A few days ago Zelo Street put up an article commenting on a letter Joel Benjamin sent to the Beeb’s Director-General complaining about the corporation’s massive pro-Tory, anti-Labour, anti-working class bias. Benjamin had taken the step of writing to Tony Hall directly because he didn’t trust the Corporation’s complaints service. He stated that it was
a private contract administered by criminally negligentoutsourcing company CAPITA. Experts in dull, pro-forma response letters, which fail to address the complainants concerns and a symbol of much that has gone awry at the BBC and in neoliberal, corporatist Britain.
He also listed the following specific examples of the Beeb’s bias towards the Tories.
To which Zelo Street added a few more of their own.
‘(a) the use of newspaper columnists, editors and press hangers-on in paper reviews, allowing the press to mark their own homework and therefore perpetuate right-wing bias,(b) the blatant use of the BBC’s Sunday Politics by veteran presenter Andrew Neil to push climate change denial, and (c) Neil and political editor Laura Kuenssberg, along with Robbie Gibb, orchestrating a resignation from the shadow cabinet live on the Daily Politics just before PMQs to the benefit of the Tories…(d) Ms Kuenssberg effectively taking dictation from Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott over the campaign breaking electoral law, (e) Refusal to discuss the misbehaviour of Cambridge Analytica, to the extent of having Carole Cadwalladr shouted down during a paper review on The Andy Marr Show™, (f) a whole string of instances where the Question Time audience has been infiltrated by Tory plants, and (g) loading panel shows with right-wing pundits and other hangers-on.’
Benjamin particularly resented the Beeb’s dismissive attitude towards criticism. He wrote
Instead of BBC management being responsive to public criticism this election, licence fee payers were subject to Francesca Unsworth, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs – publishing a letter in the Guardian – framing complainants as peddlers of “conspiracy theories” in the wake of a highly visible series of self-ascribed“mistakes,” each, coincidentally, benefitting Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, whilst harming the Labour opposition. Despite the pushback to Unsworth’s article, you then chose to to double down, blame licence fee payers, andcry conspiracy.
He also remarked that the Corporation’s bias was
clearly unacceptable, yet a natural consequence of a broadcaster answerable not to the public, but directly to an increasingly brutalising, fact free, and tone deaf Government, that ultimately wants the BBC abolished. In this context, your servile, pro-establishment political coverage looks to fee payers like feeding Conservative crocodiles, in the vain hope the BBC get eaten last.
But what is also remarkable is the extent to which people share this dissatisfaction with the Beeb. Zelo Street reported that a poll by YouGov at the start of this month – December 2019 – had found that trust in the BBC had fallen to 44 per cent. 48 per cent, on the other hand, distrusted the Corporation. This was a marked drop from October, when 51 per cent of respondents to the survey trusted the Corporation, and 41 per cent didn’t.
The Street remarks that not everyone will share Benjamin’s views and his wider analysis, but they may understand his frustration, particularly at the Corporation’s refusal to listen to the people that actually support it by paying the licence fee.
He also warns that the Tories are determined to inflict further damage on the Beeb in order to create an utterly compliant media landscape. And if that happens, Hall and the rest of them may find themselves out of a job. Unless they actually start listening to their critics, and realise that there is a problem.
Now I dare say that many of those, who distrust the Beeb come from the Right. People who think that the Beeb really is biased against the Conservatives, because Johnson tells them it is while running away from interviews, his comments echoed and supported by the right-wing press. I’ve come across complaints from those on the extreme Right, who despise the Corporation because it generally supports multiculturalism, feminism and gay rights. Which in their view makes it anti-White and anti-British.
But the Left have every reason not to trust the Beeb. Joel Benjamin and Zelo Street are right: the Corporation has been massively biased. And not just in this election either. One commenter to Zelo Street’s post reminded readers how the Corporation was also biased in the referendum on Scots independence. They were. I remember how Nick Robinson was so dissatisfied with Alex Salmond’s very full answer to a question on the effect independence would have on the Scottish financial sector, that it was progressively cut down during subsequent news bulletins with Robinson claiming that Salmond had made an unsatisfactory answer. Finally it disappeared altogether, and Robinson claimed the-then leader of the SNP hadn’t answered it. Which is a piece of newspeak worthy of Orwell.
