to think that people claiming that BNP voters aren't racists are being disingenuous?

[MrJustAbout]

I don't get the argument "that these people aren't racist, but they vote just BNP".

For me, If you vote BNP, you are a racist. I know this is guilt by association but I think it's fair. What's more, making excuses for those who choose to support these hatemongers makes it more acceptable for them to do so.

I know I wouldn't vote for a party when I didn't know their policies and if I did, I'd feel pretty ashamed that I voted without bothering to find out. To be honest, anyone who votes for the BNP and claims that didn't realise they'd just cosied up to facists needs to give up voting for good.

scarlet - but all that is explained by the fact that the birth rate among indigenous British women is at an historic low. Without immigrants, as someone else has already pointed out, there will be nobody to pay for our pensions when we're all in the great MN nursing home, kicking each other's sticks away throwing super-boiled veg over each other.

Economically speaking, we need immigrants. (Not that I've ever found economic arguments particularly compelling. I just think that human beings should be allowed to move around the planet.)

presumably, Ling, but no-one seems to have dealt with the impact of rapid population growth on maternity services/education/other public services. Which creates problems and resentment.

If the government had planned properly, those extra taxes should have been spent on providing public services to meet the needs of a growing population. But they didn't.

Maybe because they can't count - remember the govt. saying they expected only 50,000 new migrants from European expansion, and actually we got something like 750,000? (Partly because many other EU nations didn't immediately open their doors wide but phased it in, so anyone from Eastern Europe who did want to travel had only a few countries to choose from.)

But more immigration equally means more people growing old - it's not a perfect fix, or a long-term solution.

But IMHO it was just plain wrong to let new countries join the EU and then not open our doors to them. We were one of the few countries to have done the right thing here, and should be attacking the governments of nations who didn't open their doors straight away rather than ours.

Does anyone know what the figures are now like on Eastern Europeans - the impression I have is that many of the e.g. Polish tradesmen only stay temporarily, and then return home. A bit like Brits going to work in Oz / SA / mainland Europe for a bit while they're young, then often coming home to settle down.

i have just watched question time - those of you that know my posts will know i'm a lefty socialist. I lived in a town which had race riots. I don't know one person in that town not one who isn't racist - by racist i mean particularly again the muslim population.

I am absolutley certain that it is ignorance that fuels their belief system and that education is key.

I look to myself as to why i am not (as a white working class person from a dog poor background) racist. I think in part this has to do with my mothers belief system treating everyone on an individual basis and encouraging friendships with our neighbours from pakistan and the indian family who owned the store across the street. This taught me as a child that people are ...well people with their flaws and their charm. good and bad whatever their skin colour.

I think in part for me it was access to higher education and the belief systems of many and the convictions of the different ideologies of university youth - as naive as i see them when i look back.

I think the conservative lady on the panel on question time in answer to 'do you belief it;s this govt failure on immigration which has led to the rise of the BNP' was a good answer ( a much as i don't want to admit it!!) she said she had spoken to people who voted BNP and that they weren't all racist. that the reason that people voted BNP was becuase of the lack of resources in these communities and i would further add, lack of opportunity.

The Richie report which was commissioned in response to the riots cited deep rooted segregation as a min cause.

and despite the subsequant Cantle review which priases the council for it's efforts, there still remains segregation.

Now i only speak of experience in one town. i don't know if other places such as bradford , burnley or leeds have the same segregation or as i would term 'ghettos' for white ans asian communities.

impoversished ill educated white people look to a basic level for changes around them and equate that with their own hardships or lifestyle which is why statements such as 'taking our jobs' 'taking our benefits' are so common.

if a little more educated, my hope would be that the poor white population who make this simple equation could move from a personal to a political level. One could argue that this is what they are doing with the BNP, but i would counter with protest vote based on the aforementioned simplicity, rather than informed choice.

So they can then choose to put into government a party based on immigration or based on reform of the benefits system ( of which the poor white people will be in receipt of no doubt) Based on a parties affinity or not with European policies.

Rather on ill education fuelled further by seperatism policy.

debate any racist and you will debate at a political level. Debate an ill educated racist and this becomes difficult becuase they base their prejudice on their own lifestyle and their neighbours on how many asian faces are in their town. they blame the people

they blame the asian population and show their distaste in everyday racist vernacular.

They don't blame the polititions and policy makers.

If the population could function at this level with an educated political knowledge and vote for change, i think we could move forward.

shit - that;s really long sorry

I agree alana and LG. I am a case in point.

I was born and grew up in Australia (so I cost the Australian tax payer money).

Then I started working - I have spent most of my working life in the UK. I have always paid tax here - more than I did in Australia.

