Posturing luvvies and a Labour party that STILL doesn't get it on migration

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After the result of the referendum, it seemed the Labour Party and the Left had at long last got the message that the British people want restrictions on the free movement of people.

Even before the vote, Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, had indicated that unlimited EU immigration should be reviewed.

He said ‘woe betide’ his party if it ignored public concerns.

Labour’s hard-Left Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, showed the penny had dropped even for him when a week after the referendum he acknowledged that the free movement of people between the UK and the EU will end with Brexit.

It seemed Labour finally understood.

But then at the end of September the antediluvian Jeremy Corbyn committed his party to unlimited EU immigration.


Posturing luvvies and a Labour party that STILL doesn't get it on migration

By STEPHEN GLOVER FOR THE DAILY MAIL
27 October 2016

After the result of the referendum, it seemed the Labour Party and the Left had at long last got the message that the British people want restrictions on the free movement of people.

Even before the vote, Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, had indicated that unlimited EU immigration should be reviewed.

He said ‘woe betide’ his party if it ignored public concerns.

Labour’s hard-Left Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, showed the penny had dropped even for him when a week after the referendum he acknowledged that the free movement of people between the UK and the EU will end with Brexit.

It seemed Labour finally understood.

But then at the end of September the antediluvian Jeremy Corbyn committed his party to unlimited EU immigration.

There would be no curbs should he ever become Prime Minister.

If there were any residual doubt that Labour has reverted to being in favour of keeping the doors wide open, it has now been conclusively laid to rest by Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott.


After the result of the referendum, it seemed the Labour Party and the Left had at long last got the message that the British people want restrictions on the free movement of people

Over the weekend, she ludicrously declared she felt ‘ashamed’ to be British after MPs had called for the age of migrants from the Jungle camp in Calais to be examined using dental checks.

She also accused the Government of being ‘racist’ and claimed politicians wanted to treat immigrants ‘like cattle’.

So nothing has changed.

Even questioning the age of ‘child’ migrants is racist, according to Ms Abbott.

It doesn’t matter that some of them looked as though they were in their 20s or 30s.

Let them all in.

The ‘racists’ in Diane Abbott’s estimation incorporate, I suggest, a huge swathe of the British population.


The ‘racists’ in Diane Abbott’s estimation incorporate, I suggest, a huge swathe of the British population

Among them is the former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, who has backed the introduction of dental tests to check the age of ‘child’ migrants.

Now it’s true, of course, that the referendum wasn’t solely about EU immigration.

Yet it is fair to infer that millions of Leave voters were, among other important issues affecting this country, making a statement about migration from all countries.

Indeed, a Survation poll for ITV has just found that more than half of Britons believe that tackling immigration is more important than staying in the EU single market.

To be precise, 56 per cent said they were more concerned about controlling our own borders.

There can be no doubt that after years of mass immigration, the majority of people (including many Labour voters) want some limits.

Does that make them racist? Of course not.

And yet while even Ms Abbott would not be so stupid as to accuse her own voters of racism, she thinks that questioning the age of so-called child refugees who have crow’s feet around their eyes is racist.

Why? Isn’t it to this country’s credit that we have admitted hundreds of unaccompanied vulnerable children from the Jungle?

And if, as seems certain, some adults passed themselves off as children, weren’t they flouting the rules and possibly jeopardising the prospects of bona fide children who should be let in?

It’s not just the Labour Party that has reverted to type by embracing lies about immigration.

There are privileged people who are equally happy to bend the truth as they highlight the supposed moral shortcomings of anyone who questions high levels of immigration.

On Tuesday morning, I heard a well-meaning though misguided Roman Catholic lady on Radio 4’s Today programme imply that our attitudes towards immigration (namely wanting restrictions) showed we are ‘no longer a Christian nation’.

She spoke of ‘the catastrophe unfolding in France’ (but isn’t it a good thing that the inhabitants of the Jungle are being given a chance?) and referred to ‘genuine refugees’ in Calais.

She was thus promoting a commonly held misconception that suits those hoping to unsettle our consciences.

Many of the people in Calais were economic migrants who want a better life and only a few of them seem to have been ‘refugees’ in the sense of being displaced from their homelands by war or persecution.