I despise the corporation’s political bias and its knee-jerk contempt for its critics. Any and all criticism of the Corporation is met with the same response: that the Beeb is criticised for bias by both Left and Right, with the implication that the Beeb isn’t biased and it’s all somehow in the critics’ imagination. But studies cited by Benjamin in his letter show that isn’t the case. And in some of the recent instances of glaring bias, the Beeb tries to excuse them by claiming that it was all a mistake.
This won’t wash. Not any more.
The Beeb does make some excellent programmes. But I’m sick and tired of its massive political bias to the point where I’d happily see nearly all their newsroom sacked. Johnson has said that he’s considering decriminalising nonpayment of the licence fee. And the Tories and their donors, particularly Rupert Murdoch, have been clamouring for the Beeb’s privatisation for nearly four decades.
The Beeb may soon find it needs all the help it can get. But it’s rapidly losing them on the Left, and may well end up regretting this.
One of the defining features of every dictatorship has been rigid control of the press. In the former USSR and Soviet bloc until Gorbachev, the media was owned and controlled by the state, and it dutifully followed the party line. The leader was praised, and his opponents were vilified. Before being rounded up, imprisoned and shot, of course. It was exactly the same in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The newspapers there were privately owned, but even so had to follow the party line. In Germany, this was set by Josef Goebbels, the infamous ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’. The Tories also have an intolerant attitude to the media. Most of the newspapers are owned by proprietors, who support the Tories and so have a strong Tory bias. The Tories therefore expect the press and media to follow their line. When they don’t, they start flinging around accusations of bias. When it’s state-owned companies, like the Beeb, they start making threats of ending the license fee or privatising the corporation, as I remember them doing so in the 1990s. With private broadcasters they threaten to remove their broadcasting license. Thatcher did this to London Weekend Television in the 1980s following the company’s documentary, ‘Death of the Rock’. This showed that the SAS team that killed an IRA terror squad in Gibraltar had acted as a death squad. The terrorists had been under army surveillance during their entire journey through Spain, and could have been picked up at any point with minimal bloodshed. The programme concluded that they had been deliberately executed. Thatcher went berserk at this demonstration of British lawlessness, and withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license. It was replaced instead by Carlton, no doubt named after the infamous Tory club.
And the Tories were making the same threats yesterday to Channel 4, after the programme humiliated Johnson in its leaders’ debate over climate change. Johnson has now resorted to Tweezer’s tactic of running away from possible tough or hostile interviews. He refused to turn up to be grilled by Andrew Neil on his show on the Beeb, which has embarrassed our state broadcaster, as they got Corbyn on his show by falsely telling him that they would be interviewing Boris this week, and that it had all been agreed with the Tories when it hadn’t. Fearing a repeat of last Friday’s leader debates, when Britain’s oafish Trump junior was properly shown to be a blustering moron, Johnson scarpered again. Channel 4 therefore took the decision to go ahead with the debate, but put in a melting ice sculpture to represent the BoJob.
Realising that a Conservative non-appearance didn’t look good, the Tories decided to send Boris’ father and Michael Gove, his best mate. Who weren’t allowed on the programme for the simple reason, as Channel 4’s news editor Ben de Pear pointed out, that as lovely and charming as they were, they weren’t the party’s leader. Gove started lying about how he turned up at Channel 4, but was turned away because Corbyn and Sturgeon didn’t want to debate a Conservative. This was disproved by Robert Peston, who tweeted
Classic Vote Leave tactics this whole ‘Gove turns up’ while CCHQ complains to regulator Ofcom about Ch4 barring him. It is all about proving to supporters that the London media establishment are against them (don’t laugh) while trying to intimidate all broadcasters.
