UKIP if you want to, but don’t get caught napping

UKIP’s Margate conference is over, but its election manifesto is yet to be published. We know what the party’s mood music is, and that it has two policies that the three major national Westminster parties plus the Greens find distasteful: withdrawal from the EU and a greatly tightened points-based system for immigration. Beyond that, what UKIP stands for – concretely speaking – is largely a matter of conjecture; of hope for some, yet apparent fear for others.

UKIP’s failure to define what it stands for and what it would wish to do were it to be in a position to influence policy, illustrates that it still has some way to go to define itself as a political party. As matters stand, it remains a vehicle of protest. A UKIP candidate on the ballot paper will effectively present voters with the opportunity to vote for ‘none of the above’, providing that the latter sentiment also coincides with voters’ opposition to EU membership and mass immigration. As such, a vote for UKIP can be said to be positive, as it increases the pressure on other parties to address these concerns, particularly in marginal seats where UKIP’s seizure of a few thousand votes will doubtless hobble the chances of many a ‘mainstream’ candidate. That said, a vote for UKIP should, given the party’s lack of clarity regarding direction and policy, be one that is loaned to it.

UKIP’s absence of a definite set of policies currently enables it to tap into the discontents of different groups of voters in both traditional Conservative and Labour seats, but as such, this approach is unstable. It may work for a while, but can UKIP function in this manner in the longer term, if indeed, there is a longer term? Douglas Carswell has already stated that he believes immigration “has been, overwhelmingly, a story of success.” How many UKIP voters believe that statement to be true? Carswell appears to have strayed into the wrong party, frustrated by Cameron’s commitment to EU membership. Farage may yet come to rue having allowed Carswell into his party. It may have raised UKIP’s profile and given it a brief fillip in the polls, but if one of UKIP’s two core messages that has great resonance with the public – its opposition to mass immigration – is abandoned, UKIP may as well disband and simply become a campaign group calling for an EU referendum. Then again, perhaps it was never intended for it to be anything other than the latter.

It seems likely that UKIP will stack up a large number of votes across the country in May, taking support from both the Conservatives and Labour, creating unpredictable electoral dynamics and consequences in many constituencies. However, it is unlikely to seize many parliamentary seats, and like the SDP, will come a good second in many a constituency. As to what readers of this blog think, the recent readers’ poll revealed that the greatest proportion of respondents – 25% - thought that UKIP would have 2-3 MPs in the new parliament, but only 3% thought that the party would have no MPs, the same percentage who stated that the party would obtain 51 seats or more (an unusual opinion, certainly). The majority of respondents – some 68% - thought that UKIP would have between 1 and 10 MPs, but surprisingly there was also a cluster of readers – 12% - who thought that the party would obtain between 21 and 25. However many MPs are elected under the UKIP banner, their influence upon this General Election is likely to be a significant and interesting one, but quite what it will stand for remains very much up in the air.

Channel 4’s Immigration Celebration

Channel 4 is seemingly going into overdrive in the run-up to the election, churning out a greater than usual stream of pro-mass immigration propaganda. Just over a week ago we had its defamatory hatchet job on UKIP with ‘UKIP: The First 100 Days’, whereas this evening we’re treated to an immigration double bill with ‘The Romanians are Coming’, followed immediately by ‘Immigration Street’. Its senior editorial staff are clearly hoping that they can assist in neutering UKIP’s influence on the immigration debate through endlessly repeating the mantras of ‘diversity is good’ and ‘mass immigration is good’, with an aim of making the UK ‘safely’ hyper-diverse forever.

Why is the channel doing this? Well, turning to ‘Immigration Street’, with a director named Afi Khan and a producer called Masood Khan, would we really expect to see a programme that was anything other than ‘celebratory’ about enforced ethnic hyper-diversity?

Channel 4 has also been giving the Green Party a fair amount of airtime. Part of it this evening was perhaps not that welcome, owing to Nathalie Bennett’s earlier bungled radio interview in which she made a fool of herself by being unable to answer basic questions about the Green’s much-vaunted flagship housing policy. The channel’s ‘Political Slot’ after the Channel 4 News allowed Caroline Lucas to talk about the Green policy of renationalising the railways and the goal of cutting rail fares by 12% (although she did not say over what period). How was this to be paid for? By cutting the road budget, apparently. One also harbours the suspicion that the Greens would introduce a swingeingly punitive set of taxes against motorists, being enemies of the car and individualism. Moreover, one must not forget their ridiculous policy of introducing a 20mph speed limit in all urban areas, which would increase pollution and decrease fuel efficiency.

Still, at least it can be hoped that an increase in support for the Greens will damage the Labour Party, although it seems more likely that it will hoover up more former Liberal Democrat voters.