Many of the people in Calais were economic migrants who want a better life and only a few of them seem to have been ‘refugees’ in the sense of being displaced from their homelands by war or persecution


That said, despite the idiocy of her homily, I would prefer to be lectured by a high-minded if misinformed Catholic academic than by one of the celebrities who have used developments in Calais for the purpose of moral grandstanding

That said, despite the idiocy of her homily, I would prefer to be lectured by a high-minded if misinformed Catholic academic than by one of the celebrities who have used developments in Calais for the purpose of moral grandstanding.

These people are not necessarily of the Left, but they subscribe to the liberal doctrine that mass immigration is desirable.

They want to look good to the rest of us, while feeling good about themselves.

And because they are invariably rich, they have experienced none of the pressure on schools or hospitals that uncontrolled immigration has brought to many poorer people.

Nor have their jobs been undercut by foreign workers who will work for smaller wages.

A string of ‘luvvies’ have travelled to the Jungle over recent months, alerting others to their presence (and their human sympathy) via Twitter, often with a bevy of photographers in tow.

Two weeks ago, we had the singer Lily Allen, who had the presumption to apologise ‘on behalf of my country’.

She became tearful while meeting a 13-year-old boy from Afghanistan who had risked his life trying to board lorries bound for the UK.


Two weeks ago, we had the singer Lily Allen, who had the presumption to apologise ‘on behalf of my country’

This is what she said to him: ‘We’ve bombed your country, put you in the hands of the Taliban and now put you in danger of risking your life to get into our country.’ That is a topsy-turvy statement on several counts.

Ms Allen seems to have forgotten 456 British servicemen died trying to rid a part of Afghanistan of the Taliban.

In fact, it transpired that the father the boy was trying to join in Britain had been a sidekick to an Islamist warlord.

He arrived here from Afghanistan illegally, having fled in fear of being caught by the UK-backed Afghan Northern Alliance.

The football presenter Gary Lineker is another celebrity who has striven to establish his moral superiority, suggesting via Twitter that people who questioned the age of so-called child migrants are ‘racist’.

That word again. How carelessly they bandy it about!

Alas, poor Gary got his facts wrong by suggesting that one of the bafflingly elderly ‘child’ migrants with wrinkles around his eyes was a Home Office translator.

The Home Office later said this was incorrect.

Like Lily Allen, Gary Lineker wants to advertise the fact he is a deeply caring human being.

But do these expressions of sympathy amount to anything? I hardly think so. They cost nothing.

It is the assumption of moral superiority which most sticks in the craw.

When Ukip would-be leader Suzanne Evans called for physical checks on incoming children on an ITV programme, her fellow panellist Jeremy Paxman cried out: ‘Have you no compassion?’

That’s a way of saying he has and she hasn’t. Where’s the evidence?

Does Paxo dole out soup to the hungry from the steps of his agreeable country residence?


When Ukip would-be leader Suzanne Evans called for physical checks on incoming children on an ITV programme, her fellow panellist Jeremy Paxman cried out: ‘Have you no compassion?’

What he said was pure posturing, and though it may have won a burst of applause from a star-struck, politically correct television audience, the country at large is more likely to think him a fraud.

Do these people ever ask themselves why economic migrants in Calais yearn to come to Britain rather than stay in France?

It’s partly because work is plentiful here and welfare benefits easier to get.

But they may have also learnt from friends and relatives that the British are a welcoming race — and almost certainly less racist than the French.

Of course there are racists in our country, but I don’t believe the millions of people who voted for Brexit with immigration uppermost in their minds are racist.

But they do feel we live in a country whose public services are already struggling to cope with the existing population.

Unsurprisingly, they want proper control of our borders.

There is something deeply dishonest about the response of Labour and celebrities to what happened in Calais and, indeed, the whole subject of immigration.

The true facts are ignored as misplaced accusations of racism are recklessly spread around.

The preening celebrities who don’t get it are simply ridiculous.

But the continuing inability of the Labour leadership to grasp the feelings of decent, ordinary voters tells us how utterly out of touch they are with the vast majority of the British people.

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