Unable to get their own way, the Tories have complained about the debate to Ofcom, claiming that the channel has broken its legal requirement to be impartial and that the refusal to admit Gove and Stanley Johnson was a partisan stunt. They also told Buzzfeed News that if they’re re-elected, they would review Channel 4’s broadcasting license.
Sunny Hundal pointed out the sheer hypocrisy behind this.
If Corbyn had threatened Channel 4’s license over climate change debate, every newspaper in Britain would rightly be calling it ‘Stalinist’. Yet the press is silent and BBC is treating it as a legit story.
Zelo Street concluded
‘Tory commitment to free speech does not include dissent. Who’s being Stalinist now?’
The Tories don’t like freedom of speech at all. They withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license after ‘Death on the Rock’, and had a Panorama documentary how the party had an overlapping membership with the BNP, National Front and other Fascists, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’ suppressed. And during their coalition government with the Lib Dems, they passed legislation providing for a system of secret courts. If the government decides it is necessary for reasons of national security, the accused may be tried in courts from which the press and public are banned. They may not know the identity of their accusers, nor the crimes of which they are accused or the evidence against them. It a system from the pages of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, and is the same as the perverted judicial systems of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And Cameron also wanted to make street demonstrations more difficult by passing legislation that would restrict the right to march and demonstrate under the pretence of protecting local residents from ‘nuisance’.
With this latest threat to Channel 4, the Tories have shown themselves not only cowards and bullies, but an active threat to freedom of speech. Get them out, and Labour in!
Zelo Street published a very interesting piece on Sunday about our buffoonish Prime Minister’s signal lack of action in passing a report on possible Russian interference in British election. This report was prepared by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, chaired by Dominic Grieve, who appeared on Sky News to give an interview about it. The Committee is cross-party and non-partisan, considering topics like espionage, actions against our partners and subversion. The report was passed to Johnson to sign off on the 17th of October. The Prime Minister should have taken a maximum of ten days to clear it. He still hasn’t, which means that it will have to wait until April or May 2020 for publication. Downing Street replied that the process usually took six months. This was flatly denied by Grieve, who reiterated that it was only programmed to take 10 days, and added
“The suggestion that six weeks are needed is just astonishing. I really begin to worry about what the No 10 spokesmen are saying nowadays. They’re going out with things which are quite simply whopping untruths”.
What makes this particularly suspicious is that Johnson was not passed to see certain confidential information when he was our disastrous Foreign Secretary. And questions have been asked about his, Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, Cumming’s former colleague on Vote Leave, connections to Russia.
The Sage of Crewe writes
‘From there, one has to ask why Cummings, and perhaps Elliott and Bozo, want to stall the publication of that report. If there are credible accusations of interference by Russian state actors, let’s see them and see how they stand up. Likewise claims of interference by other foreign states in UK affairs – and especially elections.
For the report to be stalled, and a pack of lies advanced to excuse the stalling, merely compounds the suspicion that one or more of Dom, Matt and Bozo may not come out of publication smelling of roses. It could, of course, be leaked next week. Just a thought.’
But hold on! Isn’t Corbyn and the Labour party, who are evil subversives working for the Russians? Wasn’t there that allegation that Corbyn was a Czech spy, and that Michael Foot was the KGB agent codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’? Yes there were, and they were both lies. As was the deranged belief amongst the CIA, including the chief, James Jesus Angleton, that Harold Wilson was also a KGB agent, which Maggie also believed.
Now it seems that perhaps it’s the Tories and Boris, who are really in league with the Russians and have something to hide. Just like the allegations against Trump, whom BoJob resembles more and more.