And I probably will return to Australia in a few years...

Len. DOn't know whether you remember Oxfam Man, but one of the things he said that struck a chord with me is that migration is The. Best. Route. Out. Of. Poverty. It beats everything else. People have always done it when times are hard. To say (as you say) that capital must have unfettered freedom - that multilaterals must be free to outsource work wherever they choose, and base themselves in tax havens - but that people must remain pinned down, or humiliatingly assessed for their 'worth' to a new country, is just weird. And to say, in effect, to people in developing countries that they aren't allowed to share our hugely inflated standard of living (built largely on the exploitation of their resources) unless they have previously acquired an immense skill set is plain immoral.

The BNP are not clearly racist to some people. You know the kind of people? The ones who really believe they are not racist either, even though it may be clear to many other people that they at least hold some racist views.

I think what you can say is that the BNP certainly hold some racist views. If people vote for them, whether or not they themselves hold racist views, they are voting for a party that holds some racist views. It's impossible to unravel other people's reasons for voting, some may have stupidly used their BNP vote for tactical reasons, who knows?

Custy - I suspect one of the reasons DH (non white) and I are accepted, is because we are one of maybe half a dozen immigrants or non-white families in town. So we are not a "threat".

Good post Custy

Reflects my undertanding of the situation coming from a similar town (except south western with class riots in the 80's (if thats what you call them, I'd call them ghetto riots))

potoroo - you maybe right.

As a society i think there is a major anti muslim feel - maybe not in the bog cities ( i dunno) not helped by the iraq war/afghanistan and maybe Iran.

certainly not helped becuase usually working class boys go to the army to go to war ( made by polititans!) to fight in muslim countries.

a lot of WC know of or are related to someone who has gone off to war. ( my son has three friends aged 16/17 who have signed up )

I also see a lot of anti muslim stuff on american programming. NCIS - which i adore BTW makes me outwardly cringe at the jewish versus muslim.

always fighting 'terrorism'

Has terrorism become the new 'fighting commies' of the 1950's?

The problem is one of cognitive dissonance. You frequently find BNP supporters coming out with he phrase "I'm not a racist but.." then going on to spout some racist view.

The thing is, we have internalised the idea that being a racist is a bad thing. That racists are bad people. None of us think of ourselves as bad people, so in order to justify racist beliefs in our own minds, we justify them with excuses like "It's about the immigrants"

This sort of belief set is only possible to maintain if you don't think too deeply about it. I live next to some pretty densely populated estates. It's not uncommon to be sitting at the bus stop and have the local (white) grannies loudly discuss how all these immigrants are coming in and taking all the housing. They will include me in their discussions, until I open my mouth and they realise that, despite my white exterior, I am one of those immigrants who they are moaning about. I am the result of Britain's colonial past come back to bite them in the backside.

I used to work with teenagers who were genuinely shocked to find out that the term "asylum seeker" did not automatically have to have the word "bogus" in front.

to add to my last post re communism
communism died - there needed to be a new enemy, a massive military machine trillions of dollers invested

"And anyway the system is too vast and nebulous to see as a target, people are real and visible. I don't think labelling people and dismissing them is going to help. We need to listen to what they are saying and direct some resources into these communities. We can do that and still support initiatives for other disadvantaged groups. "

Lenin, agreed in part.

The problem is that the money does go in now. The poor "white" areas complain that the "foreign" areas get it all, and the poor "foreign" areas complain the "white" areas get it all.

Nothing can be resolved until the discussion moves away from race (almost entirely) and focuses on poverty instead. There are definitely issues about how much money goes in as a whole, on how it is decided, and on what it is spent on but these really can't be debated until we get past the distractions. (Equally, saying "spend more" can be too a easy an answer too - do you give up your hospital first, or your schools?)

Yes, telling people that it's not okay to vote for the BNP and that they are racists if they do is labelling. But you can't move beyond the issue of racism unless you are willing to tackle it head on. Pussy-footing around prejudice doesn't work and detracts from what are - most of the time - the real issues.

Custy know what you mean about TV shows - so many are cringeworthy because they just take an easy target to turn into the villain (preferably played by an English actor is it's a US programme) and I think you're right, it was the commies, or the Irish, and now it's the muslims. Spooks is as bad as NCIS - lots of the last series was about Islamic terrorism.

None of which would matter if it was pure entertainment, but it does add to the background feeling that there are some "other" people who are dangerous and that feeds into the bigger picture for people who want to blame their own problems on immigration.

Sadly the focus on one particular group makes it too easy to forget than extremism is the problem, not Islam - and there are plenty of other extremists be it Israelis oppressing Palestinians, Christian anti-abortionists shooting doctors but it's much easier to show an obviously muslim man with a bomb in his bag.

