If you've ever thought about speaking out against immigration, beware — you could become a lord

Or even worse, Jeremy Clarkson. Are those who are anti-immigration really as marginalised as they say they are?

Mark Steel
Thursday 06 November 2014 14:13 EST
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You can see how exasperating it must be for people who say, “The trouble is we’re just not allowed these days to say that immigration is a problem.” Because apart from all day on every TV channel and in every paper and everywhere at all times it’s a huge taboo that we’re not even prepared to mention.

It’s like if Gary Lineker, in the middle of Match of the Day, suddenly said: “For ONCE can we be permitted to talk about football on this programme?”

Labour MP Simon Danczuk is a typical sufferer, regretting this week how frustrating it is that we just can’t say immigration is too high. And to emphasise how impossible it is to say this, he said it on BBC radio, then on television and in all the papers. But you can bet no one will take any notice and let him say it.

You can see his point, because there are some days when, for example, the Daily Mail has a whole half-page that doesn’t refer to immigration being a problem at all. Admittedly it’s the section with the chess puzzle, and the question will be, “How much longer must we tolerate idle pawns filling squares on our side of the board threatening our bishops?” But we should applaud those like Simon Danczuk, prepared to say the unsayable, and hopefully a film will be made about his courage, like the one about Harvey Milk, or The Kite Runner.

Such is the dominance of the liberal elite in this country, ask yourself when you last saw someone putting the case for deporting Bulgarians on any show on Cbeebies.

Even more shocking is that the organisation MigrationWatch has compiled a comprehensive study of Shipping Forecasts since 2007, and it reveals that not once has it put the case for closing our borders to Romanians, even when there was a force seven gale in German Byte.

This week there was hope that at last this issue might be raised, because a study on the effects of immigration on the economy was published. But shamefully it turned out that over 10 years, the net impact of immigrants from Eastern Europe was to make us £4.96bn richer. What chance is there for an open debate when numbers are even scared not to be politically correct?

In any case, Migration Watch object to these figures and insist these immigrants have “contributed only just over 10 per cent more than they received”. You could argue, if you were really picky about statistics, that contributing 10 per cent more than you receive means you are still, on the whole, contributing rather than receiving.

But that is to ignore the fact that we simply can’t afford to go on allowing people over here, who only contribute 10 per cent more than they receive. Christmas must be fun for MigrationWatch. Every time they get a present they must yell, “Is that all you’re contributing to me? If I allow you to only give me that, I simply won’t be able to carry on”, and send the person who gave them the present to Lithuania.

But MigrationWatch are only allowed to make their reasonable point, that people contributing more than they receive are bankrupting the country, on a few thousand news programmes. Where is our democracy going if we allow some facts more airtime than others, depending on which ones are right and which are wrong? This is plain discrimination. It’s the same with people who insist the hedgehog is a type of fruit. Our metropolitan elite gives them hardly any air time at all.

In a shameful example of how our system marginalises those prepared to speak out against immigration, the founder of MigrationWatch, Andrew Green, has just been made a lord. And as we know, lords are an ethnic group that suffers abuse and discrimination more than any other minority. Lord children are routinely bullied by “normal” commoners, who taunt them with names such as Ermine the vermin, and their castles are regularly covered in graffiti telling them to piss off back to the 14th century.

But this frustration goes further than the issue of immigration. There’s a layer of people who just can’t take any more. It’s a sentiment you see in the expression of Jeremy Clarkson on his book covers, holding his head in his hands as if not knowing where to turn.

Because there’s only so much of being paid several million pounds a year for presenting shows that you love presenting, before you have to scream, “How much more can I bloody well take?”

When you’re grafting as hard as Jeremy, just to maintain a selection of houses and cars and boats, it’s no wonder you’re going to lose your temper when you hear a news item about a local council spending money on painting the Town Hall.

Nigel Farage fits neatly into this world. When you’ve struggled along as a privately educated banker with a pile of land in Kent, it’s hardly surprising if one day you yell, “That’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m going to get rid of Bulgarians.”

But is he ever allowed to express his reasonable annoyance in the media? Hardly at all, except every moment he’s awake. But how often is he on the BBC when he’s asleep? Almost never, because it’s run by a cosy cabal of middle-class public school liberals, who are completely out of touch with the struggles of upper class public school anti-liberals who are prepared to speak the truth, even if it isn’t true.

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