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| Modern Take On an Old Poster campaign Nothing Has Changed "Same Old Tories" |
Some of headlines coming from the British Conservative government and these so-called "newspapers" wouldn't look out of place on BNP literature. I loathe to refer to them as newspapers as they carry very little in the way of news, but what they do carry is heavily slanted and stacked statistics against immigrants and nearly always written in such a way as to totally mislead the public. Do these "publications" really carry any weight with normal rational thinking people? Or do normal rational thinking people avoid these so-called "newspapers" like the plague? I would dearly love to believe so, however, a frightening and cursory glance at some of the comments that accompany these " newspaper stories" can be a very sobering experience, they can only be describe as "racially vile", yet the papers concerned allow them to stand and in the case of the Daily Mail their moderators actually vet comments before deeming them fit for publication on their website- shocking!
It seems that every time that the prime minister, David Cameron, gets himself in one of his now infamous scrapes or gaffes and his standing in the polls begins to suffer, he manages to change the subject and starts talking "policy proposals" which nearly always appear to attack immigrants, it is as if he uses "immigrant bashing" as a get out of jail free card. We have long since realised that "attacking immigrants" along with "attacking" single mothers and generally denigrating all those (genuine or not, immigrant or not) forced to live on state benefits, is a tried and tested "electioneering tool" that the Conservative party uses with impunity at election times, but now it appears they have cranked it up a few notches and use it as a way to get David Cameron and the Tory party in general out of a "little local difficulty" of their very own making.
This is a very interesting report in the Guardian "Anti-Immigrant Bile On Sale Now At Your Asian Newsagent". Surely we are better than this? Surely we haven't sunk as low as the BNP? Is this really the kind of extreme right wing propaganda that we have come to expect as norm from the Tory government? And more, do we as a nation no longer see this as deeply disturbing and just plain wrong? When did Britain turn into the "nasty" country? When did Britain become desensitised and immune to such dreadful right wing anti-immigrant bias? What an anomaly these headlines are in the right wing press because without the thousands of Asian newsagents and corner shops that sell the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Telegraph, these newspapers would not have a circulation and so would cease to exist in our shops.
Recently the Home Secretary, Theresa May, was embroiled in a spat with her senior civil servant in charge of Border Force, Brodie Clark, that resulted in Theresa May publicly admonishing Mr Clark in the newspapers and in parliament before the man had a chance to defend himself, he has since resigned and accused May of destroying his reputation and is suing the Home Secretary for constructive dismissal. Mr Clark has also appeared in front of the select committee, where he was shamelessly attacked by Tory MPs trying to get Theresa may off of the hook, the real story behind this will come out when Mr Clark appears before a tribunal.
Take the recent publication about drug seizures, the Tories have heralded their "tightening up" at UK borders for what they described as a doubling of of cases caught at UK borders, when in fact it was the direct opposite and there was a serious decline in the volume of drug seizures. Sir Michael Scholar has demanded the immigration minister, Damian Green, assure him that the advance briefing of partial class A drug seizures figures was not done to generate positive news coverage days ahead of the release of national statistics that showed an actual annual decline in the volume of drug seizures.
"Were it to be the case, the authority's view is that this would be highly corrosive and damaging public confidence in official statistics," Scholar warns Green.
The statistics authority statement says the latest Home Office statistics published on 10 November showed a fall in the volume of seizures of class A drugs in the most recent period.
"This contrasts with the 4 November press release, which highlights a large increase in seizures albeit for a different time period. The 4 November press release, which appears not to have been published on either the Home Office or the UK Border Agency websites, and seems to have been distributed only to a select group of journalists, makes no reference to the forthcoming bulletin," says Sir Michael's statement.
It turns out that the figures that the prime minister and Tory party have been touting were completely untrue and deliberately misleading. This is indicative of the way the Tory party is using distorted figures about highly emotive issues such as drugs and immigration in press releases to deliberately mislead the British public.
A typically misleading headline from the Daily Express screams that "90% of immigrants live in England", however, when you read further you discover that the so-called research has been carried out by an extreme right wing group calling themselves "Migration Watch" who regularly distort and slant statistics to suit their own anti-immigration agenda. Much of the anti-immigration bias in mainstream media originates from right-wing 'think-tanks' like Migration Watch and their blatant misuse of statistics.
So the initial headline that "90% of net migration live in England" may be correct but this is probably because this is where the work is and broken down we see that while an estimated 572,000 people entered the UK on a long-term basis in the year to June 2010, 346,000 emigrated. So the 90% figure touted by Migration Watch and the Daily Express is just a sensationalist headline. 572.000 minus 346,000 leaves a total net figure of 226.000 and 90% of that figure spread over England really is not that much. certainly not as alarming as the Daily Express headline has made it appear!
