Not funny, but it struck home

Wednesday, 8th November 2006

Ms Bland’s joke and the link between immigration and emigration

Needless to say, Ms Bland has been forced into that humiliating spasm of recanting and lying which invariably occurs when a politician has said or done something with which the majority of the population quite possibly agrees but which is considered uncivilised and de trop by the likes of Ed Davey. Listen, it wasn’t me who forwarded it, she said. I hardly read it, she said. My husband uses my email account too, she said. And — yes, she really did say this — some of my best friends are Asian. People — immigrants — who ‘bring something’ to this country are, she averred, as her party card was being torn up in Central Office, ‘fantastic’. Oh dear.

However, as I say, the poem does encapsulate a certain mood and perhaps conviction which is present within — I reckon — a good half of the indigenous population. And yet its mere presence in Ms Bland’s outbox was enough to bring down the wrath of officialdom and effectively end her political career. And so, as a result, we may better understand why nobody was prepared, publicly, to link those two statistics I quoted at the start.

It almost goes without saying that Ms Bland should be left alone; it might even help her cause if she were to articulate precisely why she found that silly poem had such resonance. Clearly, for her — and millions of others — it did have resonance. The majority of her constituents would, I suspect, agree with her.

But we continue to persecute people when they articulate a popular, if awkward, view. It may well be that Ms Bland’s poem does not accurately represent the mindset of those immigrants arriving in this country from, say, Lahore or Mogadishu. Nor even the reality of what occurs when a Pakistani arrives at Croydon and tries to claim social security. But the public perception of the mindset and of what happens when the immigrant claims his welfare benefits persist. And it helps nobody — least of all the immigrant — to pretend that such views are held only by a tiny, extreme minority, and to punish people when they give voice to them.

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London1001

July 3rd, 2008 8:32pm Report this comment

The reality is that in the modern world, immigration has to happen. Everyone moved to somewhere at some point in history. However it should be managed well, to prevent what has happened in alot of London where you might as well be living in a foreign country. Really the government should have limited immigration to around 300,000 people per year (half of what is at the moment) - that would include putting in place the restriction to new EU countries that they are allowed to.

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