Thursday 29 April 2010

Surely unfair BNP repatriation policy would fuel white grievance politics

If they thought about for ten minutes, which I recognise might be asking a little too much, I fear the BNP's repatriation policy could create an enormous sense of grievance among their target electorate of white voters who feel that far too much is done for minorities.

There is a lot of mythology in that claim.

Yet, now, to add insult to injury, here is perhaps the largest ever special treatment programme being offered to minority Brits - and by the BNP itself.

Why on earth should the British government spent up to £9 billion offering grants of up to £50,000 to people to leave the country - yet only on an affirmative action basis so that the offer is made exclusively for those (like me) whose parents are from abroad.

This excludes indigenous Brits who might fancy a new life in Australia, Canada or Spain. Where on earth is the fairness in that? Couldn't white Brits sue the government under equality legislation, were such a law introduced?

Perhaps Trevor Phillips could investigate. For Nick Griffin may here have finally succumbed to political correctness gone mad.

The policy suffers massive deadweight costs of subsidising those going abroad anyway. My brother and his wife have gone to live and work in Canada recently. Why on earth would the BNP even be thinking about stumping up £50,000 for him, and not for her? I do not think the Institute of Fiscal Studies would be at all impressed by that, though asking them to fully cost the BNP manifesto may be a step too far.

As Griffin today also seems to think that the Irish are British, perhaps the Katwalas wouldn't qualify for repatriation and could hang around anyway, since my Mum is Irish. And offering me £50,000 to go to live in Dublin would seem a slightly odd use of taxpayers' money, so perhaps the BNP affirmative action project would insist that I went to Mumbai.

***

Slightly more seriously, anybody interested in the history of the repatriation argument in British politics should read not Enoch Powell's famous Rivers of Blood speech, but the follow up speech he gave seven months later at the Rotary Club in Eastbourne.

This focused on repatriation, which was already a much higher priority for Powell by 1968 than stopping future immigration. I wrote about that speech in an Open Democracy essay on some of the less well known features of Powell's argument.

To give Enoch Powell some credit, the urgency with which he spoke reflected a clear recognition in his 1968 speeches that the argument would clearly be over by the mid-1980s, when the clear majority of the immigrant-descended population would be British born, making the Powellite agenda a quixotic fantasy.

Indeed, even four decades ago, Powell recognised that even taking his advice could not prevent the reality of a multi-ethnic Britain, though he did express the thought in a rather chilling way:


We can perhaps not reduce the eventual total of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population, much, if at all, below its present size: with that, and with all that implies, we and our children and our children’s children will have to cope until the slow mercy of the years absorbs even that unparalleled invasion of our body politic".

1 comment:

Peter @ No 77 said...

Not only that, but the BNP assume that the rest of a cash-strapped population will pay for it.

Dim, or do they just think everyone else is dim?