Ed Miliband's Speech about Immigration is just a sick joke
You have to hand it to Ed Miliband. For sheer, brazen cheek, nothing beats the leader of the party that was responsible for the largest wave of mass immigration in history making a speech attempting to show that he’s the only man who can properly be trusted on immigration.
Mr Miliband must think the rest of us were born yesterday.
The sheer cynicism of the Labour leader’s speech on immigration takes the breath away. According to Mr Miliband the last government was simply “overly optimistic” about immigration.
It thought “integration would just take care of itself”.
That’s one way of putting it.
One wholly misleading way of putting it, that is.
Mr Miliband’s attempted explanation of Labour’s immigration policy wilfully ignores what the last government was really up to, and the consequences of its dogmatic embrace of multiculturalism.
In reality, Labour engaged in a deliberate policy of social engineering to bring about a “truly multicultural” country, designed specifically to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.
Those are the words of Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
Three years ago Mr Neather admitted that Labour deliberately relaxed immigration controls to “open up the UK to mass migration”. There was, he said, a “driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural”.
It clearly worked. This week’s census shows the extent to which Britain has changed during the past decade. The number of immigrants has increased by three million in 10 years.
Three million! I t may be that, as a nation, we think that is splendid and we would like as many people as possible to join us and take advantage of our generous welfare benefits. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we think that it’s a bit much and we can’t afford it. The point is that no one in Mr Miliband’s party ever thought it worth asking us whether we wanted to invite so many immigrants in and change the country.
It wasn’t even that they didn’t bother asking us. Labour quite deliberately hid the extent of mass immigration and pretended that the consequences would be negligible.
Remember when the Eastern European countries were admitted to the EU in 2004?
The government told us there would be, at most, 13,000 immigrants taking advantage of the new freedom of entry. As lies go, that is up there with the best of them.
The true figure for immigrants from Eastern Europe is, we now know, more than a million: 1,079,000. That figure represents 1.5 per cent of the entire population of their native countries moving to Britain.
But Labour’s real betrayal was not in the scale of immigration.
It was the way in which it handled its consequences.
The idea that three million immigrants can be absorbed into any country without placing any obligation on them to adapt their own customs to fit in with the national culture of their adopted land is simply grotesque. And it is asking for trouble.
I come from an immigrant community. My family arrived here at the turn of the last century.
They spoke not a word of English. So they learned it.
They changed their name from Polak to Pollard to fit in. My father ended up as one of the most senior civil servants in the country.
As a community, Jews stress that the law of the land must always prevail over our own customs. Every synagogue in the country says a prayer for the Royal Family. No one can ever say that Jews have not kept their own identity. But we have adapted to fit in. Labour stressed the opposite – that rather than immigrant communities having obligations to adapt, it should be native communities who adapt to accommodate immigrants.
That is a recipe for antagonism between different communities.
And it is disastrous for the immigrants themselves.
Mr Miliband, who is himself Jewish, ought to know this.
But it’s clear from his words yesterday that he doesn’t really have a clue. He has worked out that many former Labour voters in areas where mass immigration has introduced tensions between communities blame Labour. So he wants to persuade them that the party has changed.
Mr Miliband’s main proposals yesterday – that immigrants should be given English lessons and that the ability to speak English should be a requirement for all public sector jobs in which staff interact with members of the public – are simply pathetic.
Only a man from a party with such a record as Labour could think these ideas even worth mentioning.
They are so blindingly obvious that it says a lot about Labour’s supposed conversion to the real world on immigration that the party thinks they are worth airing as evidence of that conversion.
I don’t even believe Labour is capable of delivering on such basic ideas. Labour politicians – unlike Labour voters, of course, who do live in the real world – have immigration and multiculturalism in their DNA.
When, in the last election campaign, Gordon Brown – Ed Miliband’s mentor – called Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” for expressing mild concern about the influx of Eastern Europeans, he exposed what Labour really thinks.
Mr Miliband can try all he likes to pretend Labour has changed.
I simply call it cheek.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/...t-a-sick-joke/
Milliband hypocrite & Champagne Socialist- there won't be any so called "asylum seekers" type vermin residing in his chic St Johns Wood neighbourhood