The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

I was going to write a long, passionately argued piece deconstructing Cam-moron's recent playing of the race card in his immigration speech, but to be honest, what he was trying to do is so transparent, it's hardly worth the effort of smashing. There is, as always, a subtext with these speeches. I know exactly what he was trying to do, politicians of all parties do it when they are cornered like a rat.

He can see that his party is going to get a well-deserved kicking in the May elections. So he reaches for his dog whistle, looks out over the heads of the benighted fools he knows will still vote for him anyway, and gives a good long toot in the general direction of the British National Party and the English Defence League.

White immigration is good, brown immigration is bad, is what he was trying to say but couldn't in so many words. And why don't they all learn English and integrate (because er, most of them do. I notice he wasn't quick to castigate Tesco when they started to have aisles of Polish food, labelled in Polish!)

Meanwhile, Mr Ed the talking horse, has admitted that Labour may have made one or two mistakes in the way they presented and monitored immigration (such as sucking up the to the middle classes in key marginals for a decade, while your traditional heartlands were recruited en masse by the BNP, you mean, yes, that would be one of the many mistakes...)

Of course, this has been seized on by the Tory press and regurgitated as "Labour: We Were Wrong On Immigration".

It reminds me of that old adage that you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.

Any politician who says that they can do anything about this issue while we are still members of the EU Political Unity Project, is just that. A big, fat, howling, pants-on-fire, liar. I wish they would get a grip and deal with it properly, instead of leaving it to UKIP, who couldn't run a village fete, let alone extricate us from the clutches of Mrs Merton and President Teacozy.

And furthermore: the argument always focuses on the "shortage" of resources - why does nobody ever ask why there is a shortage of schools, hospitals and affordable housing? What did I pay all those taxes for? To fire missiles at Libya?