Political parties have been irresponsible

Western Daily Press, 21 August 2024, p. 17

To date, there has been a deafening silence from the government on possible underlying causes of the recent violent unrest.

Nowhere has there been any mention from the mainstream parties of the elephant in the room that the vast majority of our elected representatives dare not be seen to mention – namely, the levels of immigration into the country over the past three decades.

Between 1964 and 1993, the number of people entering the UK and the number of people leaving were essentially in balance.

However, immigration has been accelerating significantly and inexorably from 1994 to date, with net migration being the main driver of Britain’s population growth since 1999.

There were sharp accelerations under New Labour; and repeated Tory promises after 2010 to reduce immigration levels were summarily broken.

A very tiny number of unacceptably racist people might be saying that ‘it’s all immigrants’ fault’; but they are dwarfed by the numbers who rightly don’t ‘blame’ immigrants in any way, but rather, hold responsible a political class (Labour and Conservative) which has essentially gone missing in abdicating its responsibility to appropriately regulating the rate at which people from different countries and cultures enter what is geographically a relatively small country.

It is grossly irresponsible for virtue-signallers to weaponise the recent unrest in order to demonise and score cheap political points against those whom they gleefully label as ‘far right’ – let alone using the unrest as a pretext to stampede in censorship and major attacks on free speech.

Some of the iron-fisted prison sentences currently being meted out by Government-appointed pseudo-judges in magistrates’ courts doing the executive’s bidding – thus bypassing trial by jury, our constitution and principles of common law – are simply outrageous.

And now we see Home Secretary Yvette Cooper speaking of cracking down on people pushing ‘harmful and hateful beliefs’ (as defined by whom?...), and arch-globalists Justin Trudeau and Tony Blair speaking of using digital ID to crack down on dissidence and dissent from mainstream narratives.

Censorship is thus been taken to unprecedented new levels, taking advantage of the outrage many demonstrators felt, and weaponising the recent riots – even to the extent of arresting and sentencing people who just watched the unrest.

Just imagine the moral outrage that our own leaders would be expressing, had comparable sentences been handed out in Russia or China!

Tony Blair once famously spoke about being tough on the causes of crime, as well as on the crime itself. Whatever happened to that, I wonder?

Time for Sir Tony to have a quiet word in Sir Keir’s ear, perhaps?

Richard House

Stroud, Gloucestershire