We need to keep this as a reminder of what they really think
It's amazing listening to those metro-media prog con pundits seeking to excuse Brown's abominable behaviour in Rochdale. Apparently, we all get angry about things, he's under a lot of stress, and he was just having a bad day.
But that's not at all what the rest of us heard. What we heard was a two-faced bully who holds even his own supporters in contempt. Contempt for the perfectly reasonable concerns of a perfectly reasonable woman facing up to the real problems millions like her encounter in their day-to-day lives.
And whether Brown likes it or not, they are concerned about immigration. He may not want to discuss it, but out here, it's A Very Big Issue.
We've blogged this many times, so we won't do so again here. But there is one point worth reiterating.
Quite a bit of the commentary we've heard over the last 24 hours has focused on the point that we can't do much about immigration, because of our EU membership. But that is nonsense.
The truth is that from 1997 to 2008 (the most recent year for which we have comprehensive ONS stats), net migration into the UK totalled 2 million. Of that, just 0.5m came from the EU - including the new members like Poland.
Moreover, during that same period, a net 0.8m UK citizens left. Which means that net migration from countries outside the EU totalled an extraordinary 2.2 million:
And that is all migration we could stop.
Yes, of course we would want to make exceptions for genuine asylum seekers. And we might want also to make exceptions for some high skill workers (although we could just give them fixed-term work permits).
But that is nothing to do with our EU obligations.
In truth, the EU point is a cop out. It's yet another convenient argument for closing down discussion on immigration. Metropolitan prog cons don't want to discuss it, and they hold those that do in contempt.
0 comments:
Post a Comment