One for the scapegoating record book

I am kicking myself for not running an online gambling book on how long it would take to find a scapegoat for banking crisis. But then, less than a week would have seemed too short a time, so, as the bookmaker, I might have actually lost out on this one.

As T-W said yesterday, the UK immigration minister has stepped up to meet our government’s desire to get re-elected at any cost, by announcing a “clampdown” on immigration. This lurch towards shamelessness has been predictably attacked by the Tories – whose natural constituency is the HYS nutter and the Daily Mail reader – as not being tough enough (garbage) and stealing their policies (true)

Mr Grieve [the Tory equivalent to the immigration minister] said Labour were matching Tory policies on setting immigration limits. (from the BBC)

I have a picture of someone who finds that they have lost their housekeys and believes that beating the crap out of their next door neighbour will magically get them inside their own front door.

I.e Does not compute. This sort of thing bears about as much relation to reality as something dreamed up in an alcoholic stupor by someone who has had their frontal lobe removed.

In any case, (apart from the use of “immigrant” as if it means “black person”) the “immigration” that gets little England so irate is immigration from Eastern Europe, over which the UK government can have no control, under EC rules. So the only immigration that they can control involves a tiny number of people from the commonwealth countries and people seeking asylum.

The treatment of asylum-seekers is already a scandal. Is it possible that the government plans to make it even worse, so that people impoverished by the financial collapse will feel they’ve got their money’s worth?

Does anyone seriously believe that they are about to lose their job or their home because of “immigrants”, rather than because of the economic meltdown? Such people are clearly too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time. How on earth do they manage to survive anyway?

As I write this, the unpleasant immigration minister is on the Politics Show saying that stronger immigration controls will lessen racism, indeed that it is the ethnic minority population that’s calling for it…..

Back to my conceptual online betting scheme. What are the odds that the minister would claim that tougher immigration controls would actually counter racism? (less than evens) What are the odds that this is true? Basically zero.

Blame the scapegoat

I know it hasn’t been long since I ranted about the craziness in the UK media nowadays, but listening to local and national radio tends to have this effect on me. One of the main headlines over the last few days have been the revelations from the Terrorism Trial which found five British Citizens guilty of terrorism charges. Part of the surveillance footage showed the now-convicted terrorists in conversation with two men who later (a year or so later) went on to bomb the London underground (7 Jul 05).

This “find” has motivated the survivors (or at least a media-friendly subset of them) of the London Tube Bombing to call for an “Independent Inquiry” into the Security Service (MI5) investigation. As with lots of things which become news items in the UK it has the air of self evident truth and “justice” but on second glance it really is pointlessly mad.

The radio news I have been listening to has been crowing over the “outrage” the survivors have felt that MI5 had two of the bombers under surveillance a year before the blast, with the implication (often stated) that if the Service had acted against them earlier they would have disrupted the bombing and the 55 odd people would not have died. Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? Continue reading

Bad mothers

Hmm. After having expressed blogged horror about the women who goaded toddlers to fight, I am a bit disturbed by the way this case is getting reported now.

The women are now getting demonised as representative sub-class trash across all the media. Photographs of them leaving court have all the visual cues that identify them as “scum” to middle England and to the respectable working class – the clothes, the smoking, the visible navel adornments, their facial expressions, the unconscious visual references to the gangs of binge-drinking raucous women that are supposed to be menacing our cities.

I now know much more about their relationships and intelligence and mental health and even suicide attempts than I know about the people who live in my street. Possibly more than I know about myself. Continue reading