What are your thoughts on ‘Immigration Street’? How has your neighbourhood changed since Tony Blair vowed to destroy the ‘forces of conservatism’? How many of us realised that by ‘forces of conservatism’ he was referring to the very existence of the nation and its continuity of history across the generations?

Review: ‘Children of the Great Migration’, Panorama, BBC1

This evening, the BBC decided to launch an attempt to tug at the heartstrings and to win yet more support for unrestricted mass immigration into the EU in general, and the UK in particular. Its advance publicity for the programme read:

They cross six thousand miles of desert and sea to reach Europe, children travelling alone, on the world's most dangerous migration route. Some of them are as young as seven.

The timing of the documentary has been prompted by the upcoming ‘migration season’ in the Mediterranean, ‘in what threatens to be its most deadly year yet, [for] Europe has cut the number of rescue boats.’ This, intoned the presenter, represented ‘an unfolding tragedy of horrific proportions.’ The capsizing of two of four dinghies carrying hundreds of African immigrants this winter was cited, in which at least 400 died, part of a recent phenomenon that illustrates that people smugglers are attempting to find a way to extend their operations into the depth of winter. A new tactic pioneered this winter employed a seemingly abandoned, crewless cargo ship, the Ezadeen, into which 450 Syrian immigrants were packed, yielding the people smugglers at least £2 million in profits.

What is also alarming is the fact that ‘it’s also shaping up as a record year of arrivals too.’ Last year, it was stated that the Italian Navy’s now discontinued operation ‘Mare Nostrum’ save the lives of more than 160,000 such immigrants. Now though, it has been scrapped, with a new EU Frontex operation providing a scaled-back patrol closer to EU maritime borders. The presenter wondered how this would cope with rescuing the prospective record number of immigrants, whilst this viewer wondered why it was not defending the coastline of Europe, and returning these migrants to their ports of origin.

Panorama also examined one of the major sources for much of the human efflux from Africa: Eritrea. The Sudanese authorities appeared to be eager to help the documentary makers publicise this problem, as hundreds of thousands of Eritrean emigrants have taken up residence, at least temporarily, on Sudanese soil close to the border with their country of origin. Vast refugee camps have sprung up, and the people traffickers have engaged in bloody exchanges with the Sudanese police, killing and wounding many of their number. Whether it is that the Sudanese are neither willing nor able to police their border with Eritrea is not clear, but the border – in their direction at least – is highly porous.

Although Eritrea’s population is a relatively modest six million, it was described as a ‘source of refugees on an astonishing scale’, with many of these departing being teenagers fleeing conscription in a ‘Marxist-inspired totalitarian state’, with a ‘crippled economy’, political detentions and torture. Conscripts, apparently, become transformed into forced labour in state agriculture and industry.

The largest of the camps in eastern Sudan houses circa 35,000 Eritreans and is overseen by the UNHCR together with the Sudanese authorities. In all, there are reckoned to be some 110,000 Eritreans temporarily resident in eastern Sudan, the majority of them wishing to head to Europe; many, including a number of interviewees, to the UK.

To get all the way to Europe can cost $5,000, with the first leg of the trip taking emigrants across the Sahara, and then from Libya across the Mediterranean, typically to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Cameron’s gung-ho and geopolitically myopic intervention in Libya, which contributed to the overthrow of Qaddhafi and created a state of lawlessness in which both people-smuggling and Islamism can thrive, means that an ever-increasing number of people are setting off from the shores of Libya and heading for Europe. It is but 180 miles from the Libyan port of Zuwara to Lampedusa. From there, the immigrants head to Sicily, thence onwards to other European countries, often the UK.

The proportion of children is growing, and they are often unaccompanied for word has fed back to Africa that Europe will never turn children away and will look after them. The African cuckoo knows that the European reed warbler will look after its young at the expense of its own.

Yes, those who come seek to escape from poverty, vile and often oppressive living conditions. Yes, many of them are subject to repulsive abuse at the hands of people-traffickers. However, we cannot provide a lifeboat for the entire World. If we continue to accept this ever-increasing human tide, we will sink. We will go under. Our society will be swamped, fracture and eventually collapse. This is unsustainable, and cannot go on. What should be done? How can this human tide be staunched and turned back? 

Dire: 'UKIP: The First 100 Days'

Should national broadcasters be permitted to run 'docudramas' with the intent of interfering in the political process during the run-up to a General Election?