Mike’s put up several articles pointing out that Tweezer’s Brexit deal is incredibly desperate. No-one wants it, whether they’re extreme-right Leave supporters, or left-wing Remainers. Or even left-wing Leave supporters, who certainly exist and were one element in the vote to Leave last year. Tweezer has thus been running around trying to get the British public to support it, and has appealed to the Labour party to do so as well. 26 Labour party MPs turned up to the Tory briefing, and at present they’re undecided. Only half of them will vote for it, if that. And if they do, then they will earn the hatred and resentment of the voters, who put them in parliament for their betrayal of ordinary working people to the Tories.
Here’s a video RT put up showing Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in which he urged the House to reject it. Corbyn says
(The) Prime Minister says that if we reject this deal, it will take us back to square one. The truth is, Mr Speaker, under this government we’ve never got beyond square one, the botched deal is a bad deal for this country, and all yesterday did is mark the end of this government’s failed and miserable negotiations, there can be no doubt that this deal would leave us with the worst of all worlds, no say over future rules and no certainty for the future.
Ploughing on is not stoic, it’s an act of national self-harm. The Prime Minister may have achieved agreement across 27 heads of state, but she’s lost support of the country. This deal is not a plan for the future of Britain, so for the good of the nation, the House has very little choice but to reject this deal.
Massive applause and uproar.
I hope the whole deal collapses, along with May’s government, they have to call a new election and Corbyn wins. If Tweezer gets kicked out tomorrow, it won’t be too soon.
Another vapid, empty piece of spin from Tweezer. I heard this today on the breakfast news, and really couldn’t let it go.
Over the past few days, May has been running around trying to negotiate trade deals with the Chinese. When asked about the negotiations to leave the EU, May responded ‘I’m getting what the British public want from Brexit’.
It’s a bald lie. For a start, a large part of the British population didn’t vote ‘Leave’. The majority of Scots and Ulster people voted to remain. It’s only the English that voted to leave the EU. And an increasing number of them have changed their minds, so there’s growing support for a second referendum to be taken on this issue.
And May’s own party is hopelessly divided on the issue. Mike has put up articles on the coterie of Hard Brexiteers that has coalesced around various cabinet members and leading Tories, including Young Master Rees-Mogg. For them, it’s not so much what the public wants that’s important, as what’s important to them and their donors and supporters as managers and senior executives in the financial sector. They’d like to turn Britain into another tax haven just outside the Eurozone, as this would benefit the banking industry. Never mind the damage that it would do to manufacturing, or the immense poverty that would be inflicted on the ordinary working people of the UK as they repeal even more workers’ rights and destroy the very last remnants of the Health Service and welfare state. Just so long as those bankers’ bonuses keep rolling in, and there are nice, fat dividends for the shareholders.
And the Tory party, and particularly May, has always been extremely vague about what kind of Brexit deal they would strike. Remember a few years ago when May was mechanically intoning ‘Brexit means Brexit’ at every speech and interview, all the while glaring at her interlocutors as if it was them, not her, who was unbelievably stupid, simply for asking the question. She had nothing to offer, and could make absolutely no promises. But like Maggie Thatcher, her response to a difficult, reasonable question she couldn’t answer was to go on the offensive and try to make the other person look stupid. I can remember how Maggie replied with the highly considered, detailed response ‘Oh, you stupid man!’ after one journalist dared to ask her a question she couldn’t answer. ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a response in a similar vein, though without Thatcher’s ad hominem abuse.
Then there are the jokes Merkel has been making at Tweezer’s expense. I blogged yesterday, following Mike, about the way Frau Kanzlerin has been joking about the circular nature of negotiations. May will say to her, ‘Make me an offer’. Merkel will respond, ‘We don’t have to. You’re leaving.’ At which May will repeat, vacuously, her appeal. ‘Make me an offer’. It’s less a business negotiation between equals as May begging for some kind of deal, no matter how bad.
And it shows that the one thing that May is definitely not getting is what the public wants from Brexit.
But all we’re getting from her and the rest of the Tories is more lies and spin to try and deceive us into believing it’s so.
