By Guido Tallman
Firstly, a word of calm. UKIP are far from knocking on the doors of power. In the recent local elections they got 25% of the vote (where they stood) – on a 30% turnout in the most backward areas of the country. That’s 7.5% in the bits of the country most suited to their rancid ideas.
They complained before the election that some of their candidates had been put under intense scrutiny as some people from the outside UKIP tried to find out who these people are. David Cameron was proved to have said one true thing since taking the office of Prime Minister – that UKIP were a party of closet racists, loonies and fruitcakes. Well, that’s if you count someone doing a nazi salute on facebook as closet rather than out and proud – your shout.
Since the election, more racists have been uncovered as UKIP members and councillors everywhere race to shut down their facebook accounts, rewrite the past and try to keep their mates happy lest one says something untoward to a journalist.
Nigel Farage, in the afterglow of a good day at the polls, is busy repeating on every news outlet he can reach, normally without any hint of a challenge, that because we’re in the EU 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians are being let into the UK come next year.
Estimates of the number of people who are actually going to arrive vary wildly, from a few thousand to 30-50,000, which is the Migration Watch ‘estimate’. Migration Watch are happy to vaunt this figure about, but they haven’t shown their workings. Other estimates, like the one the Government commissioned are not being published. But no one, not the maddest idiot writer in the Daily Express thinks 29 million people will come to the UK, for 29 million is the entire total population of the two countries, Bulgaria’s 7.5 million plus Romania’s 21.4 million.
For 29 million people to come EVERYONE would have to move to the UK, no one could head anywhere else in the EU and 200,000 would have to join them from elsewhere. It means the football team who just won the Bulgarian premiership would have to try to get signed by a shit team in the UK like Aldershot. The Bulgarian Prime Minister would have to suddenly decide that politics was a crap game to be in and he’d rather go picking spring onions on a farm in Lincolnshire instead. Landowners and company bosses would have to surrender any advantage they had at home and start up a hand car wash outside Woking. They’d have to empty their jails and give the prisoners tickets to Dover (don’t mention that last one to UKIP, they’ll pick it up and run with it).
Farage did, to be fair, claim on Twitter that 4 million would be arriving. Apparently this figure was worked out with the laboratory scientific preciseness of a TV programme asking “would you like to go to the UK?” of it’s viewers. Not a question more akin to reality such as “Would you like to go and live ten to a room in a hostile village with shit amenities and work your guts out on a farm or in a factory to up your earnings twofold?”
When asked sober and analytical questions, the attitude appears to be Romanians and Bulgarians will come to the UK if they have a secure offer of employment. Which seems fair enough.
When Farage or Migration Watch invoke the fact that about 1.1million A8 workers are in the UK, they draw a very incomparable comparison. Poland (by far the biggest A8 country population wise, and the biggest source of migrants coming to the UK) has more cultural and historical links with the UK – especially since the 2nd World War – than either of the A2 states. A2 nationals have a choice of any other country in the EU, whereas Polish and other A8 nationals could choose from only the UK, Ireland or Sweden (it wasn’t until 2011 that Germany and Austria lifted restrictions on A8 migrants).
The total population of the A8 states is about 73 million. So, 1.5% of the A8 population made it (long term) to the UK having 3 countries to choose from. The A2 population faces a choice of destinations including Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Mediterranean Countries and Scandinavia. In 2004 the economy of the industrialised west in the EU was very healthy, now it is struggling and stymied by austerity. All these factors and variables make estimating potential immigration in January next year very difficult indeed.
The only numerical estimates circulating in the press at present are those from the anti-immigration lobby, the progressive side of the argument preferring to rely on facts that are few and far between in the forecasting game.
Nigel Farage was taken to Bulgaria by Channel 4 News. He spoke to a Roma family, living in appalling conditions.
He said:
“From next year, if you wanted to, you could move to London where the British Government would give you somewhere to live that’s heated, a chance of work, and you’d be financially a lot better of – do you think that would be attractive to people living here?” The answer came from the senior man in the household: “No, no, it’s different there, a lot of rain , we’re not used to the climate. We were born here, every stone has its place to rest. We love our homeland and wish to continue living here.”
Later he spoke to the son of one of the Roma leaders who told Farage
“They don’t want to move from here, they don’t want to because they are born here and they will stay here.”
Farage responded
“Well you may be right, I don’t know, I’m here on a fact finding mission”
Yes, Nigel, you do not know. No Nigel, you were on a fact ignoring mission.
Farage and UKIP have found an issue that divides the hard right from the thinking right. This division is reflected on the left, with the Miliband bandwagon veering towards a less tolerant standpoint dripping with apologies for previous ‘mistakes’ of the Labour Party, and the radical left alone in arguing for immigration to be based on human rights.
It’s about time the radical left went on the offensive on immigration, the issue is going to dominate mainstream politics for the next two years, we need to have a voice.
