Thursday, October 30, 2008

"Jobs to whites"? Pack it in NOW before it's too late

Today's cliché that we've got to speak the same language as the BNP if we want to defeat them is, frankly, absolutely pathetic.

If you thought "don't we all just adore Girls Aloud" was today's most popular cliché in Britain, then you obviously haven't paid much attention. Try and find, in fact, a single day without an article or opinion column pontificating that "the only way to stop the BNP from recruiting new followers", as the formula goes, "is for the government to stop discriminating against white people". Everyday Labour, Tory or LibDem MPs, pay lip service to the fact that "it's true we just went too far" in trying to accomodate ethnic minorities. "All those jobs handed out to the them", "positive discrimination" and "council homes quaffed by non-whites" - "no wonder the BNP is rising". And if we don't start understanding their language, well then...there's going to be trouble.

Even MPs like John Cruddas, well-meaning and all, universally acclaimed as saviour of the Labour left, are repeating that "The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters" - those allegedly in awe of the BNP. Except that Cruddas hasn't explained what he means. No details, no recipe regarding how to best articulate those "concerns".

So what exactly is this language that would magically win people back from the BNP? Do they mean we have to go down the Daily Star route with its GIVE THE JOBS TO WHITES headline? Do those politicians and columnists really think that if they all decided to write elegies to Enoch Powell, the BNP-voting oik would suddenly go: "hang on, fuck this, I'm Labour through and through"? Does it mean that if all local Councils were persuaded to start advertising for "WHITES ONLY" jobs, the BNP would die a natural death? Or would "No Somali for council homes, we've had it up to here" do the trick? I mean, really?

As if at the height of the tax-dodging non-dom controversy you got politician after politician going: "Let's stop alienating our working class voters. Let's stop licking the arses of Abramovich & co, otherwise we're gonna hand all our voters to the Communist Party of Great Britain at the next council elections". Do you hear Tory and Labour MPs alike wailing that if we don't double cycle lanes pronto the Green Party will clear the tab at the next elections? Or, does anyone ever say, "we'd better not bail those banks out otherwise we're gonna get our own British version of the Red Brigades"? No, something tells me you don't. And that's because for decades now the left and centre-left, both in Britain and in continental Europe, have instinctively felt they had to fight a rearguard battle against the (far) right and its ugly rhetoric.

Today's new obsession that we've got to speak the same language as the BNP if we want to defeat them is, frankly, pathetic. If there ever was one way of vindicating the BNP and its ignorant, racist, nazi, hate-soaked policies, it'd be exactly it: appealing to race resentment -as if your job, your house, your life, were really all about your skin tone, no less, like in apartheid South Africa. A Britain like that would be truly, very, little.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

At last. Best article I've readon the subject in ages. And what really pisses me off is when you hear 'we're not allowed to mention immigration...the debate is banned...PC gone mad' and all that crap.

But EVERYDAY you have articles, opinion columns, headlines, interviews, figures that go on about too many immigrants. It's incessant.
Now, the new turn about skin colour.

Great blog.

Anonymous said...

I hate to be the doomsayer but Wait until the recession bites harder and it's going to be grim times for England.