In August 2010 7 HMRC employees were sacked for racial abuse and for deliberately underpaying ethnic minority claimants. It followed an internal investigation into nine men based at the HM Revenue and Customs call centre in Belfast..The allegations of racially-motivated gross misconduct were investigated last January when a complaint was lodged by somebody who said that their records had been changed.
However when the Daily mail covered the story, it was covered in such a way as to invoke outrage against the ethnic minority claimants rather than the seven employees sacked for racial abuse! At the time the BBC gave no further details about the victims other than that they lived in the UK and had now been fully reimbursed. No further details existed on the HMRC news site either, however the Daily Mail have added a detail that does not seem to exist elsewhere and was seen in their article title: ‘Racist taxmen who deliberately under-paid child benefits to non-nationals are sacked‘. This title implies that the claimants were actually 'non nationals' which infers to the Daily Mail reader that these people should not be claiming anyway. This diverts the reader's attention *away* from the fact that this was deliberate serious and fraudulent systematic racial abuse and subliminally concentrates their minds why we should not be paying benefits to "non-nationals, and further the daily Mail provides absolutely no proof that these people were non-nationals. This is yet another complete non-story and red herring designed solely to stoke up anti-immigrant tensions and completely distorts what was originally a very serious racially motivated crime.
So what has all of this got to do with David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and the Conservative party? Since the coming of the coalition government David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg have managed to make politics even more dispiriting than most people already believe and their reliance on "immigrant bashing" and "welfare recipient bashing" and persistently painting an untrue and negative image of our country and our economy just to further their own right wing ideology and political fortunes has not only been harmful to race relations, it has actually greatly affected the UK economy, which in turn affects each and everyone of us. This Tory-led government and in particular the British Prime Minister, David Cameron are playing deadly and dangerous mind games with the British public.
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| David Cameron was Responsible For This Tory 2005 Election Poster |
Tory "Racism" Throughout The Years!
In 2010 - David Cameron was hit by a Tory race row amid claims that up to 100 activists have signed a petition demanding the deselection of one of his leading black candidates.
In Novemeber 2007 - David Cameron was drawn into a row over race after a candidate in a high-profile Parliamentary seat praised Enoch Powell for his notorious 'rivers of blood' speech, which warned that Britain was 'literally mad' to allow widespread immigration
Race Row Over Enoch Powell "Rivers of Blood" Speech
In March 2007 a top Tory Patrick Mercer (yes that Patrick Mercer) was axed over a
"Army Race Row"
September 2011 - TORY councillor Bob Frost is no longer teaching at Sir Roger Manwood’s School in Sandwich.
Race Row Tory Councillor Quits Teaching Post at Sandwich school.
August 2010 - Bring back slavery Tory row returns to haunt future candidate.
The scramble to succeed Michael Rock
as the chair of true blue youth wing Conservative Future.
In July 2008 - The Conservative party was dragged into a fresh race row last night after a frontbench peer made a controversial comment during a House of Lords debate.
Lord Dixon-Smith, the Tory spokesman for communities and local government, referred to a problem with a new government housing agency as the 'nigger in the woodpile'.
Tories involved in fresh race row after leading Tory's "nigger" remark
In March 2010 -A black businessman who accused the Conservative Party in Birmingham of racial discrimination will get the chance to put his claims to a judge.
Judge Will Hear Tory Race Row Allegations
I could go on and on the internet is crammed full of Tory rows over race, it appears they are still very much the Nasty Party that Theresa May painted them as all those years ago.
If Cameron senses he is losing ground he gives himself and his "nasty racist party" a quick right-wing populist fix. In February 2010 just weeks before the general election was called, David Cameron's Tories were accused of resorting to Dog whistle politics after the Conservative leader appeared on the front of flyers saying the floodgates had been opened to mass immigration. Critics blasted the Tory flyers as alarmist and misleading because they imply limits could be imposed on entrants from EU countries such as Poland and they cannot. caps can only be imposed on NON EU immigration.
The Tory party were forced to distance itself from the hard-hitting material, which was put out under the name of Cameron's home affairs spokesman, Andrew Rosindell. It appears that Cameron hasn't stopped fanning the flames of racism be cause he is still indulging in "dog whistle politics"and is not averse to generally playing the race card when it suits him.
For me the behaviour of David Cameron and his Tories holds the most vile unpleasant racist undertones, reminiscent of the 1964 inner city of Birmingham, Smethwick campaign, which ran posters of "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour" and where one of the racist orchestrator's who thought up that vile slogan and ran that hideous racist campaign remained a Tory councillor right up until the late 1980's. if the Tories were ever serious about purging their party of racism, then they would sack anyone found guilty of promoting it.
