Tag: Immigration

Flagging Enthusiasm

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The weather is never kind to bunting, which has a short shelf life.

This Summer has not been quite as mad as the last one, with no full scale riots outside the North of Ireland, but more insidious. The demonstrations outside hotels housing refugees (“illegals”, as they like to say) have hyped up the sexual threat to “our girls” from the “invasion of fighting age men in small boats”, pushed by the Far Right (Homeland Party, Britain First and the like) echoed by the Inside Far Right (Farage) and the dominant Farageiste wing of the incredible shrinking Conservative Party (Jenryk, Philp and other slithey toves) and completely capitulated to by the government, who are trying to fight Reform by being as much like them as possible on immigration.

The demonstrations have actually been quite small, often attended by the sort of blokes who think assaulting women and girls is their job, and often out mobilised by Stand Up to Racism. Nevertheless, they are said by Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper to have “legitimate concerns”, while the hundreds of thousands who demonstrate against genocide in Gaza are one step removed from “terrorists”, and the government falls over itself to boast about how deportations are up on the numbers the Tories managed, the new restrictions they are bringing in on refugee families, how they plan to house them in containers on old industrial sites, and on and on. 

The success of this strategy can be seen in the polling numbers, which show Labour well behind Reform, as it alienates left voters and fails to attract those lining up with Reform with an air of self righteous indignation: though it should be obvious to them that Farage is a charletan and a bit of a spiv; the sort of bloke who, in wartime, would loudly proclaim his patriotism while nursing a bone spur or two to keep him safely at home in a snappy suit, and then flog you knocked off nylons down the market.

The press is really whipping this up. The headline in the Sun on the day that Lucy Connolly – who’d been inside for a year after writing online encouragement to burn down asylum hotels was “Mum’s Home!” Because nothing says “Mum” more than inciting a mob to burn people to death. She was a matryr to “two tier justice” apparently.

The move to fly Union Jacks and St George’s crosses in public areas – attached to lamp posts and so on – is quite extensive in some areas. Particularly where Far Right activists have painted red crosses on the white stripes on roundabouts and zebra crossings. Why they want people walking on the flag I’m not sure. Some of these in Kent are being flown from quite well to do properties, which should remind us that Nigel Farage is a stockbroker from Sevenoaks, who shows that he is a “man of the people” by banking with Coutts.

This is very reminiscent of Northern Ireland, where Loyalists paint their kerbstones red, white and blue, and Nationalists paint theirs green, white and gold; so you know where you are. The difference is that this sort of identity is entrenched in the Loyalist areas every Summer with vast angry bonfire ceremonies, burning effigies of people they fear and hate, bonding in atavistic loathing. Wickermen for the 21st Century. This year, models of refugees in boats were a popular target; a celebration of the pogrom in Ballymena. Nationalist areas, by contrast, have abandoned bonfires in recent years and turned to more open, hopeful, music and cultural festivals. Better craic by a long way. People looking to make a better future, not marinade in the dubious glories of a lost past, for want of being able to imagine anything better.

To watch the news, you’d think this was everywhere, but when I went into London the week after it started, I kept an eye out and only saw two flags (and one of those was Palestinian) on the whole journey through the East End. I’d have expected more, given that its the Women’s Rugby World Cup and England are favourites; which usually generates a bigger, more innocent, crop of them.

In Grays, there’s a little cluster in a side road off the High Street, where the Conservative Club used to be and just opposite a weird little shop that sells second hand reconditioned white goods (which is almost a metaphor) and those life size tin silhoeuttes of WW1 soldiers that have started populating War Memorials since 2014. (See photos) The shops nearby include a Halal Butchers, several Eastern European Delis (and the wonderful Lulu’s cakes and bakes with its encroaching cafe street culture) an Asian/East African General Store (good spice collection) and a couple of charismatic church venues in repurposed shops; which is probably what they don’t like.

There are quite a few flags in Chadwell. But even there – on the Western fringe of James Murdoch’s seat – former Leeman Brothers banker, elected for Reform even after a conviction for kicking his girlfriend – “save our girls” – but he’d taken out loans for a couple of dubious companies during COVID, one of which had no employees – almost all of them are attached to lamp posts along the main road and alongside the A1089, the massive road that now slices up to the A13 from Tilbury Docks. So, this is a bit like the old NF sticker campaigns but more effective. But, as the saying goes. “Posters in windows means you’ve got support, Posters stuck up in the streets means you’ve got glue” or, in this case, plastic ties and a ladder.