Mike over at Vox Political put up an interesting piece today, reporting the findings of an employment silk, Michael Ford, QC, to the TUC on the employees’ rights that could be lost if Britain leaves the European Union. These include regulations on working time, the rights that can be transferred from one employer to another if an organisation is taken over or outsourced; protection for agency workers; the current levels of compensation paid to the victims of discrimination; and the rights of the workers’ representatives to be consulted in the case of major changes to a company, such as in the recent negotiations over the fate of British steel.
And these are not the only rights that are at risk. Other rights are also, and that those that remain may only be enforced by British courts if Britain decides to leave.
Mike also points out that depending on the British courts to help you in a legal battle over your rights with an employer won’t be much help, as Michael Gove has cut legal aid.
Let’s be clear about this: while many people are worried about immigration, it’s employment rights that are really at the heart of this move. The Conservatives have always hated Brussels primarily because of the social charter and the protection it gives European workers, not just because, or even necessarily primarily because they consider it a threat to British sovereignty, as expressed in books like ‘The Abolition of Britain’ and similar scaremongering nonsense. Dennis Skinner in his autobiography makes the point that there isn’t any real freedom of movement within the EU. This is shown by the imprisonment of the refugees and other unfortunates in the migrant camp at Calais. Those foreign workers, who come to Britain are brought in by the big companies through gang masters. This is an important point. Skinner makes no secret in his book that he would like Britain to leave the EU, but not because of UKIP, whom he aptly describes as ‘turbo-charged Tories’. Skinner makes a good point. However, at the moment the only people behind the campaign to take Britain out of the EU are extreme right-wing Tories like Boris, Gove and Priti Patel. All of them wish to strip British workers of the rights to have them labouring like their counterparts in the sweatshops of the Developing World. All for the profits of big business. Patel and her fellow Tories made that very clear in the book Britannia Unchained.
Don’t be taken in. Immigration is actually an irrelevant diversion to the real issues driving the Tory Brexit campaign. It’s what Farage and the rest of this gang want people to think it’s all about, while the real reason they’re promoting Brexit is to deprive us all, whether we’re Black, White, Asian, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or whatever, of our employment rights under European law.
The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism site, Hope Not Hate, has also been having a good laugh at the spectacle of Polish and British Nazis, including Kevin Layzell, campaigning in London the other day to get everyone to vote to leave the EU. This would obviously be something of an own goal for the Poles. They’re here through the provision in the EU constitution that allows EU citizens to move freely around Europe. As Hope Not Hate points out, this presumably means they all want to be deported.
It also undermines some of the daft conspiracy theories about the secret nature of the EU. Some of the madder Eurosceptics argue that the EU is really a secret Fascist state, similar to the attempts by the Nazis during the Second World War to present the Axis and the Nazi occupation of western Europe and its puppet regimes as a trans-national superstate to protect Europe from Communism. Oswald Mosley tried drumming up support for something similar after the War under the slogan, ‘Europe a Nation’. The EU isn’t a Fascist creation, and was set up in opposition to such aggressive nationalism. And nobody was interested in Mosley’s ideas either, although he made much of having the support of surviving Nazis.
But this raises an interesting point which contradicts the whole idea of the EU as a Fascist state. If it was, then why are all the Nazis like Britain First, Kevin Layzell and the rest of them trying to oppose it? After all, if it really was a return to the Nazi Reich, and Oswald Mosley’s ‘Europe a Nation’, you’d think they’d all be enthusiastically for it.
Mike over at Vox Political has put up another piece, this time from the Guardian, about the extremely ugly racism at the heart of the Brexit campaign. Arabella Arkwright, a businesswoman on the board and finance committee of the Vote Leave campaign, was forced to resign after the Groan asked her a few awkward questions about some of her retweets.
One of the Twitter messages she passed on was a comment from someone saying that they would be glad to give up Chicken Tikka Masal if it got ‘seventh century barbarism’ – meaning Islam – out of Britain. She retweeted it with her own message, ‘No to Sharia Law. Bye Bye, chicken tikka’.
