Mr Slippery Bangs On about Immigration. Do I hear a Dog Whistle?

I suppose we shall now have to get used to Tory Politicians incessantly pretending to care about the EU, about mass immigration, about crime and about education. Labour have already begun to do the same (it will be harder for the Liberal Democrats, but even they may get in on the game).

 

Mr Cameron’s latest supposed ‘pledges’ will, I suspect, swiftly clear away like mist on a sunny day. But by then, no doubt guided by Mr Lynton Crosby’s ‘dog whistle’ techniques (in which parties signal to voters that they hold populist views they haven’t actually expressed and – in my view – don’t actually support either), Mr Cameron will have moved on to another, different but equally vaporous pledge. Mr Crosby is an Australian election genius, who will be well aware of the challenge once offered to Australia’s fake right-wing (‘Liberal’) party, their equivalent to our Tories, by Pauline Hanson. Her One Nation Party had some similarities to UKIP.   

 

For a British government to do as Mr Cameron suggests, it would pretty certainly have to declare independence from the EU, from the Luxembourg Court of Justice and from the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. These are desirable aims, but we know perfectly well that Mr Cameron and his Cabinet not only won’t take such steps, but actively oppose them.

 

It would also have to take dictatorial powers over local authorities, and introduce some sort of identity card scheme, which are not desirable.

 

Stringent border control is the only real answer to this.  Once people arrive in this country legally, it is difficult, verging on impossible, to close the welfare system to them. Mass immigration and open borders are, always have been, and always will be incompatible with a free-at-the-point-of-use welfare state, and they’re also pretty hard to manage alongside a system of subsidised public housing based on need. Serious left-wingers really ought, all along, to have been the most stringent opponents of mass immigration, and of the demolition of national border control which EU membership demands.

 

The odd thing is that Labour has hardly ever, since the death of Hugh Gaitskell, taken an explicitly left-wing line on these issues, instead following fashionable metropolitan liberal opinion, which is quite uninterested in the problems of the British poor. On the contrary, it quietly realises that mass immigration is a powerful force pushing wages down. Imagine how much the minimum wage would have had to rise without Labour’s deliberate importation of hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans prepared to work very hard for very little. It’s amazing how this very interesting subject is never examined. Yet the often-asserted claim by Labour politicians that the minimum wage has not, as its opponents predicted, destroyed jobs, is taken at face value by people who ought to know better.

 

Modish metropolitans also benefit personally from mass migration.  It makes servants (mainly nannies and cleaners) affordable for the professional middle classes for the first time since 1939 . It also cuts the cost of restaurants and takeaways, essential to a lifestyle in which both the adults in the household go out to work all day, and can’t be bothered to do proper cooking when they get home.

 

But why is all this banging on about crime, human rights and immigration happening now? Because we are rapidly approaching the Period of Empty Promises, during which the Coalition will break up, and the two Coalition parties will pose, posture and grandstand till they are puce in the face, trying to pretend that they loathe each other,  when the truth is that they are indistinguishable. Soon I expect a Tory minority government endlessly ‘banging on’ about all the things UKIP bangs on about, and which Mr Cameron once claimed to despise.

 

As I wrote back on 25th September 2011, both Tories and Lib Dems have never intended to maintain the Coalition till the end of this Parliament. I said  : ‘But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.

 

‘There will be some pretext or other - probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.

 

‘The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of “confidence and supply”.

 

‘Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission - a seat falls vacant in 2014.

 

‘If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few 'Right-wing' measures through Parliament.

 

‘And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.

 

‘The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored’