Doing the BNP’s job
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy a brief but hearty laugh at the news that the BNP’s membership list has been leaked online*. This morning some of the people on that list will be experiencing the same feeling as the anti-fascist campaigners that the BNP like to photograph and out on the Internet. There’s also the hope that pissed-off members might sue the party into bankrupt oblivion.
The crowning jewel of the story is that the BNP, who only this month called the Human Rights Act ’surely one of the most pernicious pieces of legislation ever passed by the mother of Parliaments,’ and reiterated its promise to repeal it when the party – don’t laugh – becomes a ‘British Nationalist government’, have now asked the police to investigate breaches of the Human Rights Act.
Meanwhile, more dangerous demagogues lie closer to the centre of power. Namely, immigration minister Phil ‘You can’t come in‘ Woolas. He wants a ‘mature debate’ about immigration. What, another one? We’ve had a lot of calls for debates from New Labour and this is no different. Woolas fails to say who is supposed to be having this debate, what its formal parameters are, or where it’s to take place. Is he really interested in dialogue with anyone other than tabloid newspaper editors?
It’s impossible to have a debate about immigration with Woolas anyway because – as Obsolete points out – Woolas has already poisoned the well with accusations of lawyers and NGOs turning the immigration system into ‘an industry’. He say sympathetic organisations have ‘vested interests’ without mentioning that unsympathetic organisations like, say, the Home Office, have them too.
NGOs and migration lawyers Woolas says, “by giving false hope and by undermining the legal system [they] actually cause more harm than they do good.” Where that leaves the 200 people who turned out to support the Kachepa family, for example, as they were dragged from their home by Home Office officials, or the communities across the country working to prevent friend and neighbours from being deported, Woolas doesn’t say. Maybe he’d suggest these misguided souls just aren’t reading the right newspapers although I think you’d struggle to paint the residents of Glasgow’s Kingsway estate as Guardianistas.
What Woolas can’t admit even to himself, however, is that it’s Home Office practices and its seeming inability to interpret its own legislation with any degree of humanity that has led to the ‘immigration industry’ springing up. The doors kicked in at dawn, the homosexuals told to go back to Iran and be discreet, the teenagers forced to dress in front of Home Office officials, the asylum seekers assaulted by private security teams, Yarl’s Wood, the human beings processed on an unfeeling and – yes – industrial scale.
And on and on and on. It’s New Labour that created a market for NGOs and immigration lawyers. It seems to have escape Woolas that the volunteers who staff these organisations would probably much rather be doing something else than battling institutionalised misanthropy. Asylum seekers came here looking for protection from the British state and ended up needing protecting from it.
(If you want a flavour of how the ‘immigration industry’ works in this country, visit the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns website and sign up for the email list. Get involved with the campaigns if you can.)
See also: Obsolete, Philip, Anton.
* I’m not linking to the list and anyone doing so in the comments will be deleted. If you want to join an avenging mob get thee to Guido Fawkes.
Posted on November 19th, 2008 at 9:18am under Human rights, New Labour, UK politics
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• 19 Comments |
…wait, it gets better: Nick Griffin was on Today this morning claiming that the leaking of the list ‘proved’ that the BNP weren’t all lumpen skinheads (as opposed to proving that bigots and racists come in all shapes, sizes, genders and professions…including ballerinas)
“Spain is on its fourth one-off amnesty and the result of that is more dead bodies on the beach of people coming over from Africa.”
What a thoroughly vile man he is.
[...] their delight at the discomfiture of BNP activists and supporters. Chicken Yoghurt points out this delicious irony. The crowning jewel of the story is that the BNP, who only this month called the Human Rights Act [...]
[...] their delight at the discomfiture of BNP activists and supporters. Chicken Yoghurt points out this delicious irony. The crowning jewel of the story is that the BNP, who only this month called the Human Rights Act [...]
[EDIT by Justin]: Sorry, that link’s a no-no.
[...] McKeating makes a deliciously ironic observation: The crowning jewel of the story is that the BNP, who only this month called the Human Rights Act [...]
My God, this site is advertised under the heading ‘Best of the Web’ in the Guardian. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find it’s just another lot of liberal lefties who cannot wait for the native Brits to be replaced by a multicultural melting pot. Hopefully one day we will see a public list giving personal details of all those liberals who promoted the ethnic cleansing of Britain. That should be a hearty laugh!
Yes, indeed. If there’s one thing our Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Roman-Celtic natives don’t need to get into, it’s a multicultural melting pot.
And don’t forget the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and their heritage.
I thought they only had sex with each other. Not so much a contribution to the melting pot as a few persistent bits of gristle that are well past their sell-by date.
I suppose that would be a list like the one the Nazis had that listed jews and gypsies and other groups of people that were holding back Germany, would it?
(I’m not inviking Godwins Law, am I?)
I forgot about the (in)vikings. Add them to the melting pot as well.
(I think we get a pass on Godwin’s with this, don’t we?)
My God, this site is advertised under the heading ‘Best of the Web’ in the Guardian. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find it’s just another lot of liberal lefties…
Yeah, the Guardian endorsing a site frequented by liberal lefties, who’d have thought it.
“Hopefully one day we will see a public list giving personal details of all those liberals who promoted the ethnic cleansing of Britain. That should be a hearty laugh!”
Do try and keep up Lin old chap.
I’m afraid those you seek to pin a simplistic label on have already been beaten to the draw as far a list of people promoting the ethnic cleansing of Britain is concerned.
It was already published earlier this week. There are, apparently, some 10,000 on the list.
[...] a good kicking. And to add an hilarious dash of irony to the proceedings, Justin at Chicken Yoghurt points out that… The crowning jewel of the story is that the BNP, who only this month called the Human Rights [...]
[...] Harrowell crunches the numbers on that BNP membership list: Now, if immigration or population growth really is causing people to go fascist, we’d expect [...]
[...] Tim, I thought I’d email the office of Home Office minister Phil Woolas. I don’t regard the minister as a man of good conscience so it’s probably futile appealing to that part of his make-up. I wondered if there was [...]
[...] with the issue of immigration. Woolas himself has never played politics with the issue, has he? Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, [...]
[...] did he? Woolas has never made political populist points linking immigration to unemployment. Woolas has never appended the word ‘industry’ to the word ‘immigration’ in an attempt to smear those with the bass neck to wish New Labour would carry out its immigration [...]