Labour’s U-turn on social housing for non-immigrants is welcome but too late

Rod Liddle says that metropolitan liberal ideology is too deeply ingrained in local councils, social services and the judiciary to be overturned by one panic measure driven by Labour’s sudden fear of the BNP

The government’s new and exciting ‘No Homes for Darkies!’ policy, announced earlier this week, has, for those of you on the right, a certain bracing, post-Weimar Republic feel to it. The policy — or, put better, pointless aspiration — was part of Labour’s relaunch, an amalgam of ideas with which it hopes to win the next general election, much in the way that Hull City might hope to win the Premier League next season by buying Michael Owen. The housing business was a £1.5 billion plan which included a proviso that local authorities should be ‘enabled’ to provide homes for people who’d lived in the area for a long while. It was immediately rechristened by opponents ‘British homes for British people’, in a snide reference to Gordon Brown’s previous promise of ‘British jobs for British workers’ which was itself borrowed, unconsciously or otherwise, from the British National Party’s manifesto. Certainly this latest initiative is absolutely straight-down-the-line BNP policy, something Nick Griffin and company have been banging on about for the past ten years.

Previously the Labour party, and its allies in the press, insisted that this supposed problem was a chimera, a nonsense, a nonexistent issue. Asylum seekers and immigrants in general do not push their way to the top of the housing list and never have — it is a spiteful, politically motivated fiction along the same lines as the EU banning bananas which are not bent, or too bent; local councils banning Christmas festivals because they are non-inclusive; and the Zinoviev letter.