Last night's Channel 4 offering, 'UKIP: The First 100 Days', was as predictable and dull as it was woodenly acted and blatantly partisan. How could a review conclude anything else? (Admittedly, I've not read the Guardian review, so it may well praise it for its 'objectivity' and great 'public service'). From the outset, it was obvious that this programme had been commissioned and screened with no other intent than to portray UKIP as the new 'nasty' party; a party of not-very-closet 'racists', frightfully white and not very bright. Although Channel 4 sometimes commissions and delivers excellent documentary programmes, such as Dispatches, last night's drama could not be adjudged to meet the broadcaster's often high standards, falling instead into a knee-jerk pantomime Leftism, that characterised anyone with concerns about mass immigration, the undemocratic nature of the EU or globalism, as racist, xenophobic and innately stupid. If it was intended to be political satire, it was about as funny and cutting edge as David Cameron delivering a stand-up routine, or George Osborne shoving an unexpected tax demand in your face.

That its central character - a fictitious female MP of Sikh extraction - should eventually 'see the light' and turn on UKIP, was a known given of the drama as soon as the camera first alighted upon her. What else could such a character do? The writer evidently thought that both she, and the programme's viewers, needed to be awakened from their state of false consciousness.

Although, obviously, the UKIP platform - so far as we can make it out - being anti-EU, anti mass immigration and anti-multiculturalism, lies in direct opposition to Channel 4's pro-EU, pro mass immigration and pro-multiculturalism editorial stance, should this fact alone allow the broadcaster to screen such a programme at this time? If so, surely for the sake of political balance, we ought to see analogous documentaries dealing with the other 'major' political parties operating across the whole of the UK? Channel 4 could portray Ed Miliband as an out-of-touch elitist intent on wrecking the public finances, or David Cameron as a friend of transnational corporate capital selling off the country's economic assets to hostile foreign investors; Nick Clegg as . . . Nick Clegg, or Nathalie Bennett of the Greens as a vegan totalitarian with a soft spot for ISIS (not the Egyptian goddess) and a desire to extinguish Britain in an immigration tsunami from Africa and Asia? That would strike me as being both as fair and as objective as the 'docudrama' that we saw last night.

That complaints should have been submitted to Ofcom in the wake of 'UKIP: The First 100 Days' is perfectly understandable. Will Ofcom take any notice? What do you think?

SNP: ‘The more seats we have here, the more powers we’ll have in Scotland.’

Thus runs the slogan on the first welcome image (reproduced below) displayed on the SNP’s website landing page. However, for the English this statement, given projections regarding the possible composition of the next House of Commons, would be better displayed next to the SNP’s peculiar logo, which looks for all the world like a noose.   

Opinion polls indicate that we are heading towards a second Parliament with no party possessing an overall majority. For a number of months, the national polls – at the headline level – have remained relatively static, but what has changed, as widely noted by commentators, is the situation in Scotland. As matters stand, the SNP is on track to oust Labour as the leading parliamentary party in the country, routing the latter in a number of its historic strongholds. Rather than laying to rest the question of Scotland’s constitutional status within the United Kingdom, last September’s Independence Referendum has bequeathed a situation in which the Scots have come to perceive themselves as very much separate to the rest of the UK, albeit whilst remaining part of it.

Much of this change in national self-perception can, perhaps, be attributed to the Westminster panic over the possibility of a ‘Yes’ vote, and the associated granting of additional concessions to the Scottish Parliament which amounted to the ‘Devo Max’ that had previously been denied as an option to Scots. Having woken up to the efficacy of voting SNP in leveraging additional powers and privileges from Westminster, Scottish voters seem intent to play the nationalist card in pursuit of further concessions from the rest of the UK, to pay for policies that are deemed unaffordable in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Doubtless, Ed Miliband’s lacklustre leadership of the Labour Party and absence of a coherent political vision also plays poorly with Scottish voters when contrasted with an SNP, which is making a direct play for the traditional Labour vote north of the border. 

Amongst the SNP’s pledges is to continue to ensure that ‘There will be no tuition fees for Scottish students’. This situation understandably makes many English students envious and resentful, particularly so when considering that whereas English and Welsh students studying in Scottish universities have to pay fees equivalent to the maximum chargeable to domestic students in England and Wales - £9,000 per annum – if you happen to come from anywhere between Lisbon and Tallinn that happens to be part of the EU, you pay nothing. Not only that, but even ‘if you’re the child of a Turkish worker in the UK’ you can apply to have your tuition fees paid in full. You could not devise a more unjust anti-English system if you tried. Alongside this remarkable pledge, is a statement that the party wishes to see ‘a minimum income of at least £7,000 for the lowest income students’ (although presumably not for sub-Turkish English students).

This SNP approach to policy, with its pronounced anti-English tenor, spells trouble ahead. According to today’s UK Polling Report rolling average of polls, Labour stand on 33%, Conservatives on 31%, UKIP on 15%, the Liberal Democrats on 8% and the Greens on 6%. The others, amongst whom are included the SNP, account for the remaining 7%. However, whereas UKIP are highly likely to end up with far fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats, possibly winning a handful in total, the SNP, because of their natural concentration in Scotland, look set to play the role of power brokers, just as the Liberal Democrats have done since 2010. Such an electoral outcome will doubtless fuel pressure for both constitutional and electoral reform, given the far higher number of votes that will accrue to UKIP, but failing to yield electoral MPs. 

