Migration: neither left not right

Just how hypocritical can the Daily Mail be? In attacking Leicester's finest, it whinges:

For more than 40 years, Left-wingers in politics and the media have successfully silenced rational debate on the impact of mass migration.

This is bull. For one thing, many of us on the left want a rational debate about migration - though what place the Mail would have in a rational debate about anything is open to question.
What's more, free migration is not about left and right. It's about freedom. Those of us who value freedom highly - me or Perry say - want free migration. Those who prioritize other values don't.
And it's here that the Mail is so hypocritical. Two of the great slogans of Thatcherism, supported by the Mail, were "management's right to manage" and "get on your bike and look for work"*.
But these are the principles behind free migration - that managers should be free to hire whomever they want, and that people should be free to look for work where they want.
Why, then, was the Mail so in favour of these slogans in the 80s, but so opposed to their application today?
Could it be that the Mail's only principle is hatred for the working class and foreigners?
* Yes. I know Tebbit didn't say that - but the sentiment was the same.

Comments

[Alex]

"Could it be that the Mail's only principle is hatred for the working class and foreigners?"

Yes.

This was a message from the Department of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

[Mark Wadsworth]

There was a rather entertaining Head-to-Head on the Beeb a few months back, where Gove and Toynbee agreed basically that immigration was good for the better off (cheaper labour etc) but bad for the poorest (cheaper labour etc). So the old 'left/right' sort of prejudices were totally swapped over.

You are right, the libertarian view must be that immigration is not something to be excised about, but it is a numbers thing.

If the UK said 'OK, you are all welcome', well, don't forget that there are about three billion people living in shitholes across the world who'd be here like a shot. I think that there is a maximum speed at which people can be absorbed/integrated (i.e. Australians hit ground running, with other groups there is a lot of resistance to integration).

[David Duff]

"Could it be that the Mail's only principle is hatred for the working class and foreigners?"

Almost comparable to the Left's hatred of the Daily Mail.

"This was a message from the Department of Simple Answers to Simple Questions."

From a simple mind, presumably! The majority of the readers of the Daily Mail are 'working class', so why on earth would the Mail hate them?

However, let us take our host's 'come one, come all' policy to its logical conclusion which is that anyone from anywhere who could scrape the price of a ticket would be welcome to this Island. Perhaps he could provide some answers to the following questions:

Where are they all going to live?

Who is going to pay for all their medical needs?

Who is going to pay to educate their children?

Will you be happy if, as 'zillions' of them pile in, they turn out not to be nice, cuddly progressives who share your libertarian outlook, but people with rather stern cultural views on how society should be regulated, particularly in relation to drink, sex, the place and deportment of women and, worst of all from your point of view, a theocratic belief in God?

And as their numbers increase and ours, by which I mean the indigenous English, Scots and Welsh, decrease as we make for the exit, how will you stop them from out-voting us and imposing their own views of society?

How do you think your beloved 'working classes' will like it as their wages are forced down, their traditional lives upturned and they find themselves foreigners in their own land?

Finally, is it possible that *you* hate the 'working class' more than the Mail?

[dearieme]

"For more than 40 years, Left-wingers in politics and the media have successfully silenced rational debate": that's not bullshit, there's lots of truth in it. I can remember Labour MPs and the like, back in the 60s and 70s, smugging away on TV and refusing debate, with the twee little expression "I'm not going to get into the numbers game". If that's not a refusal to engage in rational debate, what do you suppose it was? And as for silencing debate, of course they did, accusing everyone else of being Nazis, Racists, Fascists. Get a grip, Dillowbert.

[Robs]

Do you completely discount the effects of peoples culture on society, Chris? For example, do you really think that, given a western society of N people, adding another N people from, say, Afghanistan would necessarily be an improvement?

[Matt Munro]

"This is bull. For one thing, many of us on the left want a rational debate about migration - though what place the Mail would have in a rational debate about anything is open to question."

I'm sorry but wheeling out the left's favourite whipping boy - Daily Mail - just won't do (why are you all so obsessed with a paper no one under 60 reads anyway ?).
The fact is that for as long as I can remember (I'm 42) the left have insisted on "setting the terms of " (i.e censoring) the debate about immigration and shouted racism and worse at anyone who dared question the ludicrous "porous borders" concept. I well remember university campuses in the 1980s adopting a "no platform" policy for far right groups (far left was of course ok). You are guilty of this yourself by seeking to prescribe what is "rational" in the debate. A debate means a full and frank exchange of views, however disagreeable they may be to some people, anything else is censorship.

[Cleanthes]

You can have free migration OR a welfare state, but NOT BOTH, and even then, you can only have a welfare state in the context of a number of other fairly strict conditions, few of which currently hold in this country.

I would prefer free migration. The Mail recognises that we aren't going to get rid of the welfare state any time soon, so is campaigning against free migration.

I think the Mail is wrong, but then the Mail is libertarian of any stripe, so that's not really saying much.

[Rohan]

I agree Cleanthes.

More so a citizen/basic income.

[Cleanthes]

Sorry that should read

"the Mail is NOT libertarian"

obviously...

Rohan,

Probably. In principle a CBI is a great idea, and would certainly be a HUGE improvement on the moral hazard and inefficiency of the current welfare set up. However, I'm not sure that it can be supportable with open migration.

I'm also nervous that the managerialists would enforce a gruesome implementation of an ID card/Database alongside a CBI - if anyone had the cojones to try and introduce it...

[a very public sociologist]

The blindness of the right never ceases to amaze. How exactly has the left prevented either the Murdoch press, or the howling reactionaries at The Mail and Express from publishing all sorts of inciteful stuff about immigration and migrant workers?

[Cleanthes]

Um...

The charge laid at the top is that the left has ...
"silenced *rational* debate "

So your post here sheds little light.

[Matt Munro]

But that's the whole point, the right rant about immigration and crime, and say anyone who disagrees is a bearded, lentil eating, sandal wearing communist, and the left say migrants are all fluffy bunnies and anyone who disagrees is a foaming at the mouth closet nazi.
As being a nazi is generally deemed worse than being a communist, the right are effectively silenced. That's not a debate.

[Perry de Havilland]

"Where are they all going to live?"

I am all for paving Kent over (and for that to happen all that is required is an end to the absurd planning laws that have causes such high property prices). The private property owners there will make a fortune it will bring the price of housing down across the whole south... a win-win. A great many nations have a vastly higher population density than Britain

"Who is going to pay for all their medical needs?"

The same people who are going to pay for their food, their iPods, their cars, their clothes, their umbrellas, their hookers, their Sunday Best, their paper party hats... they are, just like you should pay for yours.

"Who is going to pay to educate their children?"

See above.

[Blissex]

«(why are you all so obsessed with a paper no one under 60 reads anyway ?).»

Because fully vested, car, share, house owning citizens above 60 are increasingly one of the biggest blocks of voters, and their perceptions and class interests drive the political process.

That's the big difference between politics before the era of mass landlordism and now.

Also the debate about immigration is largely one about generational class warfare: the typical voter is far older and owns far more assets and sues far more welfare services than the typical immigrant.

Immigrants are good only as as long as they take low wages as nurses or plumbers, don't vote, but pay taxes and those taxes pay for welfare for older citizens and not themselves.

This is more or less the common politics of both the dry and the wet conservative parties, because it is the politics of 70% of voters.