How did you react to Nick Clegg’s admission that the UK has accepted around 1,500 Syrian refugees? Was it: a) This country’s full, send the scroungers back? Or b) Good, but why only 1,500? That seems a very small number given the appalling situation those poor souls are in.
I know my country or, at least, I still believe in the basic decency of its people, and I would bet my new Christmas Dreamland electric blanket that the majority of Britons would say b).
The present anger about immigration is not directed against desperate asylum seekers or even immigrants themselves. As BBC political editor Nick Robinson pointed out in his refreshingly forthright BBC2 programme, The Truth About Immigration, it’s largely the result of uncontrolled mass immigration over the past decade and the failure of the BBC and the political class to permit an open debate about what it was fair or reasonable for this island to absorb.
Public anger is about child benefit being paid to 45,000 children in Poland when our own sisters and daughters and friends have had their child benefit taken away. It’s about maternity units in East Anglia where midwives report unsupervised women going into labour in the corridors because no one thought to plan for the large number of Eastern European babies.
It’s the outrageous official denials that any such problems exist. It’s the primary school in Leicester where a teacher I know doesn’t have a single white child in her class. (Ghetto anyone?) It’s self-styled “Muslim Patrol” vigilante groups in east London terrorising a couple for “holding hands” and telling a woman she would be punished in “hellfire” because of the way she is dressed. It’s universities capitulating to pressure to segregate male and female students to please certain Islamic speakers. It’s the uphill battle to deport the hate preacher who inspired the swivel-eyed fanatics who cut down Drummer Lee Rigby. Telegraph.