On 3 February, UK Polling Report reported that the four opinion polls carried out thus far this year in Scotland revealed the following stated voting intentions: Labour 27%, Liberal Democrats 5% and the SNP 47%. This represented swings of 21% from Labour and 20.5% from the Liberal Democrats to the SNP. However, swings are never uniform, so although the polls suggest a near if not complete wipe-out for Labour in Scotland this May, most pollsters believe that Labour will retain some seats. Nonetheless, it is generally anticipated that the SNP will take upwards of 40 Westminster seats if current voting intentions hold firm. This raises the spectre of a Miliband minority administration propped up by the SNP, possibly, depending upon the precise distribution of seats, also being reliant upon a cobbled together coalition including one or two Greens and the Liberal Democrats. This would probably be the worst possible outcome for the UK, running the risk of fracturing it irrevocably, whilst ceding further sovereignty to the EU and sinking ever further beneath the weight of near-untrammelled mass immigration. Who would pay for Scotland's spending spree, particularly during a time of likely declining North Sea oil income? 

A Labour minority Government with SNP support could sound the death knell for the United Kingdom. Wouldn’t Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon et al be delighted with the anti-democratic havoc that they could play with the Sassenachs! 

Hark, hark the dogs do bark

The beggars are coming to town. This is the warning being made by the German Association of Cities in a report examining the negative impact of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria since 2006. During the intervening years, it is estimated that some 159,000 Romanian and 90,000 Bulgarian citizens have arrived in Germany, accompanied by what the Daily Telegraph describes as ‘a rise in organised crime’. What these figures fail to tease out of course is the percentage of these immigrants that happens to be Roma. Whereas many other Romanian and Bulgarian citizens will have upped sticks in search of legitimate employment, it would seem that this is not the preferred option for a very significant, if not a preponderant, element within the Roma.

Four German cities have been singled out as ‘struggling to cope’ with the influx: Berlin, Dortmund, Hamburg and Hanover. The immigrants generally do not speak German, are low skilled and place significant economic and social strains upon the receiving cities, leading to a situation in which  “The social balance and social peace is extremely endangered.” Depressing, yet refreshingly frank words and analysis. Why should Germany have to put up with this and bear these costs? Why should the UK have to allow a similar human ingress, following the removal of restrictions on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria on 1 January this year? Not one more unskilled labourer of any type is required, and we certainly need no more beggars. We are in the depths of a protracted recession, or more accurately, depression, and the arrival of such people can only serve to exacerbate existing problems and bring new ones. Migration Watch was right to caution that up to 70,000 per annum could arrive from these countries, and yet the Prime Minister ‘promises’ us an EU referendum in 2017 or 2018, thereby ensuring open borders until at least that date. What good is that?

Last year it was revealed that The Big Issue had been colluding in a scam allowing Roma immigration from Bulgaria and Romania by classing Roma Big Issue vendors as ‘self-employed’, leading in some parts of the country to them constituting 80% of all those selling the magazine. Alas, the courts adjudged this scam to be legitimate, and to be in full accord with the law. For most of us, this appears to be the straightforward abuse of a magazine that was purportedly established to help the homeless get back on their feet, and save enough money to gain accommodation of some sort.

For politicians however, the Roma issue is not big at all, but rather invisible. Criticise Roma criminality (‘culture’) and dark allusions will be made to a certain policy carried out on the continent some 70 years or so ago, yet look at the statistics and it is plain to see why so many Roma condemn themselves, or elect to follow, a life on the margins of society if not outright criminality. In Bulgaria for example, statistics from 2007 show that only between 60-77% of Roma children were enrolled in school education (ages 6-15) compared to 90-94% of ethnic Bulgarians, with only 6-12% of Roma enrolling in further education (16-19). If basic education is deliberately neglected to such an extent, how can the Bulgarian Roma hope for their children to find any form of legitimate employment when they become adults?

Official census data states that in 2001 Bulgaria was home to 370,908 Roma and Romania to 535,140 in 2002, so there would seem to be a large pool of prospective migrants. It will therefore be understandable that owing to the politically correct strictures of reporting in this country that ethnic Bulgarians and Romanians will be tearing their hair out in years to come, reading and viewing report after report, in which their good name is blackened thanks to a significant element within their Roma export. 

