What I mean by living in a bubble world

This is what the Conservative Home lot think of Nick Clegg's immigration views after the main commentary:

Comments

A senior Tory moderniser told me last week that he hoped that David Cameron wouldn't focus on immigration policy again

So this person is not concerned that the character of our country - which means so much to most of us - has been steadily and permanently changed by those who benefit from the import of cheap labour, which is what the recent history of immigration has been all about.

The notion that the voting public is repelled by anti-immigration campaigns is, of course, one of those pervasive 'big lies' that has been pushed relentlessly by the thought controllers of the left for around a quarter-century.

The wholesale sellout to Political Correctness, better described as Social Marxism, is the one thing for which the so-called modernisers in the Conservative Party can never be forgiven.

Posted by: Traditional Tory | September 18, 2007 at 08:29

Its difficult for Cameron to not deal with immigration, unless of course his whole green agenda is nothing more than a sham. For it all comes down to the sustainability of a population, and right now we have one of the most unsustainable populations ever in our history. Yet our politicians are telling us that the greatest threat to us, global warming, is just around the corner.

So 'Dave' is global warming the greatest threat to us? If it is, then you have to deal with population sustainability, and as population growth is being driven by mass immigration, it means you have to deal with immigration. Unless 'Dave' your whole green agenda is a sham, so is it a sham?

Posted by: Iain | September 18, 2007 at 09:26

I'm sure that the majority of voters would not forgive the Conservative Party for burying it's head in the sand over issues which the average man in the pub discusses day in and day out.

When someone comes in with the more liberal line, you get this:

BenM, you are completely mistaken on immigration policy being a problem for the tories. It is a complete fallousy, propagated mostly by bleeding heart liberals and socialists such as yourself. May I remind you that the Tory policies on crime and immigration are the areas in which they have consistently shown thumping leads over Labour.Fact. We did not lose in 2001 or 2005 because of Immigration policy or a perception of us being the "nasty" party, rather in spite of it. It was the economy stupid.

I'm not claiming the Immigration issue is an open-and-shut case; just illustrating how, if you only mix intellectually with people of a like mind, you can get an erroneous view of what 'everyone' thinks about an issue. This is what the Populus polling conducted at great expense by Lord Ashcroft found:

"The issue that dominated the Conservative campaign, immigration, was never important enough to voters to determine how large numbers of them would cast their votes".

The problem seems to be that people think the Tories are uncaring, dominated by their own class, not really bothered with giving opportunities for all (not if it involves any redistribution), and so on. Coming down on economic immigrants may chime with a portion of the public, but does not move the critical swing voters who need to feel that the Tories care, for a sustained period and for the right reasons, about the social ills in this country.

I accept that although I call myself swing voter, I am not representative of all swing voters. But the tone of the Tory internal thinking here suggests several things that are off-putting:

- A blatant recognition that they have two tones to their party; the David Cameron line (green, not nasty, etc) and the "lieutenants" ('we know the man in the pub wants to hear about immigration'). This is precisely what sceptics like me fear - just like a Blair sceptic might have thought 'he'll go all Left on us when he gets in'

- some very muddled thinking (the link with the environment and global warming was nutty), the sense that we are uniquely strained in terms of population growth, the rise in house prices being uniformly bad (well, it redistributes to the Rich and Old, which is an irony here), the sheer Luddism of counting the jobs the foreigners have "taken"

- no-one ever mentions the demographic timebomb awaiting any country that fails to replenish its stock of young workers as the latest demographic lump finally passes into retirement, or the fact (see Dani Rodrik) that immigration is one of the most potent globalising forces for redistributing wealth.

- no sense whatsoever that individual freedom to move is a factor to be considered at all. In other words, a pretty light hold on libertarian values, a great eagerness to see this as the great exception to freedoms, even a willingness to ban the practice of the British travelling abroad to live

- This line is always unchallenged: "endless mass immigration dissipates and banishes any sense of England; any sense of what it is to be English. " Yeah, that's why Americans are such an unpatriotic lot.

I really don't want to say it is a simple issue; it needs better management, which I think a closer reading of Nick Clegg would find is what is being proposed. But it does NOT bode well for the Tories that they think it's so obvious, innit.