This was also the case right across East Thurrock to Basildon, where, on the long bus ride back from the hospital, I counted just eight flags or strings of bunting in anyone’s windows; and we passed hundreds of houses. There were more on lamp posts, but only in enclaves, not generalised.

The response of Yvette Cooper, in her last week as Home Secretary, was to say that there should be more of them because the flag “brings us together”. This is in the context of a couple of youngish blokes in Basildon who filmed themselves painting St Georges crosses on the white background of some first floor flats above a row of shops while abusing a woman in a hijab, “Oi! Raghead!” etc. Really bringing us together. They have, thankfully, been arrested for criminal damage and racial abuse. It takes a really dim sense of entitlement to assume you can film yourself doing stuff like this and for it not to be taken down and used in evidence. If Reform were in government I guess they’d just recruit them to the British version of ICE, so they can deport most of the people who look after us in Care Homes and Hospitals.

I note in passing that Gary Lineker has just won the BBC presenter of the year award. Cue Match of the Day theme.

Looking droopy

Previous

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This morning, instead of the Guardian flopping onto the doormat at 4 in the morning, the great, grey, grim, gruesome masthead of the Daily Telegraph was visible poking through the letterbox like an ultimatum in Gothic.

The Telegraph is a gloriously reactionary paper, whose columnists barrage its readers with nerve edgy variations on the theme of “we’ll all be murdered in our beds” to keep them scared and angry, and its news sections are barely calmer. It was ever thus. When I worked permanent nights in a choclate factory many years ago, I used to read the Telegraph to keep me awake; because a mind that is boggling finds it hard to drift off.

A characteristic article this morning headlined Hunter gored to death by buffalo he was stalking explains how “a millionaire trophy hunter…was killed almost instantly by ‘a sudden and unprovoked attack’ by the animal”.

They write this with no sense of irony; after all, all he was doing was stalking it to shoot it. The natural order of things. No provocation at all. There’s a whole world view in that.

Doing its bit to calm down tensions over “migrant hotels”, their lead article on p4 is headed Migrants in hotels linked to hundreds of crimes, with the strapline, in case anyone misses the point, Residents have been charged with violence, child abuse,domestic assault and shoplifting and a little highlighted indent gives the figure 425 for the “number of offences people living in hotels the Home Office use to house migrants have been charged with”.

Many of their readers, happy to have their prejudices confirmed, that “they” are a threat to “us”; and that this is a characteristic that can be freely atributed to all “migrants”, will read no further. But the tortuous use of language in the headlines, for anyone paying attention, is explained by sentences buried deep in the story, but which explode it from the inside out, again, for anyone paying attention.

First, these are figures for people charged, not people convicted. So, this will be the highest possible number.

Second, “Not every defendent who lists one of these hotels as their place of residence is necessarily an asylum seeker. It has not been possible to establish how many of the offenders identified by the Telegraph are currently applying for asylum in the UK”. So the highlighted number is bollocks. They know it. But they print it anyway.

Third, “The court records show that a significant proportion of these offences are alleged to have been perpetrated against other apparent asylum seekers”. Its notable that they don’t specify a figure, or proportion for this, though doubtless they could. Possibly because it draws the sting from the implication that “they” are a threat to “us”.

Showing the same inversion of reality that they deploy in the Big Game Hunter vs Buffalo story, they state “…police are under pressure to routinely disclose the nationality and migration status of suspects to protect community cohesion and to address a perception among some groups that asylum seekers are carrying out a disproportionate number of offences”. Note the unspecified character of “some groups”. Who might they be, I wonder?

Perish the thought that papers like the Telegraph, in its own revealing words, offering “a sense of the numbers involved”, and doing so by playing them up, could be promoting that “perception among certain groups” the better to whip them up, while retaining implausible deniability with weasel words.

On this issue, as on so many others, like so many of those arrested in the racist riots last summer, the Telegraph definitely has previous.

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Idiocies of the Week

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?