A Mature Debate On Immigration

Just as you cannot have a "free" market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography, so you cannot have the unrestricted movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour, i.e., of people. Capitalism is the problem.

The Co-Chairman of Balanced Migration is a Labour MP, Frank Field. Participants in it include Ian Davidson, a leading Co-operative MP; Baroness Boothroyd; Lord Jordan, a veteran trade union leader; Lord Ahmed, a prominent Muslim peer; Ann Cryer, a former Socialist Campaign Group MP, the widow of another and the mother of a third; Hazhir Teimourian, a London-based Kurdish journalist; Peter Kilfoyle, who resigned from the Blair Government in order to act as its critical friend before opposing the invasion of Iraq, and who signed the Lanchester Declaration, which you ought to Google; and Lord Skidelsky, a founding and finishing member of the SDP who went on to resign from the Conservative front bench in order to oppose the bombing of Kosovo, and whose latest book is entitled Keynes: The Return of the Master. Long effectively joined by Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman. And last month, effectively joined by Ed Miliband.

Past Labour Governments acted to arrest the importation of a new working class whose members understood no English except commands, knew nothing about workers’ rights in this country, could be deported if they stepped out of line, and, since they had no affinity with any particular locality here, could be moved around at will. They acted against the enforced bilingualism or multilingualism that transfers economic, social, cultural and political power to a bilingual or multilingual elite, to the exclusion of the English-speaking working class, black and white.

The trade union closed shop prevented such abuses, as surely as  it guaranteed to the Tory 40 to 45 per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence on the selection of the Labour parliamentary candidates for the safe Labour constituencies in which they lived. The trade union-based No2EU – Yes to Democracy list at the last European Elections, the object of a complete media blackout up to and including the editing out of audience contributions on Question Time, was headed both in the East Midlands and in Yorkshire and the Humber by leaders of the Lindsey oil refinery workers.

But none of this receives the slightest coverage. Instead, the media just give us material designed to bait the loonies for the amusement of the transnational corporate shills in the office. An office, moreover, which is in New York. Do those commenting below the line on these things genuinely have no idea how much damage they do to the cause of Balanced Migration? Or, for that matter, how you cannot have too many Slavs, or West African Christians, or Arab ones, if your main concern is to prevent both Islamisation and secular liberalisation, of which latter neoconservatism and Zionism are the armed wings? The first are the original bulwarks against both, while the other two are on that double front line today.