The Blame Game

Dennis MacShane launched a broadside attack on the Conservative Party a few days ago, blaming them for preparing the ground for the rise of the British National Party in the coming EU elections at the beginning of June.

At the moment it would appear that the BNP are on course to win as many as six seats in the EU Parliament, meaning that they will receive all manner of EU political funding, not to mention high salaries for its MEPs which they could divert towards supporting the BNP party machine.

On his blog, Tony Sharp summed up what is probably the general attitude of Conservative Party members in a posting in which he argued that it was ‘idiotic’ of MacShane in attempting to lay the blame of any increase in the BNP vote at the Conservatives’ door. However, I disagree with Tony. An increase in the BNP vote is as much the fault of the Conservatives as it is of the Labour Party.

Members of the electorate who are moving across from Labour (or the Conservatives) to vote BNP are not just interested in ‘big government and more state control’ as Tony says, but a whole host of other issues including crime, immigration, and the EU – none of which the main parties are speaking up about.

If the Conservatives were actually seen by the electorate to have coherent and plausible policies on immigration, crime and the EU (and others) then it is likely that they might gain from the Labour exodus of votes. However, the party does not have credible alternative policies and sections of the electorate have largely realised that in practical terms the two main parties are identical.

Therefore, to the electorate the Conservative Party and Labour represent two tarnished sides of the same dull coin. Neither party will speak out on the issues that are actually important to many people, thereby driving them into the arms of the BNP as a means by which the electorate will attempt to protest.

Click here to continue reading the article…

No Action Offered

‘No action offered on migration’ says the BBC News website headline – a phrase derived from a Conservative party press release by the Shadow Immigration Minister, Dominic Grieve.

This comes after Labour’s Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas had been forced to partially backtrack on comments he’d made in an interview with the Times about reducing the number of immigrants entering Britain.

In a post-Times interview, Phil Woolas told the BBC’s One Show:

I think, frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the cap…

The European Union population can come and go just as we from Britain go and live in Spain, perhaps, or France – so, too, can others come to our country.

So it’s very difficult to see, even if we are in favour of a cap, what it should be.

And here, for once, we have the truth from a Government Minister – well, almost. Phil Woolas is indeed right that there is ‘a lot of nonsense talked about the cap’. It is nonsense because, as even the dim-witted journalists at the BBC have finally grasped:

Immigration from inside the EU cannot be controlled, and neither can a limit be placed on genuine claims for asylum.

We cannot control immigration whatsoever within the European Union as our old friend EU Commission Directive 2004/38/EC put pay to that. However, in his interview with the One Show, Phil Woolas fails to actually mention the elephant in the room (ie. the role of the European Union). To mention the EU directly in British Westminster politics is just not the done thing.

Click here to continue reading the article…

A Dedicated Border Police Force

The Conservative Party, which for some reason The Telegraph now refers to as ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’, have announced possible plans for a new dedicated Border Police Force.

The new unit will apparently help combat illegal immigration, people and drugs trafficking along with a whole host of other niceties that cross our borders on a day to day basis. However, as is unfortunately the case with so many new Conservative proposals, this mooted Border Force will avoid the true issue and instead tackle an irrelevant one.

The immigration problems that we now face as a country have little to do with the illegal variety which constitutes only a very minor part of our total immigration burden. In fact our real problems (and they are many) lie with what is entirely legal immigration over which we no longer have any say or control.

When we became members of the European Economic Community and later the European Union we accepted the text of the Treaty of Rome which grants the ‘fundamental right’ of free movement to Citizens of the Union across member state borders.

This supposed ‘right’ to free movement was later strengthened by our old friend Directive 2004/38/EC and more recently the Lisbon Treaty (aka. The Constitution) which has now completed its rubberstamping journey through our increasingly irrelevant provincial council (aka. The Houses of Parliament) and will soon come into force once the will of the Irish people has been circumnavigated (aka. basically told to shove it).

Click here to continue reading the article…

We Have No Control Over Immigration

David Cameron has been talking about immigration quite a lot recently. He says he believes, as do I, that Britain should be accepting far less migrants than it already does.

However, one of the problems with the current debate over immigration is that the Government has absolutely no idea how many migrants are actually entering Britain each year. Similarly the Conservatives don’t have a clue either. Therefore both sides have to rely and argue over completely unreliable estimates.

Furthermore, this past week the Government has already had to readjust those unreliable estimates several times, now claiming that maybe as many as one and a half million immigrants (including British citizens born overseas) have entered this country in the past decade. I suspect in fact it is even more.

So, why is this? How can the Government have almost no accurate record of the number of people entering this country, and why does it refuse so blatantly to admit the reasons why this is the case?

Click here to continue reading the article…