It’s a curious feature of the BBC that independent thought, creative, original, idiosyncratic reasoning and analysis is often crushed under the weight of the organisation with its overwhelming employment of people who think the same thoughts and cleave to the same values. Those of an independent frame of mind soon find it wise to keep their consensus breaking thoughts to themselves or find themselves marked out as a maverick, tolerated but closely watched and contained, any off message ideas or an attempt to encourage a bit of free association and joined up thinking is discouraged and colleagues of course ignore the inconvenient reports that jar with and contradict their own…and the one shining example that gives a tantalising glimpse of what the BBC could be is extinguished in a tidal wave of group think, group non-think.

For the last 3 or 4 years we have been force fed the idea that austerity is bad, not only bad but completely unnecessary, Ed Ball’s Plan B the credible alternative, the idea that stimulus is good, that the economy is suffering because of the Coalition’s economic policies, that it was ‘Casino Banks’ that destroyed the economy, that Capitalism has failed, that GDP growth should be so much higher, that high employment is a complete riddle…and that consumer spending will save us rather than exports.

None of that is true.

But those, if you have been listening to the BBC, are the messages that have been broadcast to us day in day out for years, variously subtle or blatant Labour press releases.

How do I know those things aren’t true? Ironically because the BBC told me.

Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders both broke from the Party line and gave us a view of the dark underbelly of the Labour economic ‘miracle’.

What is most notable is that long before the banks went belly up Peston and Flanders knew Gordon Brown’s never ending boom was about to go ‘boom’.

In 2006 Peston, he tells us himself, was in a meeting with the head of the BBC’s Newsroom who asked him ‘So when would the great bust come?’

Peston says he replied, ‘Goodness only knows.’ and explains…‘ And because we could not put a time on it, there was no urgency to get it on the Ten O’clock News.

That was a mistake.’

The BBC knew there was going to be a ‘Great Bust’ but didn’t think it important to raise the matter.

Below are two examples, one from Peston in 2011 and one from Flanders in 2005, that give a more individual, incisive, true analysis of the economic situations of the times than we get from the ‘Institution’ of the BBC.

Peston telling us that the economy was reduced to a basket case and that there is no quick fix, no instant way of growing GDP, and that GDP will only grow slowly for many years…and that getting debt down is crucial….and so far, for all the talk of ‘austerity’ there has been in reality little reduction in spending.

Flanders predicts, in 2005, that Brown’s policies have put the economy into intensive care….caused by borrowing and high government spending…and that there is a high probability of a crash.

As stated such messages have been lost in the wholesale flannel and flattery pushed out to defend and promote Labour by ‘the Corporation‘, the BBC’s refusal to delve into 13 years of Labour’s mismanagement and the pushing of Labour’s latest policies…basically a continuation of Brown’s.

Ironically of course Flanders, though not Peston, has been at the forefront of these attempts to gull the Public, ignoring her own previous predictions and analysis.

Peston brought us The Party’s Over, broadcast on BBC Two at 1900 on 4 and 11 December 2011.

If excessive debt is the disease, what we’ve had since the end of 2008 is analgesic and sticking plaster, rather than cure.

We haven’t as yet found a way to get the debts down so that we can be confident that our economy’s foundations are solid and sound again.

What it means is that we must brace ourselves for many years of relatively low growth, perhaps 1% versus the 3% of the 16 boom years before the crash, because we no longer have the fuel of borrowing more and more every year.

Flanders brought us Testing the Miracle in 2005:

On running the rule over Gordon Brown’s economic record

‘These must be frustrating times for Gordon Brown. Now his foes have decided it is open season on the economy – which even a year ago had seemed beyond reproach.

When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry?

Saved by spending

The miracle, if there is one, is that we carried on growing. But looking around the country, you see it is a miracle built not on investing, or exporting, but on a miraculous capacity to spend.

The public spending prop

What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.

In the north-east, one recent estimate puts the public sector of the economy at close to 60%.

Brown’s Miracle Economy

STEPHANIE FLANDERS: Tony Blair claims Gordon Brown is the best chancellor we’ve ever had. The man who called an end to boom and bust.

GORDON BROWN: There will be no unsustainable dashes for growth, no out of control booms, no risk taking with inflation, no quick fixes.

FLANDERS: But now the critics say Gordon Brown’s luck is about to turn.

Geoff Ford, Chairman, Ford Component Manufacturing Ltd

FLANDERS: He [Ford] worries that high public spending is distorting the labour market, turning the old job for life culture of shipbuilding into the new job for life culture of the town hall. The local council has a workforce of more than 7,000.