My feeling is that this is more dangerous than commie-bashing, because we didn't have a large population of Russians living in the UK so it felt more political and less personal, somehow.

i also cannot remember a political party canvassing on the estate whee i used to live. I know this isn't the case for others, but it certaily was my experience both up north and down south.

we didn't have a conservative candidate no one knocked on the door and asked us what we wanted - or informed us what they offered - apart from religeous zealots and ....the BNP.

v. clever. the underclass and working class have a massive base and don't vote sadly. the BNP tap into their fears - but the other political parties aren't doing themselves any favours by not comming into these areas and giving people the opportunity to ask questions and be more personable accessible and approachable.

finally - and this just astounds me

We had a #money lender' some of you may not know but there are - in very poor areas - money lenders who go door to door - lend £500 at 125% intrest ( not exaggerating) these money lenders were also members of the BNP

so you got " want to borrow £500/£1000?...no problem...oh and watch this cd, it just shows what the koran says about infidels and how all muslims want to kill you"

not even shitting you

yes alana good point

Oh, I agree. The issue isn't immigration - it's population capacity versus contributing citizenship.

And a good portion of the blame lies with the education system. We teach, now, so much nonsense in schools and the national curriculum makes no allowance for basic foundations before it forces students to move on, that it fails to achieve anything with a good protion of the children it purports to serve - i.e. the 'indigenous' population. There have been numerous reports that, in areas were parental education is poor, the school system does not have enough flexibility, funding or incentive to teach basic reading, writing and mathematics skills to the children.

By the time these kids are then 12 or 13, they are so far behind that everything said in school is incomprehensible nonsense and they just stop attending. It is then impossible for them to support themselves, so they turn to crime, acquire a criminal record and are promptly stuck for the rest of their lives because it's amazing how many low-paid, unskilled jobs require back-ground checks to come back clean.

This is not a new issue, but after two generations, it's becoming an unbreakable one.

And it might not be such a problem even so if it wasn't coupled with twenty years + of government telling the population that they're entitled to so damn much. Labour wanted 50% of the population to have access to university education.... WHY? For WHAT? Free university education for anyone genuinely capable of working in a profession that needs it, yes, but not just because! And not in utterly pointless subjects!

No country needs a workforce that wildly out of balance. It needs one with a solid basic education. 95 A* are lovely... but not essential in being a 'good person'.

Why do we teach kids that their only future lies in academic education that they may not be basically capable of? Why is our ENTIRE schooling system geared to this?

Worse, why do we also seem to be teaching them that they're entitled to a 40 hour week in a 'soft'(forgive the phrasing!) white collar job? That's not workable in any country - it never has been. How many people seriously only work a forty hour week and earn a living? In any profession? It's not even true for highly trained professionals, never mind anyone else. No junior doctor works a forty hour week, certainly no nurse, no lawyer. Not even the City stock traders or the investment banker's we're all screaming about at the moment. No manager of a retail shop. Not if they want a career.

It might not be fair - there should be a better balance between work and life, but there isn't, there never has been and for the forseeable future, at least, there isn't going to be.

But still, I can't count the number of interviews I've held with 'native' job applicants (of any colour!) who start with 'I'm desperate for work...' and continue with 'but I can't work evenings/weekends/bank holidays/ night shifts/outside/in the rain... pick one'. Some have genuine reasons, but not all. Far from all.

Contrast this with the immigrant, who hasn't been through our education system and doesn't think like this, and of course I give the job to the immigrant. He'll turn up, he'll be polite, he'll work overtime when I need him to. That's just logic.

So yes, eventually prejudice swings against the native worker and, hand in hand with mandatory ethnic diversity policies (and that's a whole other issue on the other side of this argument - ban the damn box and employ the person, not the ethnicity or gender!), companies employ immigrants. Why shouldn't they? Without them, the economy would come to a grinding, screeching halt.

Be interesting to see what the BNP and their ilk do then!

Alana, your post has made me think - maybe it's just human nature to look for some group of "others" to blame for their problems and misfortunes? Not to say it's right or justifiable - maybe that's just the way humans work. And if it's not race or religion we get (in very simplistic terms) socialists blaming "the rich" for all society's ills, capitalists blaming "the workshy"... Basically, it's always somebody else's fault.

ginnybag - agree in part.

the many benefit claiming people i know complaining about the asian population having all the shops or all the business. yeah well - they waork hard for it.

and whilst i don't believe that american utopian ideal - work hard - get rich.

one has to try. if you are able to work - and choose not to you have some fucking brass balls to complain!