Local Homes for Local People

The government seems to be suffering from an outbreak of common sense. Sadly, it has taken from 2007 until now to incubate, and even now it is only at an early stage, and may yet perish before it becomes pandemic. Still, maybe Gordon Broon is finally listening, or maybe he’s got some new advisors, or both. Still, cancelling ID cards and shelving the part-privatisation of Royal Mail in the same week is at least a start, in the same way that seeing two feminists doing the washing up is a start.

There’s still the same acute lack of vision, of any sense of purpose though, still the same feeling of flying desperately by the seat of your pants, and what there has been in the way of positive announcements in Gordon’s master plan for the future of Britain is still unlikely to have crowds thronging the Mall or people doing the conga in Trafalgar Square, heatwave or no heatwave. Teachers will have to have a test every five years, and this on top of all the other crap they get dumped on them from on high, and, in a move not widely reported, the sneaky bastards are proposing a measure whereby farmers have to insure their livestock against the possibility of their being the source of an outbreak of foot and mouth or similar, which, considering that the most recent outbreak was sourced back to the government’s own laboratory at Pirbright, is rich indeed.

Both those proposals are inherently nasty, sneaky, and unlikely to benefit the people targeted – teachers and farmers – but the proposal which should perhaps give us most pause for thought in the new plan for Britain’s future is the one which has been characterised as “local houses for local people”.

For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat. It is no wonder they hark back to a byegone era.

The BNP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the BNP play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”

You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution. No one in the BNP’s target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it, and nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”.

Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff.

You can prove anything with statistics, particularly if you use them selectively, which is why the BNP concentrates on the influx and ignores the exits. It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that the BNP peddles. Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the BNP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same).

The BNP’s whites-only admissions policy is also ridiculous, ignoring as it does the fact that the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity it demands is in itself a product of immigration, albeit a thousand years ago. Perhaps it takes a thousand years to establish a Reich, Hitler certainly thought so, and look what happened to him. But of course, once you have bought the BNP’s simplistic lie about immigration being the cause of all our ills, it follows quite naturally that you will believe this tosh. The BNP’s justification for it, as far as I can discover amongs the verbiage on their web site, is that there are other, similar rules which apply, unchallenged, apparently, to black-only or asian-only organisations.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. A detailed study of the consititution of the Black Police Officers’ Association has not been high on my agenda of late. If it is true, then it’s equally as odious as the BNP’s stance, and should be challenged, but in either case, two wrongs don’t make a right.

It is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected, that the Labour Party’s only answer to the duplicity of the BNP seems to be to try and ape its policies, but this is, of course, partly a reflection of the corner into which they feel they have painted themselves. All of the mainstream and Labour politicians bleating about the voters and the success of the BNP and UKIP in the May elections have only themselves to blame. They took their eye off the ball.

So what do we need now? We need a politician of the left, or of an independent caste of mind, who will be able to take apart the BNP’s policies forensically, and demonstrate the fallacious links in the thinking. To point out, for instance, that if you were to repatriate everyone who was even faintly brown, the NHS for one would grind to a halt overnight. To state boldly and simply that when it comes to immigration, it’s just not as simple as the BNP likes to make out. And to have the courage to stand up and say that all Britons should be treated equally, whatever the colour of their skin, and to formulate policies that demonstrate it, both ways. And if that also means an end to pointless “positive discrimination” so be it.

Ending “positive discrimination” of the mindless, box ticking kind kicks a plank out from under the BNP straight away. I’ve never been a strong advocate of “positive discrimination” of any sort, beyond the physical kind, of making streets, homes, workplaces and public buildings accessible to people with medical difficulties, but certainly in a situation where you have a group of unscrupulous opportunists using any perceived inequality as a stick with which to beat you, I think you should think very carefully before handing them that weapon.

Ending positive discrimination of the worst, the most damaging sort, does not mean, though, going too far the other way, into negative discrimination, which is where Labour are currently heading with local homes for local people. For a start, they should make clear, and continue to make it clear, that by “local people”, they don’t just mean local white people, if they persist down this road.

The BNP, for all its success in the elections, is still a small, minority party, for the moment. But it has certainly fired a warning shot across the bows of the Labour Party, and it is high time they responded by hoisting the red flag to the top of the mizzen-mast, and letting fly a few salvoes of their own, instead of sailing under the swastika and crossbones, and trying to out-Pugwash the pirates.