David Cameron: a globalist advocate of open borders

Spalding anti-immigration protest: April 2013

Spalding has a problem with immigration, as does Boston. However, the greatest problem faced by the residents of these two towns is not so much the immigrants themselves, as the political system and legislation that has enabled and encouraged the latter to settle there. One cannot blame the immigrants for wishing to seek a better life given that EU regulations have legally entitled them to come and work in the UK. Our dissatisfaction should not be directed at these people, but at the EU, our Government, our mainstream political parties and those employers who seek to use immigrant labour to their narrow self-advantage and to the detriment of the wider society.

Although it would be churlish to state that every aspect of EU membership has been negative, on balance, both in practical terms and in matters of democratic principle, membership has neither been welcomed by nor beneficial to a large segment of our population. The free movement of labour between member states has been one of the most visible and most negative aspects of membership. From the perspective of certain vested interests – notably unscrupulous employers keen to drive down wages irrespective of the impact upon living conditions – the importation of cheap and often highly qualified and motivated labour from the EU accession countries of the former Soviet bloc has been welcome, but from the viewpoint of ordinary people here at home struggling to find work that will pay a living wage and enable them to live what would hitherto been seen as a ‘normal life’, it most certainly has not.

The people of Spalding are tired of having their concerns relating to unprecedented levels of immigration ignored or branded as ‘racist’, and inspired by recent anti-immigration demonstrations that took place in nearby Boston in November and earlier this week, they have decided to take to the streets at a date yet to be fixed this coming April. Its organiser, Dean Everitt, told the Spalding Guardian that this march would be followed up by marches in Boston, Wisbech and Lincoln, culminating in a march on Westminster. Details of the protests are to be posted on the Spalding Immigration Issues Facebook page.

Mr Everitt stated:

Europeans cannot come here and think they can act in the same way as they do abroad. People don’t want drinking and urinating in the streets, overcrowding in properties and lack of jobs.

Residents are becoming afraid to go out, especially at night. We’ve had six murders in three years – and that’s just Boston and Spalding.

In addition to the problems listed by Mr Everitt, there will of course be associated issues generated by a large influx of non-English speaking children into local schools and pressure placed upon health and social services. Whereas our large urban centres have been subject to such pressures for decades, these problems are new for small towns such as Boston and Spalding which have seen recent immigration create a staggering growth in population. By 2008, some estimates placed Boston’s immigrant population as high as one quarter of the total, and the 2011 census indicated that the population of the borough as a whole had increased from 55,800 in 2001 to 64,600.

This specific problem recently received an airing on the BBC’s Question Time in which the BBC’s favoured Professor of Classics Mary Beard dutifully sang from the globalist open borders hymn sheet, extolling the many ‘virtues’ of Boston’s immigrant influx, blithely brushing aside the concerns of locals. However, as can be seen from the second of the clips below, Beard’s sunny evaluation of the situation was soon washed away by a contribution from a local woman of half-Polish descent who highlighted the general nature of the problem whilst providing some specific examples.

Such is the discontent generated by the immigrant influx, that even Boston Labour Councillor Paul Kenny has been compelled to grant some form of recognition to public concerns. Thus, this week he attended a House of Commons conference entitled ‘Immigration to the regions: how do we ensure that no-one is left behind?’ with a view to raising questions about ‘street drinking, employment and issues surrounding Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs)’. However, the only genuine solution to the specific problems experienced in Boston and Spalding, as well as to the wider negative impacts of mass immigration across the country as a whole, is to take a genuinely robust approach to immigration which involves a de facto closing of the borders, with allowance being made for only a very small number of immigrants to enter the country under genuinely exceptional circumstances. As for those who are allowed in, citizenship and its attendant rights should be granted only after an extended period of residence providing that the individuals concerned have fully integrated and proven themselves to be of good character.

We remain in a period of exceptional economic crisis, and whereas mass immigration does not lie at the root of this crisis, it has certainly made it harder to cope with; further immigration will do nothing other than exacerbate our many problems in the areas of employment, housing, health, education and social services. Leaving the EU will only be part of the solution, for the abandonment of the false belief in the morality of globalism will be a necessary precondition for regaining control of our borders, as this is what allows our borders to be so porous. Will the protesters from Spalding and Boston recognise this truth and draw the necessary political conclusions, or will they be bought off with some sop from Westminster?

  

The economy shrinks whilst the population grows

Although provisional, today’s statistics released by the ONS suggest that overall the UK economy remained flat in 2012: there was no growth. However, the statistics that point to a 0.3% contraction in the economy during the final quarter of 2012 are, when taking into account demographic factors, even more worrying, for the figures relate to aggregate GDP and not per capita GDP. Given the rapid population expansion that has taken place over the past decade and a half and continues to this day, per capita economic output is shrinking at an even faster rate. This conclusion would appear to be supported by statistics released earlier this week stating that unemployment is now at its lowest in 18 months and a new record has been reached for the number of people in work. Average earnings are said to have increased by 1.5% in the year to November 2012, but given that RPI throughout this period was running at more than double this rate, they purchasing power of average wages has been falling; our standard of living in these raw terms is declining.