What brought her down, however, was a picture of a White girl surrounded by women clad in burqas with the caption, ‘Why didn’t you stop them, granddad?’
Arkwright has denied that she’s racist, and says she abhors racism in every form.
To which Mike asks the obvious question whether anybody really believes this, and if so, why.
Yesterday, the world was shocked by the news that Omar Mateen from Afghanistan had gone into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire with a gun. 50 people were killed and another 50 were injured before the thug was finally shot by the cops. Today, people have been lighting candles in remembrance, and sending their hopes, prayers and best wishes to friends, lovers and relatives of the victims and the people of Orlando. People around the world, whatever their sexuality, are standing with the gay community to show their hate and disgust at the crime.
Unfortunately, some morons over here have chosen to learn the wrong lesson. Mike put up two posts yesterday about the effect this would have on the Vote Leave campaign. In the first he expressed his fears that they would seize on it to promote more fears of immigrants. And in the second, he expressed his disgust at finding them realised. Some idiots in the ‘Leave’ campaign had stuck up a piece warning that if Britain didn’t leave the EU, something like it would happen here.
This last piece has an eye-opening, and eye-watering list of the stupid reasons some people gave for shooting others. These include domestic arguments in which one spouse has grabbed the gun, so the other grabbed it and shot the other one.
In fact, Britain already has had something like the mass killing in Orlando. This was 7/7, when four suicide bombers killed and maimed hundreds on a bus and in the tube. Those four butchers weren’t immigrants, however. They’d been born here, and were 2nd or 3rd generation. They certainly weren’t recent arrivals off the boat or plane. And many of the idiots, who’ve gone off to join al-Qaeda or ISIS, and so dedicate their lives to ending those of others in the name of a crazed misinterpretation of Islam, have been exactly like them: the British-born children of immigrants.
As for the crime itself, unfortunately there have been more than enough White Americans fouling the airwaves over the other side of the Pond with demands and exhortations for their compatriots to do something similar. One of the videos Secular Talk put up a few days ago was about a right-wing radio host – or politico – who asked why they didn’t shoot trans people anymore. Well, I guess there are a variety of reasons, but I would think that the main one was that people had sympathy with those, who felt they were of the wrong biological gender, because they had medical condition that was causing them distress, rather than that they were wicked or perverted.
Secular Talk also put up a piece from another right-wing talk radio programme, in which a frothing nutter ranted about how people should be rioting in the streets about gay marriage and the rise of gay equality in America. He seemed to think it was a cause for bloody revolution. My guess there is that many people have come to realise that whatever their own views on homosexuality, it’s with a consenting adult and doesn’t affect a person’s moral worth. Being attracted to one’s own sex does not mean that they don’t pay their taxes, support their local sports teams, give to charity and otherwise behave exactly like the rest of the population. One Christian American woman expressed her absolute lack of support for banning gay marriage by stating that she was in ‘a Christ-centred marriage’ with her husband. Now gays had the right to marry. So she had to check her own. ‘No,’ she said, ‘still in a Christ-centred marriage with my husband’. Another man from one of the Southern states put up a video in which he went poking around looking for any gays that might suddenly have fallen out of the sky, to inundate America with gayness. Nope, despite the passage of gay marriage, he couldn’t find any more gays suddenly materialising around the place. It was an ironic attempt to show what a non-issue it all was.
I’ve also no doubt that this atrocity would have delighted Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a right-wing televangelist with the usual hatred of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan. He also hated feminists and gays. When Orlando started holding gay pride marches, Falwell started frothing out the mouth and declared that they couldn’t shake their fists at God like that. Instead, the Almighty would punish them with an asteroid, or earthquake or tsunami. Or something. The local newspaper asked the town’s Roman Catholic bishop what he thought of it. The reverend gentleman opined that he thought, overall, the people of his fair city were decent, god-fearing folk. ‘If God was going to send an asteroid,’ he thought, ‘you’d think He’d start with Las Vegas’. Good point.