Careless talks Sparks Riots!
How long will it be before David Cameron and his Tory cronies manage to conjure up a full scale race riot in this country? We have already have riots sparked last summer by disaffected youth, people who Cameron constantly talks down to, people who he blames for the riots when the vast majority are good, decent, honest people. Yet again this was David Cameron diverting attention away from the fact that his impaired judgement prevented him from returning from his holiday, only coming home after images of lawlessness and riots and burning buildings were beamed across the world and attempting to place blame anywhere and on anyone rather than himself.
Cameron, Osborne and the useful idiot Clegg are playing a deadly game of setting immigrants against indigenous population, private sector against public sector, disabled against able bodied people, workers against the unemployed, single parent families against couples with families, childless people against people with children, young against old, black against white, Muslims against non Muslims, it just goes on and on, this is the deeply offensive Tory government we have in power today who are driving a wrecking ball through our economy, NHS, welfare, police and defence and when they make a mess they never accept responsibility, they simply turn around and bizarrely blame the Labour party or anyone else like the former head of Border Force, Brodie Clark, or divert attention with misleading talk about how "tough they are going to be on immigration".What the Tories are doing is plumbing the depths of desperation and right-wing idealism which exposes how deep rooted the problem of racism still is in the Conservative party and David Cameron is no exception, only now he has added a whole host of other issues into his armoury The Tory party has not improved, it has just got better at hiding its "institutionalised racism" and for that it is even nastier than ever.
Related article
19.04.2001: Tory MPs reject anti-racism code
19.04.2001: Tory MPs reject anti-racism code
6 comments:
Just checking Crosbie's biog - it was Libertas he chose to work for, not Veritas. Significantly, he had no qualms about working with Boris.
That's odd - my first comment seems to have disappeared.
The reference to Australian political strategist Lynton Crosbie was referring to his close collaboration with Cameron in the racist 2005 campaign. Crosbie, hardly a shining example of moral probity himself, seems to have found Cameron so objectionable that no amount of money offered by Lord Ashcroft would tempt him to work on the 2010 campaign.
Nicky, I haven't removed them, I'll have a look in the record see if they are there.
Nicky I think I found it, it was poster under "I'll cut the deficit not the NHS", must have been a glitch. I'll post it below.
Nicky said...
Thanks for highlighting this issue, Gracie. It's a common theme with Tory supporting knuckle-draggers on internet forums to claim that Labour 'opened the floodgates to immigrants'. This all stems from the racist propaganda coming from the tabloids.
What complicates the issue is that it's often Tory-voting employers who actually prefer to hire foreign workers - simply because they can pay them less! That aspect is never reported - instead it's implied Labour have some kind of agenda. The ludicrous claim that Labour want to import voters for themselves is often bandied about.
Our press needs to have some kind of code of conduct to prevent this sort of poisonous and misleading propaganda. Strangely, the papers can rightly condemn the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence and yet seem oblivious of the fact that their own actions create the environment for that sort of brutal racism.
Cameron's role in the overtly racist 2005 Tory election campaign is often overlooked. Cameron was later anxious to portray himself as a right-on, Notting Hill-dwelling, modern, not at all racist new type of Tory. (Ha bloody ha.) It was noted by blogger Sturdy Alex that at this year's Tory conference that the three black Tories in the audience were all sitting near Sam Cam - just to ensure that viewers got the false impression of diversity.
Cameron's colleague during the 2005 campaign was Australian political strategist, Lynton Crosbie. Crosbie was very highly regarded by the Tories for his role in helping Australia's conservative party (the Liberals, appropriately enough)through his misleading but highly effective campaigning, much of it preying on the electorate's fear of immigration (ironic for a nation of mostly immigrants).
Significantly, even an abject toerag such as Crosbie found Cameron so repellently objectionable, that when Cameron wanted Crosbie to mastermind the Tories' 2010 campaign, Crosbie refused. Ashcroft kept upping the amount of money he was offering Crosbie to run the campaign, but still he refused, saying he was going to work instead with fringe party, Veritas. Conservative Home tried to downplay Crosbie's refusal, but it seemed pretty clear that Crosbie's refusal was down to his low opinion of Cameron.
November 21, 2011 9:28:00 AM GMT
Great Post Nicky and thanks for posting it. I wonder why Cameron upset Crosby so much? Pity he doesn't talk, we may then get some truth about Cameron. I detest Cameron and Osborne, the last person I detested in politics was Margaret Thatcher.
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