Worryingly, the underlying state of the economy looks weak, with the genuine foundations of wealth creation – “the production industries” – contracting at a faster rate than the economy as a whole, dropping by 1.8% in the final quarter of 2012. This represents part of an ongoing trend illustrated in the graph below, which shows that production as a whole had declined by circa 5% since the beginning of 2011, with the largest drop being witnessed in mining and quarrying which fell by over 25% during the same period. 

 The latest figures for the UK’s trade deficit released in November also reveal a grim picture, with the deficit on goods and services estimated to have been £3.5 billion. Looking beneath this surface figure, the weakness of our manufacturing and productive sector is starkly revealed by a £9.2 billion monthly deficit on goods which was “partly offset by an estimated surplus of £5.7 billion on services.”

Clearly, the economic policy of the current Government is not working, and yet, the ‘solution’ offered by the Labour Party is no better, for it focuses upon maintaining consumption through increased borrowing without addressing the trade deficit and the over-reliance upon the service sector. A radical new industrial policy is required that provides greater backing for the development of cutting-edge technologies and the industries of the future, providing jobs both for those with high-level intellectual skills in science and engineering, as well as for those working in support roles in the supply chains required to nurture and sustain this domestic revival. However, such an approach is at best paid only lip service by the globalist parties of today: Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and UKIP. A new non-globalist alternative is required to provide the support and impetus necessary to launch and sustain a long-term economic revival with a vision and programme that looks decades into the future, rather than simply to the next General Election.

David Cameron’s forthcoming EU Speech: Great Expectations?

The Conservative Party currently appears to be in overdrive in its effort to undermine the threat from UKIP, with many leading members taking care to use language that could be mistaken for Euroscepticism by the electorate, whilst in the main remaining resolutely pro-EU. Even the Prime Minister himself, an undoubted Euro-enthusiast, has now been compelled by a solidifying Euroscepticism amongst a section of the British electorate to hint at concessions to public opinion on this score, coyly intimating that a referendum could eventually be in the offing. However, nothing could be further from his intentions than allowing the UK to leave the EU, and any referendum that may eventually be set before us (which in itself is doubtful) would be likely to be rigged in its wording. Nonetheless, anything less than full-blooded Euro-enthusiasm causes the BBC to balk, and thus it is that Cameron’s comment that he wishes to seek a “fresh settlement” between our country and the EU is sufficient for the BBC to take this as being tantamount to the ravings of a xenophobic Little Englander.

In his interview on this morning’s Today Programme, Cameron refused to divulge what he would say in his speech to be delivered in the Netherlands next week, although he stressed his globalist economic credentials by making reference to the UK’s “strong tradition of global trade”. Throughout the interview, the emphasis was very much upon rationalising EU via reference to economic imperatives, whilst ignoring the option of leaving the EU and negotiating mutually beneficial trading arrangements with members of the bloc. Neither the Prime Minister nor his interviewer touched upon the aspects of EU membership to which electors undoubtedly have not given their consent, such as ever-increasing and deeper political union and the intent to eventually form an economic union with the Muslim states of North Africa and the Middle East founded upon the principles of Euromed. There are many non-economic costs to EU membership, and the free movement of labour between member states has in recent years caused many problems in the UK by placing increased pressure upon housing, education and health, whilst undermining domestic wages and helping to entrench long-term structural unemployment. This is not something that either the BBC or Cameron are keen to publicise.

This month witnesses the end of transitional controls on the right of Bulgarian and Romanian citizens to come and work and settle in the UK. Although Cameron was pressed on this matter in this morning’s interview, he refused to provide an estimate of how many people are expected to arrive from these two EU member states. However, with a combined population of roughly 26.3 million and far lower average wages than the UK, it would not be unreasonable, taking into account previous experience with immigration from Poland, Slovakia and other EU accession states, for a wave of several hundred thousand immigrants to arrive. Where, when we have a housing crisis, will they live, and what will they do for a living as we struggle with mass unemployment in the depths of a protracted recession arising from our structurally unbalanced and globalised economy? These are questions that neither the Prime Minister nor the BBC are willing to answer, for they reveal one of the many economically and, importantly, socially costly negative consequences of remaining a member of the EU. Withdrawal from the EU would help us to manage our immigration problem, but that alone would not enable us to solve it completely.

When Cameron delivers his speech on the EU next week it will, like the many speeches delivered by leading politicians on this issue, be more or less interchangeable with those of the leaders of the other two major Westminster parties, whose motto may as well be “In the EU and globalism we trust”. Of one thing we can be sure: Cameron’s speech will be an anticlimax, and any great expectations that some voters may possess regarding the Conservative Party’s intent to allow a meaningful referendum upon EU membership will be dashed; these expectations will remain, like the book of that title, fiction.

