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Can the recent success of the British National party be explained by the misguided immigration policy of the government? That was the killer question from the floor during the notorious episode of Question Time 10 days ago. Four times it was put to Jack Straw, the justice secretary, and four times he avoided answering it. Until that evening I had thought Straw was a fairly decent sort of bloke, for a politician. No longer. In a man so central to the new Labour project, who has served in cabinet under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who has been home secretary and foreign secretary, evasion on such an important subject is shocking.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6898174.ece
In an astonishingly insouciant article Andrew Neather — a former adviser to Straw, Blair and David Blunkett — revealed that Labour ministers had a hidden agenda in allowing immigrants to flood into the country.
Ministers longed for an immigration boom but wouldn’t talk about it, he wrote. “They probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.”
The revelations get worse. “There was a reluctance ... in government,” he wrote, “to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.” The social outcomes that ministers cared about were those affecting the immigrants.
To frame a radical social policy, with wide-reaching consequences, just to embarrass and marginalise the opposition party, is grotesquely immature and irresponsible; it is the behaviour of spiteful children mucking about with our destinies just to settle imaginary scores.
Under these circumstances, Labour’s obvious gerrymandering by mass immigration — black and ethnic minority people are very likely to vote Labour — is perhaps the least of its crimes.
Read it all(at the above link).
That's a couple of good pieces I've read recently from Minette Marrin. I think I'll be following her work a little more closely in future.
Morg
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