A valid reason not to vote for Nigel Farage
In a post yesterday I said that there are many excellent reasons not to vote for Nigel Farage, but guilt by association comparisons were not among them.
Today he has provided a much better reason not to trust him with your vote with his suggestion that Britain should implement a five year absolute ban on giving permanent right of residence to people coming to this country.
We do need to reduce the levels of immigration but massive swings in policy from one oversimplified extreme to the other is exactly what Britain needs to get away from. Ironically it is the same sort of thing which Labour, who Farage rightly criticises, did when they were in office.
The criticism of the last Labour government that they encouraged very high and unsustainable levels of immigration which caused serious harm to social cohesion and put a significant strain on some public services is true but incomplete.
Labour were also criticised in some quarters and at some times for implementing draconian policies on immigration, treating genuine refugees in a harsh and inhumane way, and refusing admission to people to whom this country owed a debt - Gurhka war heroes who wanted to come here for medical treatment, for example. And this too is true but incomplete.
The bizarre thing is that BOTH criticisms - that Labour's immigration policy was sometimes seriously lax but at other times far too harsh - are absolutely valid.
Labour's policy swung like an irregular metronome between an extreme "open door" policy and trying to quite literally outdo the Daily Mail in harshness when they panicked and realised they'd gone too far. (To give just one of many examples I could give to substantiate that charge, at one stage Labour deported someone to Zimbabwe who even the Mail recognised had a legitimate case for asylum on the grounds that Mugabe was likely to persecute him.)
And the problem with swinging like a metronome from one extreme to the other is that such badly thought out panic reactions are likely to exclude the sort of people who we actually need or who genuinely deserve to come here.
Labour's policy of being almost the only country in the EU that had no transitional controls on migration from the last wave of entrant countries, but trying to slam the door a few days before the policy was due to come into effect produced a classic "worst of all worlds" result.
Another example concerns medical students. Our NHS would have collapsed without foreign doctors and nurses.
And yet, during one of their panic attacks when they were trying to prove that they could after all be tough on immigration, the last Labour government tried to move the goalposts on foreign medical students half way through their courses and send home people who had come here to train to be doctors while that training was incomplete. This disgraceful measure would have deprived the NHS of the services of those who might have stayed here: while at the same time it disrupted the training plans of the health services in the countries they came from with no long term change to the UK's migration numbers in the case of those who would have gone home anyway.
An extreme example of a lose-lose policy. But that's the sort of nonsense you end up with if you start flipping between extremes, as Labour did.
Does Mr Farage propose to revoke the hard-won promise which Joanna Lumley campaigned for, that people who have served Britain in the Gurhkas should have the right to settle here? If he he does, I would be prepared to bet that 90% of the British people including the vast majority of UKIP supporters would condemn such a blatant breach of good faith.
It is common sense to manage down the size of net migration to more sustainable levels - tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands per year, and to do it by practical, legal, and fair methods such as requiring people to have lived here for a number of years before they are eligible for benefits and taking action on illegal immigration, preferably in a humane and civilised way.
Politicians of all parties need to respond to genuine public concerns on this subject, which are shared by the settled immigrant communities who know that they will be the first to suffer if social cohesion collapses. It is absolutely not racist or xenophobic to have those concerns. But politicians of all parties need to think carefully - in some cases, a lot more carefully - about how their policies will actually work and how Britain can implement for fair and effective measures rather than unworkable slogans.
Today he has provided a much better reason not to trust him with your vote with his suggestion that Britain should implement a five year absolute ban on giving permanent right of residence to people coming to this country.
We do need to reduce the levels of immigration but massive swings in policy from one oversimplified extreme to the other is exactly what Britain needs to get away from. Ironically it is the same sort of thing which Labour, who Farage rightly criticises, did when they were in office.
The criticism of the last Labour government that they encouraged very high and unsustainable levels of immigration which caused serious harm to social cohesion and put a significant strain on some public services is true but incomplete.
Labour were also criticised in some quarters and at some times for implementing draconian policies on immigration, treating genuine refugees in a harsh and inhumane way, and refusing admission to people to whom this country owed a debt - Gurhka war heroes who wanted to come here for medical treatment, for example. And this too is true but incomplete.
The bizarre thing is that BOTH criticisms - that Labour's immigration policy was sometimes seriously lax but at other times far too harsh - are absolutely valid.
Labour's policy swung like an irregular metronome between an extreme "open door" policy and trying to quite literally outdo the Daily Mail in harshness when they panicked and realised they'd gone too far. (To give just one of many examples I could give to substantiate that charge, at one stage Labour deported someone to Zimbabwe who even the Mail recognised had a legitimate case for asylum on the grounds that Mugabe was likely to persecute him.)
And the problem with swinging like a metronome from one extreme to the other is that such badly thought out panic reactions are likely to exclude the sort of people who we actually need or who genuinely deserve to come here.
Labour's policy of being almost the only country in the EU that had no transitional controls on migration from the last wave of entrant countries, but trying to slam the door a few days before the policy was due to come into effect produced a classic "worst of all worlds" result.
Another example concerns medical students. Our NHS would have collapsed without foreign doctors and nurses.
And yet, during one of their panic attacks when they were trying to prove that they could after all be tough on immigration, the last Labour government tried to move the goalposts on foreign medical students half way through their courses and send home people who had come here to train to be doctors while that training was incomplete. This disgraceful measure would have deprived the NHS of the services of those who might have stayed here: while at the same time it disrupted the training plans of the health services in the countries they came from with no long term change to the UK's migration numbers in the case of those who would have gone home anyway.
An extreme example of a lose-lose policy. But that's the sort of nonsense you end up with if you start flipping between extremes, as Labour did.
Does Mr Farage propose to revoke the hard-won promise which Joanna Lumley campaigned for, that people who have served Britain in the Gurhkas should have the right to settle here? If he he does, I would be prepared to bet that 90% of the British people including the vast majority of UKIP supporters would condemn such a blatant breach of good faith.
It is common sense to manage down the size of net migration to more sustainable levels - tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands per year, and to do it by practical, legal, and fair methods such as requiring people to have lived here for a number of years before they are eligible for benefits and taking action on illegal immigration, preferably in a humane and civilised way.
Politicians of all parties need to respond to genuine public concerns on this subject, which are shared by the settled immigrant communities who know that they will be the first to suffer if social cohesion collapses. It is absolutely not racist or xenophobic to have those concerns. But politicians of all parties need to think carefully - in some cases, a lot more carefully - about how their policies will actually work and how Britain can implement for fair and effective measures rather than unworkable slogans.
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