Your new neighbours? Romania's Roma

Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Labour’: hearing, but still not listening

Today witnessed Ed Miliband’s third speech in less than a year that was delivered with the intent of generating headlines that he and the Labour Party had finally awakened to the fact that the majority of people – British people that is – had neither wished for nor endorsed Labour’s policy of encouraging mass immigration. In this respect, the BBC dutifully reported today’s speech addressed to the Fabian Society as constituting an admission that Labour ‘did not do enough for ordinary people, becoming distant on issues such as immigration.’ What Miliband then went on to emphasise, as in his previous speeches on Englishness in June and immigration in December, was that he was unapologetic for the fact that the ethnic and cultural fabric of society had been radically altered, and that on the contrary, he rather liked it and that it was something (to use a much abused word in recent years) to be ‘celebrated’. In a telling sentence he stated: ‘I bow to nobody in my celebration of the multi-ethnic, diverse nature of Britain.’

Since last June Ed Miliband has plainly be toying with Blue Labour rhetoric as advocated by Jon Cruddas, in an attempt to reconnect with Labour’s neglected and alienated former bedrock of support: the indigenous working class. However, Miliband has made it clear on a number of occasions that he finds the substance of Blue Labour rather too strong to stomach, so he has chosen instead to don patriotic drag in an attempt to portray a party that is still wholeheartedly in favour of mass immigration, muliticulturalism and the promotion of non-indigenous interests (I hesitate to employ the term ‘ethnic minority’ for the English are now a minority in their own capital) as standing up for the national interest. His arrogation of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ phrase is a conscious part of this attempt to dupe and manipulate public opinion. People would be advised to consider that when Miliband speaks of ‘one nation’, he is referring to all of the populations of the globe resident in our country, not to our nation: 'I am proud to celebrate the multi-ethnic, diverse nature of Britain.'

Although Miliband is correct in criticising the Conservatives for fostering divisions in society, he is wrong in positing Labour as the answer to these divisions, for he is intent upon cementing and widening the divisions that he and his party so assiduously cultivated whilst in power. If voters wish to find the positive political substance of ‘Blue Labour’, then they are going to have to look for it outside of the Labour Party. Miliband’s three speeches relating to this theme illustrate that although he and his likeminded confederates have heard the discontent emanating from the British public on this score and been unnerved by it, they have not listened, and they will not act upon it.

Ed Miliband's vision of 'One Nation' revisited for a third time

Ed Miliband’s Immigration Speech: celebrating national dissolution

As with Ed Miliband’s speech on ‘Englishness’ in June, his speech on immigration at the end of last week was used as a pretext to launch into another ‘celebration’ of Britain’s, particularly England’s, newly found ethnic ‘diversity’ (i.e. Balkanisation). Whereas the first of the speeches was trailed as Miliband recognising that Labour had ‘got it wrong’ with respect to its routine demonisation of Englishness and its equation with ‘racism’, and the second as an acknowledgement that Labour had ‘made mistakes’ in its open-door immigration policy, neither in fact proved to be the case; Miliband provided his own definition of ‘Englishness’ that denied the English the right to their own identity, and ‘apologised’ for mass immigration by stating that we had not done enough to help the immigrants. So, for all of his toying with ‘Blue Labour’ rhetoric, even the substance of that strand of thinking within his party proves to be excessively unpalatable for him.

Following the Olympic opening ceremony, I noted how ‘It was not so much a celebration of national identity, as of a post-national notion of Britain as a hyper-globalised space, in which its people were depicted as being displaced by incomers at an every-accelerating pace’, and indeed, Ed Miliband picked up on this theme, but not as cause for lamentation, but for ‘celebration’. Miliband stated:

‘the whole Olympic experience reflected the diversity of modern Britain. So it was an immense achievement for our country and it reflects a crucial reality about our nation today. Social, cultural and ethnic diversity has made us stronger.’

What facts does he provide to back up such assertions? Why is it ‘crucial’? How has it ‘made us stronger’? Clearly, it is not 'crucial' and it has not 'made us stronger', and he did nothing to bolster his argument other than continue to repeat such assertions in a variety of verbal forms throughout the remainder of his speech. The reality is that the ongoing Balkanisation of Britain has helped to fuel riots, demands for special religious privileges, restraints upon freedom of speech and expression, discrimination in the workplace in favour of those of a non-indigenous background, a diminution in animal welfare standards, and increased stress upon our public services, whether they happen to be health, education or social security.

