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On shouting and voting

22/05/2014 14:16 / 1 Comment on On shouting and voting

Calls to vote Labour in the Euro and local elections and, perhaps more particularly, in the 2015 general election, give rise to an awkward question for anti-racists. What would we be voting for? In a Channel 4 News interview on 14 May Krishnan Guru-Murthy pitted Chris Leslie (Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury) against Nicky Morgan (Tory Financial Secretary to the Treasury). The first question was: “Is the current level of immigration good for the economy?” Chris Leslie said, “Yes, I think so” – but then went on to say no. “The key here”, he said,

“is [that] Nicky promised before the general election – I don’t think it was a wise thing for her to do, but she promised – that they would keep that net migration down below 100,000, and it looks as though the government have dropped that plan now.”

After a bit of “Oh no we haven’t” pantomime from Morgan, Leslie then admonishes her:

“You promised it would be all down. The thing is you shouldn’t make promises that you’re not going to keep. It’s really important.”

I immediately wanted to tell Krishnan to quote Labour’s Roy Hattersley (1999 version) at Leslie. Roy Hattersley (1965 version, when he was Home Office Minister) had argued for tightening immigration controls on the grounds that “Integration without control is impossible, but control without integration is indefensible.” This convenient little formula was too neat to be true. 34 years later he acknowledged his mistake and explained why he now thought he had been wrong:

“If your immigration restrictions are too repressive you encourage bad race relations rather than encourage contentment and satisfaction, because you are saying, ‘We can’t afford any more of these people here’, and the implication is that there is something undesirable about these people.”

This is true of immigration controls in general, of course, not just the oddly named “too repressive” ones! But in any case Krishnan couldn’t hear me shouting at the TV screen and Labour remains indistinguishable from the Tories.

Anyway, I’m going out to vote for somebody or another because I don’t want to see UKIP gain any ground at all.

 

Be kinky, be brazen – be President?

13/05/2014 00:19 / Leave a comment

What they will do to get into the White House. According to the Washington Post, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal put his case to be a Republican presidential candidate to a group of evangelical pastors last Friday (see link below), telling the story of his journey “from Hinduism to Protestant Christianity”. Bobby “recalled talking with a girl in high school who wanted to ‘save his soul'”, and he recalled “feeling a stir while watching a movie that depicted Jesus on the cross.” Now, this is kinky beyond kinky. Have a word with somebody, Bobby, please. It’s not too late.
But then we come to the hard-nosed bit. The poor darling “does not have an obvious pool of activist supporters to help drive excitement” for his candidacy in the presidential race. So what does he do? He starts “harnessing his religious experience in a way that has begun to appeal to parts of the GOP’s religious conservatives.”
That’s my boy! Be shameless!
And keep up the kinkiness. The evangelical pastors he met over dinner in Lynchburg, Virginia, seemed to appreciate it. They enthused that “his intimate descriptions of his experiences stand out.”
Amen, brother. Pass me them old nails!
Here’s the story: http://wapo.st/1g1R8Fe