In case you can’t read it due to the appalling quality of this scan, the question that London Lite (the Evening Standard’s freesheet) asked its readers is: ‘Would a woman chief be good for the Met?’.
OK, I know its a voodoo poll based on a self-selecting sample, but the result is more than a little shocking.
Back to the future with Dominic Grieve - on transport and immigration
I blame Phil Woolas. In making his factually-limited and politically dangerous statement about curbing immigration during a recession, the immigration minister seemed to be going out of his way to legitimise as large a number of right-wing myths (‘coming over here, stealing our jobs’) as possible. Apart from the logistical idiocy of curbing economic immigration at a time when the Chancellor has rediscovered Keynes and is looking to bring forward a number of major infrastructure projects (as un-exclusively predicted by The Animal), Woolas has effectively given the government’s stamp of legitimacy to the inflammatory principle that foreign workers ‘take’ British jobs and that immigration is ‘out of control’. Beyond the succor that such a shift in the terms of public debate give to the extreme right, from a Labour point of view there should also be concern that Woolas’ statement has effectively allowed the Conservatives to claim that they were right all along and that it is somehow practical or desirable to set a limit on inward migration to the UK.
Inevitably, Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve (you know, he was brought in after that other guy went off in some sort of huff…) has sought to make hay today from the apparent government u-turn. In an article in today’s Evening Standard Grieve says
bit by bit, the Government is increasingly talking about immigration in terms that mirror what the Conservative Party has been saying with consistency for years.
The worrying thing is that, in a way, he’s right. Of course, Grieve’s conclusion is (and I hope for the sake of race relations in this country that he is right) that the government won’t follow through on its tough words and that only the Conservatives can be trusted to ‘manage’ the migration system. But to be fair to Grieve, whilst his words are tough and the dog-whistle message to the knuckle draggers is certainly in there, he (more…)
|