The Daily Mail was not impressed with his speech, and noted that ‘There are now around a million households where no on speaks English.’ What do these ‘million households’ add to our country, other than a deadweight? How many millions live in these households altogether? They constitute an extreme drag upon our economy, and deny homes to our young couples who wish to start families but are unable to do so because many larger dwellings are filled with non-English speaking immigrants. Furthermore, the enormous decadal increase in population brought about by mass immigration and the immigrant-descended population has assisted in inflating the property market and making homes unaffordable; it is an increase that has helped to choke our roads and to overburden our trains. All of this we must now suffer at a time when our economy is at best at a standstill. Our standard of living, whether measured in monetary terms, in the quality of our housing, in the general standard of our environment or in the services that we receive, is falling, and yet we are told that it must fall still further because of the ‘decarbonisation’ of the economy, whilst we make room and accommodation for more immigrants. And these observations of course, do not take into account the broader negative cultural impacts. Miliband, naturally, does not see let alone acknowledge any of these objections.

A thread that ran through both of Miliband’s speeches was his reference to his ‘refugee’ parents, to his family’s Jewishness and to ‘the terrors of the Nazis’. This, evidently, he perceives to be a useful means of implying that anyone who should object to mass immigration and the impact that it has wrought is somehow spiritually at one with ‘the Nazis’. It is of course a nasty and baseless insinuation, but he is happy to use it. In this latest speech, he made this incredibly explicit, by praising the Babel at a London school and claiming that ‘the British people have embraced this diversity’ before immediately launching into the observation that:

‘frankly we’ve had our fair share of doomsayers in Britain over the years. From Oswald Moseley in the 1930s, Enoch Powell in the 1960s to Nick Griffin today.’

This theme was later picked up when he asserted:

‘Division, racism and prejudice were features of everyday life for far too long in the Twentieth Century.’

So, there you have it: to object to mass immigration, globalisation and ensuing national self-dissolution is according to Miliband tantamount to fascism. Out of the three men he mentioned, Powell was the only one who was decent, and he has, contrary to Miliband’s speech, been proven correct in his observations and predictions. Whereas Miliband’s speech upon immigration will be largely forgotten in a decade’s time, Powell’s is an historical artefact that will remain.

As is customary not only for the Labour Party, but also for the BBC and UKIP amongst others, Miliband chose to emphasise Eastern European migration, omitting to mention that the majority of immigrants over the past 15 years have not come from within the EU, but from Asia and Africa. The census figures released this week confirm this.

Miliband announced that the learning of English was key for future ‘integration’ and stated that ‘We must live together across communities’. Already we have seen our capital city become not only non-English but also non-British, and if you live in a small town or in rural England, do not think that Miliband does not have plans to transform your world, for he also stated: 

‘Mixed communities are the key to making integration work. And mixed income housing is the key to creating mixed communities.’

So, if you should think that the building of social housing in our county towns and villages would be primarily to accommodate local people who cannot afford to buy their own homes, think again. Under a Labour administration – and probably under the current Condem Government – such homes may well be used to help enforce ‘mixing’, with immigrants being relocated from the globalised urban centres which were once English cities to a location near you. Will there be a Somali ‘community’ in Bridport for example? Ed Miliband would doubtless be delighted at such a prospect.

Labour's 'One Nation' is no nation at all

Bradford’s Muslim Population Explosion

In an article written in July after the release of the initial raw headline results from the 2011 Census, I noted how the highest population increases in the country appeared to take place in the boroughs possessing the largest Muslim populations, and today’s release of census results relating to religion appear to confirm this supposition. In July I observed that Tower Hamlets and Newham were recorded as displaying the greatest rate of population increase between 2001 and 2011, and today’s results state that Tower Hamlets has the highest share of Muslims in the country, and Newham the second, with the percentages standing at respectively 34.5% and 32.0%.

In Yorkshire, Bradford had experienced the fastest population growth, and once again I had attributed this to its growing Muslim population. This latter supposition also seems to be borne out by the statistics, for whereas the city’s Muslim population was recorded at 16.08% in 2001, the 2011 census reveals this percentage to have increased to 24.7%, making it the borough with the fourth largest share of Muslims in the country. Blackburn and Darwen, with 27.0%, stood in third place. Luton, the birthplace of the EDL, possessed the fifth highest concentration of Muslims at 24.6%. Across England and Wales as a whole, the number of Muslims increased rapidly during this 10-year period to a total of 2.7 million, its proportion of the population exploding from 3.0 to 4.8%.

The Muslim share of Bradford's population has risen by 53.6% in just ten years. Demographic Islamisation is thus a reality in England today, and the greater the number that profess that faith, the louder will be the calls for it to be protected and for the admission of co-religionists from overseas. Overall, what with London now being not only a minority English but also a minority British city, the census results make for grim reading.

Bradford Today, Bradford on Avon Tomorrow?