FORD: Because the public sector and local government are able to offer such attractive packages, they are creaming off the best of the talent, and that therefore deprives the rest of the labour market, and I do believe that the significant growth in public sector employment actually stifles the entrepreneurial spirit because of it’s different focus, there’s no risk, there’s no real risk, and there is a disincentive to stick your neck out.

Peston used his 2011 article and research as the basis for his recent book ‘How Do We Fix This Mess?’ in which he looks at the causes of the crash and the possible fixes.

First here is Robert Peston’s cap doffing to his bosses in the book:

I would like to thank the BBC just for being the BBC: more than ever, it is a privilege to work for a news organisation which is sincerely and wholly committed to trying to understand and explain the world in an unbiased way.

However everything he writes here contradicts that statement for the BBC presented a very different perspective on the financial crisis and its causes to that which he recalls.

I’ll let you read and apply his analysis to events and the future…just ask yourself who is to blame, was it just the banks, or was it even the banks…and should we be getting the growth that Labour and the BBC insist we should, and would be having under the miraculous Plan B?:

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

Peston also looks at Osborne’s cut in the tax rate for high earners…cynically raised as a last gasp piece of politicking by Gordon Brown…from 50p in the pound to 45p.

Peston tells us the cut was done at the instigation of business leaders who said they couldn’t recruit and retain talent because of competition from abroad.

In other words globalisation, the free movement of workers, has meant that tax rates have to be competitive globally….in a similar way that corporation tax is competitively ‘priced’ to attract businesses to invest in concerned countries.

Ironic really that’ open borders’ and the end of the nation state, that Nirvana for the Left, has led to the very things it claims to hate……an über rich highly mobile class, and businesses that can upsticks and move factories and jobs to anywhere in the world….dumping too expensive British workers onto the scrap heap….compounded by the mass immigration of cheap labour into Britain that pushed down wages and made life on benefits more attractive than working for a minimum wage.

Effectively not much of what Peston says in his article and expanded upon in the book is accepted by the BBC……Peston blames Labour as much as the banks, after all Canada, Gernmany and Australia all rode out the crash…becaue they didn’t spend, spend spend before it,  and Peston tells us that growth will be slow and low for years…not what the BBC leads us to expect.

The BBC’s narrative is entirely differnet with Labour almost unmentioned, untouchable, whilst the banks take the full blame…the economy is dragging along the bottom with growth stagnating…if only we had a plan to stimulate the economy with massive government spending all would be well.

The truth is out there somewhere….just not on the BBC…unless you’re quick and spot the maverick free thinkers before they are ‘whipped’ into line again.

The BBC tells us that:

‘What appears to be the beginnings of good news on the economy is good news for the coalition too, and so tricky for Labour.’

Never mind the BBC can help you out in those ‘tricky moments’, that’s what it’s here for, serving the Public good.

The BBC are sceptical about the green shoots of economic recovery….employment is up but they are the wrong sort of jobs, exports are up but again they are the wrong sort of exports, consumer spending is up but again we are spending on the wrong things….the recovery is all a bit of a mirage, a fantasy based on wishful thinking and government spin….and a ‘million’ Zero Hour Contracts.　

Yes the BBC has decided that the figure of one million, though just as much guess work as any other figure, is the one to use…..mainly because they have decided that Zero Hour Contracts aren’t real jobs so that proves all along they were right and that employment is really going down not up. So there.

Today the BBC started off teasing us with some good news about the economy but then it whipped away all that hope and poured cold water over all that nonsense…….bringing on economist John Philpotts to rain on our parade, finishing off with a boot to the groin from Labour:

“Despite some good news in the latest jobs figures there are worrying signs about the underlying state of the UK jobs market,” said John Philpott, from the think tank, The Jobs Economist.

“The rise in employment is almost matched by an increase in the size of the workforce, which means the unemployment rate is unchanged at 7.8%.

The headline jobs figures may continue to be broadly positive but one only has to dig a little deeper into the statistics to see that millions of people are still being hit by a combination of lack of jobs and a ceaseless sharp fall in the real value of their pay. This doesn’t look or feel like an economic recovery to write home about.

Labour’s shadow employment minister, Stephen Timms, said the reality was that for ordinary families things were getting “harder not easier”, highlighting the rise in part-time workers.

“Ministers just sound out of touch when they ignore the fact that the number of people who are working part-time because they cannot find a full-time job is at record levels,” he said.

Firstly…note that ‘ increase in the size of the workforce’…what exactly does that mean? That rise is of course the importation of cheap foreign labour which has forced wages lower and priced British workers out of the jobs market.

