Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Line that Clegg missed
Brown and Cameron both went hard after Clegg on immigration. They used terms such as "caps" and "controls", most importantly calling his policy "amnesty". If I was Clegg I would have said "This is not the language of a fair open Britain, this the languange of American reactionaries". First, because it is. All of the words are used in the American right-wing lexicon to describe the moderate efforts for immigration reform lead by two crazy lefties named Bush and McCain. Second, Clegg can use this to show that he is the change in politics. But he is actually at the heart of being British. Finally, it could provide hours upon hours of clips comparing lines by Cameron and Brown to those of Rush Limbaugh and Tom Tancredo.
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This is an unfair article. Cameron is certainly not Limbaugh or any extreme Republican. You can tell this by his support for single payer healthcare, civil partnerships for gays, a progressive taxation system etc etc.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing wrong with representing the public and remember the UK is a small island that has a very high population density. In the US there are no space concerns.
Anon, you make a good point that Cameron is not an extreme Republican. Honestly by American standards he would be called a pinko liberal. But I was saying that Clegg could really change the footing of the debate if he put Cameron and Brown, remember I put Brown in there too, into a hard-line corner. But I love your input, remember I do not have a sense on the ground, but only from across the big puddle of water.
ReplyDeleteWhoops- for a start we (the people) have never had a say on 'immigration' and we never will because the 'powers that be' know exactly how a possible vote would go (ie) 'no' to immigration). I have no idea if it's on 'youtube' but there was a bbc programme on such an issue profiling Jack Straw's Blackburn constituency. It makes for interesting viewing; it highlights a taxi-firm taking people from the 'asian' area to wherever they wanted to go, the same with the 'white' area. Guess what- the two hardly (if at all) went into the differing party's area. We have immigration and 'social mixing' by stealth. What i mean by this if you examine varying English counties then examine the social make-up in the varying constituencies you can discern a pattern (ie: Oxford East- mostly white but a large asian population. Oxford West- mostly white but a growing black population.) Since this issue has come to a boil recently we have the embarrasing fact that we have elected 2 BNP members to the EuroParly, 1 BNP member to the LondonAssembly, and many more councillors in England. Over 2 million people have been driven to voting for the BNP because the political elite have created this mess and cannot fix it.
ReplyDeleteKiernan - thanks for your reply and for this blog. I am a British person living in North Carolina so I get to see both sides of the pond.
ReplyDeleteCameron and the Conservative party would be Democrats here in the US. The political system is so shifted. But New Labour and Lib Dem types would be on the centre right in places like Germany and France which have socialist parties on the left (instead of centre-left - there is a difference)