitude on the left – compare Gordon Brown on Mrs. Duffy as a bigoted woman. I think it is indicative of a wider arrogance – “we know better, those who disagree with us are just misled by the media, and just need educating more – then they will see that we are right”. And then of course there was the Marxist “false consciousness” bull.

Unfortunately a lot of the “idiots” are those who the left think are their natural supporters………

I think the rise of the BNP is not a sign of greater idiocy on the part of its mainly working-class suppporters – it is more a sign of the left’s failure to engage fully with its target constituency over several decades.

What ‘rise of the BNP’? It isn’t rising. It’s almost bankrupt and it’s humiliated in every election it ever gets into.

And yet Labour supporters continue to use it as a justification for racism.

@19

It has nothing to do with the left or Labour. If a person decides to be prejudiced or hateful towards others because of their appearance or place of origin then there is something seriously bloody deficient in their reasoning – there is no excuse for letting psychological defence mechanisms from pre-history inform our beliefs now.

I love the canard from the right to the working class that the left is full of “intellectual elitists” who want to tell them what to do, when it’s the right who actually hate them – you only have to look at recent policy decisions from the Tories to see that.

“If a person decides to be prejudiced or hateful towards others because of their appearance or place of origin then there is something seriously bloody deficient in their reasoning”

This is certainly true. Unfortunately not everybody does have sufficient common sense. That’s why Labour so often to uses racial and religious bigotry to mobilise it’s base.

Let’s just hope this Phil Woolas thing finally persuades the UAF to take a stand against ALL racist politicians, not just the ones in the BNP.

Chevril

I think you have misunderstood my comments entirely.

Labour do suggest working people deserve a bigger slice of the pie. They deserve, for example, better education for their children and better healthcare. They deserve better security in their retirement, and better support to live independent lives. They deserve not to be homeless when they hit on hard times. And so on.

That’s a part of what labour thinks. Because it is what working people think and feel.

My point about immigration is that people don’t really blame migrants for the lack of these things. They talk in those terms because they see these issues portrayed in those terms by right wing tabloids so much.

But a quick conversation quickly gets past the immigrant issue (scape goats) to what actually bothers them. (The issues of education, housing, health and so on) showing that they don’t really want a scapegoat at all – they want solutions.

Labour in East London saw its share of the vote and total vote rise in 2010 because it was willing to have those conversations and to overcome any sense of scapegoating.

Woolas was a coward unwilling to do the right thing. both right morally, and electorally.

@Sunny

“Err, that is simply untrue if you look at the polls. People may not favour unfettered immigration but the kind of rhetoric and doomsday scenario Enoch raised aren’t bought by most people.”

Yeh, okay I’ve never spoken to a voter concerned with the River Tiber foaming with blood but the majority of voters I’ve spoken to basically want all immigration stopped. Citing Britain being over-populated, overwhelming the NHS, etc.

The results of New Labour focus groups from the 1990s onwards showed a high level of anger and alienation among working-class people. This anger covered a wide range of issues: trade union rights, employment legislation, public services, public transport, housing, crime, immigration. To some extent this didn’t matter to New Labour, as their thinking was that many workng class areas have safe Labour seats and their interest was in marginal seats in more middle-class areas, where other isues were more important. However there are some marginal seats with a significant working class electorate, and the risk identified by New Labour was that other parties would succeed in tapping into the alienation felt by working-class voters. The problem for New Labour was that much of what feeds this anger is in the “too difficult” box for New Labour: thus a conscious decision was taken to focus on crime and immigration issues in these areas and ignore all the other issues that made working-class people angry.

Living in a Labour constituency where the LibDems are not far behind, I can guarantee that I will get a nasty Labour leaflet about “LibDems soft on crime” a couple of days before the election. I can guarantee that my councillor (a New Labour wannabe) will only really here what people are saying in public meetings if they talk about crime. The other issues are too challenging so there is an over-compensation on crime and immigration.

“Labour do suggest working people deserve a bigger slice of the pie. They deserve, for example, better education for their children and better healthcare. They deserve better security in their retirement, and better support to live independent lives. They deserve not to be homeless when they hit on hard times. And so on.”

Labour certainly says these things. The problem is that after fourteen years in office their achievements fall way short of their rhetoric. That’s why they need to use the scapegoats the tabloids have so generously offered them – the alternative would be to take the blame themselves.

Happily, as you say, normal people’s real concerns are about real issues such as a lack of affordable housing and good education.

That’s why I want the UAF to make more of a stand against Labour racism. Hit ‘em hard enough and often enough and they can be encouraged to address the issues rather than blaming everything furriners.

chervill

Again – out campaigning in East London at the last electio n L:abour did very well without scapegoats. It stood on its record – the massive improvements in nhs waiting times, the much higher employment levels, the regeneration projects, the schools that were once “failing schools” but that now got better results.

It also highlighted its ambitions like free school meals for primary school children, the work programmes being used to help people keep or get jobs, and the subsidy schemes to get stalled construction projects back up and running.

It is, i believe, no accident that Labour did so well in places like Newham and Barking n Dagenham where it stood on its record in government and challenged simplistic tabloid scapegoating.

