If you are losing ground, the electoral gap is closing and you need a quick right-wing populist fix….then resort to the dog whistle politics by playing the race card. Immigration to be precise. Throw in alarmist racist language like, ‘opened the floodgates’, ‘bogus’, ‘population explosion’ and so on. And this inevitably fans the flames of racism. Andy at Socialist Unity says what the Tories are doing has the ‘uncomfortable echo of that ugly racism’ from the ’64 Tory campaign electoral campaign in Smethwick.
I was brought up in Smethwick and that vile racist piece of history reverberated for many years as one of the orchestrators of that racist campaign was a Tory councillor right up into the late 1980s.
What the Tories are doing is plumbing the depths of desperation and right-wing populism which exposes just how nasty they still are.
If you don’t want Peter Griffiths(-ism) as a neighbour, vote Labour (my two cents)
I was thinking of a similar title like that too….honest. Great minds….
Hi from Australia… I don’t know that much about English politics, but you might be interested in this link – http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2010/2819838.htm – where Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, is interviewed by an Australian conservative, and to an Australian ear, is shockingly frank about how conservatives manipulate the voting public.
Particularly noteworthy to me is the section where Nelson refers explicitly to ‘combating’ the rise of the nationalist vote, by trotting out a few populist platitudes at an opportune time, the advantage conservatives have of ‘being able to pull the rug out from the BNP at any time’. And perhaps even more noteworthy, the implication Fraser purveys regarding the role of the politician, as being a constant (parasitic) presence whose job is merely to act as some sort of barometer and lightning rod to public prejudice, exploiting the frustrations of the masses as a means of facilitating political ‘support’, and whose job certainly is not to have any form of constant, explicit principle.
Of course, there’s nothing new in all this, the only thing of note is how shamelessly forthright Nelson is about using such base politics as a ‘legitimate’ strategy. Going by how comfortable he is in speaking such things, however, I suspect that even this, sadly, might not be a shock to the English listener…
The good thing about Australia is that whilst, typically, it’s an all-star shitfight, at least it tends to be reliably less of a shitfight than England…
There’s nothing racist about the terms “floodgates” or “population explosion”. Pretty sensible language to use to describe hundreds of thousands of new arrivals every year. Your assumption that this has a racist slant reflects only your visceral and irrational hatred of anything the Tory party says. For most commentators it’s simply about economics: labour markets, housing, education, taxation.
You may have watched the episode of Question Time earlier this year featuring Nick Griffin, during which a bloke asked the panel why none of the mainstream parties were prepared to tackle the immigration question, and what impact that had on support levels for the BNP. That man was black, I assume a second- or third-generation immigrant. He believed that further immigration would be bad for the country. Was he racist?
As it happens, I’m personally all for letting in as many work-hungry, skilled, honest economic migrants, regardless of ethnic origin, as can find employment here. (I’m also all for toughening up our act on benefit free-loaders, immigrants or nationals). Would that suit you, given the downward pressure on wages? Didn’t think so.
Typically throughout our modern history, true intellectuals on the Left have struggled to reconcile socialist ideals with liberal immigration policy. Because socialism doesn’t deem “growing the pie” to be a worthy goal of societal organisation, it’s very hard to justify letting more people in to have a slice. Only the absolute numbskulls fail to notice this inescapable contradiction, because they can’t cope with the idea that there isn’t a bottomless pit of taxpayer money from soaking the “rich” or the “bosses”.
When did you last go back to Smethwick ? For 20-odd years – the Andrew Faulds years – I walked once a fortnight from Rolfe Street up to Halfords Lane. During that time the place was completely transformed. Hardly any of the people there in 1968 remained by 1988.
Peter Griffiths campaign was tasteless and grossly ill-mannered. His demographic predictions, unpleasantly expressed as they were, were not too inaccurate.
Laban, I canvassed for a LP activist in both 1987 and 1988 and the Tory he standing against was part of ’64 racist campaign. I was brought up in Smethwick from 1969 and left in 1988.