Immigration - Blaming the 'other' will backfire

Maybe the Prime Minister got a sneak preview of Searchlights research findings that 48% of  those polled would vote for a ‘anti-immigration party’, before he made his speech about multiculturalism in Germany a few weeks ago. 

After all, if the Searchlight poll even begun to reflect the UK voters that’s an awful lot of voters to be harvested if you give them a nod and a wink.  

It also goes some way to explain why the Prime Minster failed to attack the English Defence League, who are as much anti-immigration as they are anti-Islam – EDL’s modus operandi understands that you gain more support by targeting a specific enemy, rather than the BNP’s scatter gun approach. To make matters more confusing both these and other groups are very content to conflate and muddle  immigration with terrorism, for them they are all the ‘other’.

It’s difficult to know where all this will end. A recent documentary on Radio 4 ‘The mind Changers’, warns us that when identity groups feel under attack. under siege very bad things happen, as they have done in Northern Ireland, Palestine, and most tragically Burundi.

What’s for sure is that it is very difficult to challenge people’s prejudices without labels of racism and racist locking down any further debate. In yesterday’s Guardian Lindsey Harris tried when she suggested that there are not too many Britons rushing to pick vegetables, pack chickens, work in old people’s homes, do auxiliary nursing, wash pots in hotel kitchens and other minimum paid jobs. Her reasonable argument suggests that we too readily blame migrant workers - many of whom increasingly come from the EU - when the real challenge is our interlinked global economy in which global workers only go where there are opportunities.

One thing for sure, in the short term blaming the other is easy and could win cheap votes, but the trouble that it stores up could dramatically affect us for years to come.

Simon Woolley