Oldham was obviously different – but most of us hate Woolas for that reason and it is again no accident that his “victory” was with a much reduced majority while in east london Labour saw its vote not just hold up, but rise in places.

Where did you campaign in the election? It would be interesting to identify which local labour movements we need to re-educate.

Chris

Read back at my comments about the people who complain about immigrants but really are just upset about services and housing and so on.

A very short conversation with those people quickly moves away from immigration and makes clear what they really care about – and that’s exactly why local campaigns that challenged the scapegoating did well in 2010.

It is also why Woolas’ cowardice was not just out of order but also politically poorly judged.

@21 replying to @19

“I love the canard from the right to the working class that the left is full of “intellectual elitists” who want to tell them what to do, when it’s the right who actually hate them – you only have to look at recent policy decisions from the Tories to see that.”

1.I made the point you replied to and I am not from the right. I have never voted Tory in my life.

2. The “canard” is not to the working class, it is to left politicians. Some of those are working-class, some are not.

3. Whether or not the right hates the working-class is not really relevant – as the original point never suggested that the the left hated the working class.

4. The right may indeed be arrogant and elitist and think it knows better – but that does not invalidate criticism of the left. You might in any case expect that sort of attitude on the right, but perhaps it does not sit so well with the left’s self-image.

The “we know better than you” mentality on the left was of course most obvious in Marxist-Leninists, with their concept of the vanguard party for example. Perhaps you find it in quite a few political movements – Greens are not free from it either.

Neither am I personally, but I regard it as an obstacle to be worked around or through.

@29

1. I was referring to people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

2. I meant that the canard was *addressed to* the working class.

3. Right now there is little else more relevant, I assure you.

4. I’m not invalidating criticism of the left in the slightest – but I would say there are more pressing things to be concerned about at present.

I also think you’ll find that there aren’t that many Marxist-Leninists about these days outside of nice-if-somewhat-strident old guys outside stations and supermarkets peddling Socialist Worker – and while I also have my own issues with the way some Greens go about things, the weight of scientific opinion indicates that whatever their faults, they have a point.

If anyone thinks suburbs are mono-cultural they need to get out of their little cul-de-sac more often!

In suburbia the most exotic and different place in the world is most often only a street away.

In contrast I’d argue it is the inner-cities which are increasingly uniform in their ‘multi-culturalism’: Turkish gangs run one manor, Ukrainian, Jamaican, Vietnamese or Bengali gangs the neighbouring ones.

Casual racism is a way of life in urban centres because communities are commonly divided along racial, ethnic and national lines.

If cities are a vibrant and vicious mix of black, brown, yellow and green, suburbs are beige and comparatively tame.

Immigration is not a class issue – it is a geographic issue.

People of all classes feel the impact of immigration.

While immigration benefits those at the top of society the burdens fall on those at the bottom. This happens because government policy has been inadequate in dealing with the problems of employment, housing, health and education across all sections of society (at least until now).

And people from all classes migrate.

Migration occurs because people want to better themselves and create better lives for their families, whether they are billionaires or refugees from warzones. This happens because there is no global political will the set up an accountable and integrated governmental structure to deal with the problems of economic volatility, environmental destruction and violence which continues to plague populations.

But people from similar circles do also tend to congregate in similar locations after they migrate, so the gross impact is perceived subjectively.

I’ll bet the Milibands don’t open their doors to the homeless unless it’s for the publicity!

Thomas

I have to ask – where do you live?

I live in inner-london – a very poor part of inner-london. (And I don’t mean fashionably down-at-heel like Shorditch)

I live in one of the poorest wards in the country. I play my football in a different ward, but one that is also among the poorest in the country. And I watch my football in the most deprived part of the capital. (I’m a spurs fan)

And I don’t recognise this urban world you inhabbit.

Is it Bradford?

margin,
you’re a funny guy.

I think I answered that question in another thread. But I don’t think where I live now is relevant, given that I’ve lived in a variety of areas (urban, suburban, small-town and rural) in recent years.

Thomas

I try.

But I did wonder which inner city it was in which you experienced that sort of atmosphere. It isn’t one I’ve ever experienced.

Now I’ve not experienced much by way of the suburban monoulture you were understandably seeking to label a myth. But I don’t quite see how dispelling a tired cliche about one type of community is made easier by pedalling a rather baseless myth about another type of community.

The one thing that can be said about experience is that it is entirely subjective.

So while my experience can fairly dispel a myth by highlighting exceptions to a rule it can’t write a new one all on it’s own.

I think you picked up the subtler side of my point that opposing perceptions reflect each other almost exactly, neither of which is the whole story.

But I also think we’re talking about different aspects of society which represent themselves in society – I mentioned criminal gangs, while you mentioned sporting culture and family life.

Clearly these operate differently – sports and family are healthy because they tend to offer a space for open mix and free exchange, while crime is unhealthy because it is closed and violent.

So I don’t think we necessarily disagree at any level of the argument, but rather our separate focus on different levels of it may possibly cause confusion.

And I fully share your scepticism about the current state of Labour – today’s blow-up over the Woolas issue is a perfect illustration of unacceptable nature of their inherent contradictions.