You can also bet that over the next few days and weeks you’re going to hear mass whining from the NRA and the gun lobby about how liberals are unfairly using this to deprive decent, law-abiding Americans of their right to have high calibre, military-grade firearms. When massacres like these have occurred, including those at schools, they’ve immediately seized on them to go on the offensive. Often highly offensive. Instead of depriving people of guns, more people should have them, including school children. Then the little mites could shoot back the next time a maniac walked in, or one of their fellows went berserk, and opened fire. We’ll probably here something similar now, with gun-nuts asserting that at least all the men in the nightclub should have been packing, ready to defend themselves and the women.
Given what human nature is like, is should be obvious that the last thing that makes places like schools and nightclubs safer is idiots coming in tooled up. Bullying and gang fights tend to be a fact of school life, which parents and teachers and school staff have to deal with. Now imagine what would happen if all of the little darlings involved had guns, and started blazing away.
It’s the same with nightclubs. Fights break out in pubs and nightclubs, when people have drunk too much, spilled someone’s drink, tried to move in on their partner, or simply looked at them the wrong way. People can get seriously hurt, but most of the time, they ain’t fatal. Now imagine what would happen if a boozed-up lout suddenly started to wave a gun around in a roomful of other drunken, gun-toting louts. You don’t have to be a genius to see how that could easily end in mass carnage, rather than the weight of overwhelming firepower forcing the other dude to put his gun away.
Quite apart from the fact that schools should be for learnin’, and nightclubs for dancing away the evening and generally having fun. Guns should have no place in either.
I’m still a bit annoyed about the Vote Leave’s scaremongering last night about Turks, Albanians and Romanians all threatening to abandon their homelands and march across Europe to get into Britain. Frankly, it ain’t going to happen. Apart from the fact that Turkey, for example, isn’t expected to reach the criteria for EU membership for another 30 years, the number of Turks, who actually have passports is only 8 million. Yet if you believe Vote Leave’s bilge and UKIP, all 75 million of that ancient and historic country’s people are going to leave Anatolia, just to come to Britain. Furthermore, despite the freedom of movement written into the European constitution, there are still some border checks in the Schengen area. So remaining in Europe doesn’t mean that millions of foreigners will sudden be heading over the Channel anytime soon.
As for the particular threat from Albanians and Macedonians, I think this is going to be very overblown too. Bristol’s a very diverse city in terms of the various ethnic minorities, who’ve settled here. Apart from Blacks and Asians, there were also Poles and other peoples from eastern Europe, who arrived here after the War. There are also long-established Italian families, such as Verecchia’s, who are ice cream vendors. Bristol also has an Albanian community. I don’t know how large it is, or indeed anything about it. I only know it exists from looking along the shelves at the Central Library in town, and finding a few books in that language. One of them was on Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The fact that they’re here, but are otherwise unremarkable indicates, I hope, that there’s little in the way of friction between them and other Bristolians. I certainly haven’t noticed outbreaks of mass prejudice against them in my part of Bristol, though that doesn’t mean it necessarily doesn’t exist.
The same goes for Romanians. Remember how UKIP were telling us all that millions of Romanians were threatening to come over, along with a similar number of Bulgarians? In the end, instead of the millions only a few thousand or so arrived. According to an item on the local news a few years ago, Bristol is also the major centre of the Romanian community in the UK. We have so many of them in the city, that the government decided to locate their consulate here. I’m pleased that our city has such links with a part of Europe that was previously closed to westerners. Again, I might be wrong, but I haven’t noticed any particular problems with those that have come here.
So, from the fact that Bristol’s Albanians and Romanians are so un-newsworthy, I think that these people present very little of a problem as immigrants. I’m aware that there are criminal gangs from eastern Europe, and that human trafficking from the former Soviet bloc is a problem. But from my city’s experience, I don’t see immigrants from these nations are likely to cause any problems, and I don’t believe that there’ll be the mass migration with which Vote Leave and UKIP are trying to scare us all.
It is just scaremongering, and should be treated as such.
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