I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
- Luke 15: 7
Let’s start off with a joke: when is a racist not a racist? When he or she is a leftist.
OK, it’s not that amusing. In fact it isn’t funny at all although I must confess that a wry smile has crept across my face in the last 24 hours as I heard both Margaret Hodge – a Minister, let it not be forgotten, in the Labour Government – and Simon Hughes, the hardly conservative Liberal Democrat MP for North Southwark & Bermondsey, declare that British residents should have priority over council house allocations.
So why do I have a wry smile on such a seemingly parochial issue? Simple. In 1999 (along with the now MP for Hammersmith & Fulham, Greg Hands) I co-authored a leaflet entitled “Fulham Homes for Fulham People”. This called for the local council’s scarce housing stock to go to people who lived, worked or had some semblance of connection to Fulham – and not to bogus asylum seekers or those with no other bona fide connection to Fulham.
Instead of debating the merits of the proposal, left-wing racemongers moved into operation. An anonymous complaint was lodged at the Commission for Racial Equality by some left-wing activists. Six leftist council employees in the Housing Department staged a sit-in during my next council surgery (thereby preventing me from helping the very residents who had complained about the lack of social housing in the borough).
The CRE wrote in earnest terms to the local Conservative Association calling on them to denounce the leaflet and its two authors. The leaflet had, as it happened, been approved in advance by the then Chairman of Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative Association and both the Association and the Conservative Group Leader on the Council made it clear that they stood by the leaflet, the campaign underlying it and then Cllr Hands and myself. The CRE found no case to answer although that part of the story never seemed to make it into the Guardian when it ran the story subsequently – I wonder why…?
Margaret Hodge, herself an immigrant, has rightly observed that the scarcity of housing for local residents is a matter that has been too widely ignored by councils. It has given the odious British National Party a chance to embed itself in too many local communities. The BNP is a protectionist, narrow-minded and authoritarian sect with more in common with the totalitarian left than any centre-right party in the world and yet as a result of lazy journalism it is referred to as a right-wing party.
Mrs Hodge, herself a former council leader in inner city London, stressed that genuine asylum seekers and refugees should, of course, be housed humanitarianly. That must be right. Her concern was focused on economic migrants – those who have elected to make Britain their home in an effort to better their life chances. Mrs Hodge said:
“In exercising that choice as an economic migrant, should they then presume to have automatic access immediately to public social housing?”
Mrs Hodge said that white, black and Asian British families on low incomes, who had lived in an area for several generations, could not get their own homes and all felt there was an "essential unfairness" in the system. This was exactly what I had said in 1999 before I was attacked as the Devil incarnate – the media naturally ignoring the fact that the families then-Cllr Hands and I were helping were of all races.
Mrs Hodge continued:
"They feel that they've grown up in the borough, they're entitled to a home, and that sense of entitlement is often overridden by a real need of new immigrant families who come in, perhaps locked into private accommodation, poor accommodation, overcrowded.”
“We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We must debate these difficult questions.”
As one has come to expect, the racemongers have clambered aboard a bandwagon to denounce Mrs Hodge. The Refugee Council, supposedly a non-partisan charity, sanctimoniously whined that “the way to counter some of the views put forward by far-right parties is not to follow their lead” – thereby accusing a government minister of following the lead of the BNP. Keith Vaz, never one to miss a bandwagon, called Mrs Hodge’s comments “offensive” and said that no minister “should use the language of far-right groups which only assists them in their objectives”. As is so often the case it is Mr Vaz whose comments are offensive.
What Keith Vaz fails to realize is that what seems to be assisting the BNP in its repugnant objectives is the way in which politicians fail adequately to address the concerns of local residents of all creeds, races and colours. Local housing stock is limited. It seemed obvious to me in 1999 that that scarce housing stock should be given to people with some kind of a connection to a particular area and not to those who have just recently arrived there.
As Margaret Hodge said:
“Unless we listen, we shall be unable to convince people that we are on their side as they learn to live with new neighbours in the tolerant and strong multiracial society we on the liberal left desire.”
I urge you to read
Margaret Hodge’s article in the Observer. She ended her piece with the following words:
“I know that striking the best balance in our approach to migration is fraught with huge difficulties. But if we don't dare to talk about it, we'll never get it right.”
Amen to that.
The housing market is in crisis. Despite low interest rates, the credit crunch means that mortgage lenders are reluctant or unable to lend to prospective buyers, many of whom are in turn reluctant to risk buying a new home just in case the crunch turns into an outright recession.
The TaxPayers' Alliance is a model for how think-tanks should operate. The TPA is a campaigning organisation, a pressure group on steroids. Instead of publishing turgid pamphlets read by a handful of fellow policy wonks, the media-savvy TPA commissions polls, undertakes and publishes newsworthy research, secures media coverage and then campaigns on that particular issue with vigour.
Instead of debating the merits of the proposal, left-wing racemongers moved into operation. An anonymous complaint was lodged at the Commission for Racial Equality by some left-wing activists. Six leftist council employees in the Housing Department staged a sit-in during my next council surgery (thereby preventing me from helping the very residents who had complained about the lack of social housing in the borough).
Mrs Hodge said that white, black and Asian British families on low incomes, who had lived in an area for several generations, could not get their own homes and all felt there was an "essential unfairness" in the system. This was exactly what I had said in 1999 before I was attacked as the Devil incarnate – the media naturally ignoring the fact that the families then-Cllr Hands and I were helping were of all races.
