Labour betrayed the working class over immigration
From: Express Online, March 7, 2013

THROUGHOUT the Labour Party’s long, destructive period in office the party’s immigration policy represented a savage betrayal* of the British people.

As the floodgates opened to new arrivals the very fabric of our country was transformed. Vast swathes* of urban Britain became like a foreign land. Social cohesion collapsed. British workers were thrown on the economic scrapheap*. No occupying foreign invader could have done more damage to Britain than the treacherous*, unpatriotic governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. There is now growing public fury and despair over what has happened to our once well-ordered nation.

Opinion polls show that immigration has become the most important issue for the electorate, while the dramatic rise of the UK Independence Party has been partly fuelled by anger over the unceasing influx.

In a cynical bid to capitalise on this public backlash Labour leader Ed Miliband now pretends that his party has adopted a new approach to immigration. The old days of supporting open borders have gone, he promises. In comes a supposedly tougher strategy that puts the interests of the British people first. It would be hard to conceive of a more shameless exercise in political deceit* than this last farrago of drivel* from Miliband. Labour has not changed from the dark days of Brown and Blair.

An ideological attachment to mass immigration and multi-culturalism is written into the party’s DNA. What Miliband is really trying to do is not proclaim a new policy but to mislead the public. A ll his traits of hypocrisy, duplicity and opportunism were on full display in his party political broadcast last night. He said with phoney candour* that Labour “got it wrong on immigration”.

What a grotesque understatement.
In truth Labour almost wrecked our nation with their aggressive social revolution, in which the rate of immigration was deliberately cranked up* to almost 600,000 new arrivals every year.

Our democracy has been subverted by tribalism* at the ballot box, our justice system by sharia law. Vicious misogyny* is rampant*, reflected in the appalling incidence of honour killings and forced marriages. Incredibly the Home Office estimates that 24,000 girls in this country are at risk every year from the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation*. Miliband’s blatherings* last night would have been laughable were they not so offensive. He proclaimed in his broadcast that it is “not prejudiced” to worry about immigration yet Labour always painted critics of its open-door policy as xenophobes and racists.

  “A bigoted* woman,” was Gordon Brown’s notorious description of Rochdale voter Gillian Duffy when she dared to express her concerns about immigration. Only a few months ago Labour-run Rotherham council removed a child from the care of a couple who happened to be Ukip voters and were therefore deemed by the municipal race commissars to be unfit for the role of foster parents.

  That is the climate of institutionalised bullying that Labour created right across the civic bureaucracy, with their endless equality programmes and propaganda. Miliband concluded his broadcast by spouting the predictable cliché, “ diversity makes us a successful country”. That is patently nonsense. Britain was a far more successful country when we had a settled population.

The era of mass immigration has led to an almost permanent economic crisis and falling living standards, not least because of the intolerable strain* on our public infrastructure and the welfare state.

Indeed Miliband blithely* ignored the reality that our lax benefits system has acted as a magnet for huge numbers of immigrants, especially in terms of housing and child allowances. What is remarkable is that Labour was founded at the beginning of the last century to represent the British working class.

But Miliband’s party has spectacularly betrayed the very people it is meant to support. Miliband was Gordon Brown’s key ally yet the economic model they devised was expensive lunacy*: importing millions of people, most of them from Asia and Africa, to provide cheap labour while keeping five million Britons of working-age on the dole. It might have been economic insanity but Labour had their own narrow political reason for pushing ahead with mass immigration.

The fact is that 80 per cent of migrants vote Labour so the party hugely expanded its client base by demolishing our borders. In addition there was the ideological impulse. Contemptuous* of Britain’s heritage, riddled with* guilt about our past, filled with Marxist notions about victimhood and discrimination they were determined to refashion our society along the lines of their ideology. So the twin forces of mass immigration and multi-culturalism were used as weapons to create “a new social order” to quote the chilling words of Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman. Miliband was one of the architects of Labour’s immigration disaster. His broadcast should be treated with the same scorn that his party showed in office towards Britain’s national integrity.
813 words


Annotations:
* savage betrayal - brutaler Verrat
* swathes - Landstriche
* scrapheap - Müllhaufen
* treacherous - heimtückisch, trügerisch
* deceit - Täuschung
* farrago of drivel - Mischmasch von Unsin
* phoney candour - unechte Offenheit
* to crank up - ankurbeln
* tribalism - Stammessystem
* misogyny - Frauenfeindlichkeit
* rampant - um sich greifend, zügellos
* genital mutilation - Genitalverstümmelung
* blathering - Gequassel
* bigoted - engstirnig, vereingenommen
* to be deemed as - gelten als
* strain - Belastung
* blithely - ungeniert, unbekümmert, geflissendlich
* lunacy - Wahnsinn, Aberwitz
* contemptuous - verachtend, verächtlich
* to be riddled with - voll von etwas sein


Assignments:
1. The author of the text accuses Labour of having created 'a new social order'. What does this 'new order' look like today?
2. Why has the British working class suffered the most by past Labour governments?
3. Examine the choice of vocabulary in this text and say how it contributes to the mood in the text?
4. Can the issue of immigration in Britain compared to that in Germany? Take into account the different election systems.