BNP shamelessly lying in anti-immigration campaign
The Independent today had a major feature on the practice of the British National Party of lying about immigration in order to scare working-class white voters in east London into voting for them. Most recently, the claims include one about a university campus being regenerated in order to provide houses for asylum seekers or other newcomers, and a preposterous one about Africans being given £50,000 grants to buy houses in the area (this is preposterous because that amount of money will not buy you a room in London, much less a whole home).
This practice of telling "big lies" is an acknowledged part of BNP strategy, as noted in this Searchlight article (Searchlight is a magazine which keeps watch on the far right). Among the lies they circulated is a story about a girl being raped by asylum seekers, and one about a plan to turn a public library into a mosque, both entirely fabricated. Earlier this month, they issued a "scoop" in which a conveniently anonymous source revealed an "Islamist plot" to explode a fifth bomb on the 7th of July last year, which was supposedly intended to flood the Underground. Any such plan would have needed to be massive, requiring an inside job by men able to access a shallow tunnel under the Thames; the so-called scoop has no reference to this.
Johann Hari also has an article in the Indie today (best read at his homepage) about what I consider the elephant in the living-room in the BNP/immigration debate: the content of the popular press.
The right-wing press has spent a decade pumping out day-after-day propaganda that depicts asylum seekers as swan-baking, benefit-snatching criminals who surge into Britain in their hundreds of thousands to scrounge, steal and rape. Yet this week, those same journalists have been open-mouthed and astonished to discover that their campaign has had a real political effect. They have reported with hushed horror that one quarter of British people is now sufficiently soaked in this invented hate to consider voting in the local elections for the nakedly racist British National Party. Well, what did they expect?
The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, Anotnio Guterres, took the unprecedented step last year of warning the British press that they were stoking “dangerous” levels of hate against refugees – but they continued unabated. They invented more slanders against refugees than an entire issue of the Independent could list – imaginary Kurdish asylum seekers who turn out to be terrorists, fantasy figures of over a million “illegals” streaming in every year, and countless cookie-cutter rants claiming that bitterly poor people living on £38 a week in a damp council flat were being “hosed down with benefits”.
Read the whole thing (yeah, Johann Hari does sometimes talk sense).
Note (from Harry's Place): tomorrow there is to be a Day of Action against the BNP in Barking-Dagenham, Havering, Epping and Thurrock; leaflet downloadable here.
Comments
The invention of "asylum seeker" to replace "refugee" was a stroke of malevolent genius. All the same, there is logic to supporting the BNP at local elections: given that people are increasingly favouring community-based politics and politicians- even if you have ot invent a community to do so- it is inevitable that the largest community should define its interests in enmity to other communities and support a party that wants to get more for them out of the trough. It's also easy to understand the resentment of local people in areas- especially in London- that are both poor and expensive to live in and where property is hard to find when refugees are immediately given accomodation there. This is competition between two incompatible goods, not good and bad. On the one hand many of the people with skills and knowledge to deal with refugees live in London, on the other hand a lot of people in london have problems finding somewhere to live for themselves. In previous times- with D.P.s after WWII and Asians from East Africa- there was a policy of creating whole communities in disused service camps from which people could gradually move out. Now such places are sold at once for hypermarkets and the main purpose of policies to refugees seems to be to stop anyone wanting to come to Britain by destroying any virtues we ever had or claimed.
Posted by: Thersites | April 21, 2006 12:01 PM
we do not need any more asylum seaker, particularly muslims!!
Posted by: roger | May 7, 2006 12:56 AM
The UK is full, we don't need any more immigrant workers (except to jack up the house prices for the Buy To Let owners), mean time the worker are suffering, lower wages, poorer service and if you don't own a house, a hopless life with no chance of owning an average home in London (unless one happens to rake in 93,000 per year!). We need to take control of our boarders now, and stop the migration.
Posted by: Chris Ashley | September 15, 2006 11:01 PM