But who is John Philpotts? The BBC says he is from an ‘independent think tank’.

Well, not so much a think tank but a one man band with a blog.

As for independent…..reading his stuff you may possibly come to the conclusion that he is in fact ‘left leaning’….supporting the unions, government spending and public control of services, Plan B and Ed Miliband’s immortal ‘predistribution’ plan…whilst insisting that Osborne’s Plan A isn’t working.

Independent? Not so much.

He has been a regular on the BBC, one notable occasion recently telling us that employment figures were mostly government spin….as he reveals in this Guardian article:

We need employment statistics that confront political spin

Honest political discourse requires a warts and all picture of the underlying complexity of these figures – the ONS could help

Here he is in his blog giving the game away as to his true affiliations:

Unions have a progressive part to play

Despite having the ability to directly challenge the impact of fiscal austerity in the workplace, union influence is nowadays felt mainly in its contribution to debate on economic and social policy, as demonstrated this morning in outgoing TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s well-constructed Olympic themed critique of a Plan A that shows no sign of working.

It is no coincidence that the slump in union membership has accompanied a steady fall in the share of national income received in wages relative to profits.

This may be of little concern to ardent neo-liberals who believe that allowing labour markets to clear is good for jobs and a higher profit share good for investment. But those of us concerned about the impact of this for low skilled workers and the public finances in an economy where levels of business investment disappoint in time of boom as well as slump, take a different view.

The consequences have been highlighted in recent days with the emergence of the wonkish concept of ‘predistribution’ into UK political debate. It’s very costly to maintain a large proportion of the workforce by means of what is in effect ‘in work welfare’ support. Better, if possible, to ensure workers earn enough not to need such hand-outs. This, as we will doubtless hear in the coming months, can be achieved in a number of ways. A progressive role for trade unions is one of them.

In all his articles he takes a good look at events…as he wishes to make a career out of his analysis he has to inject some measure of realism into his comment…however he seems to always end on a negative for the government and their policies.

But there are snippets of interest that cut across the BBC’s narrative and give the lie to it:

On the 14^th August he tells us that nearly all the new jobs are ‘quality jobs’….permanent posts….

Moreover, while job security might have increased a little (the quarter saw a big drop of 70,000 in temporary employment, suggesting that permanent posts account for all the net new jobs created between April and June)

Here on the 17^th July he tells us that part time jobs are decreasing and full time, permanent jobs are rising:

The best news of all is a strong quarterly rise in full-time employment of 28,000 and increased working hours (the number of people in part-time employment fell by 12,000). Alongside a fall in temporary employment (down 15,000) and self-employment (down 28,000), fewer redundancies (down 19,000) and more job vacancies (up 24,000), this suggests that confidence is returning to the jobs market with employers cutting back on contract workers in favour of permanent staff.

On the 12^th June he tells us that wages are kept down due to imported labour…and reduced power of the Trade Unions:

The broad conclusion to be drawn from all this analysis – which chimes with my own view as expressed in previous blogs – is that a combination of increased outsider power in the labour market, caused by an expanded supply of labour, and reduced insider power, resulting from the diminished influence of trade unions in the workplace, has altered the UK’s trade-off between real wages and employment.

In fact, the IFS finds, it was mainly larger firms who cut jobs whereas small firms were more likely to keep workers on at lower pay in order to limit the impact of a fall in productivity on unit labour costs.

However as to the Trade Union claim….he contradicts that by revealing that most unions are in the Public Sector and that much of the fall in wages has been for workers in the small and medium sized companies where there are few if any union members any way….so reduced union power is not the cause of the fall in wages.

The BBC continues on its merry way trying to undermine confidence in the recovery, keeping up the Labour narrative, hoping for the economy to collapse and for Labour to romp home in the next election, and still bringing in ‘ringers’ like John Philpotts to pad out their position.

Will the corridors of the BBC be littered with champagne bottles and drunken BBC socialists in 2015?

So far it looks likely only if they want to drown their sorrows.

Yes, it’s certainly time for a new one of these. Here you go, detail the bias as you see it!

Strange bias by the equally strange Roger Harrabin here on the issue of whether there is such a thing as “road tax’. In essence, it strikes me as a polemic in pro-cyclist anti-motorist pedantry. The BBC hates motorists and loves cyclists.

Its going to be interesting watching how the BBC deal with the building tsunami of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants into the UK. This morning, the BBC reports that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK rose by a quarter in three months. As we can all anticipate, this surge will grow and grow as restrictions come to an end. Always advocates of irrevocable demographic change, I suggest the BBC will seek to present this as a failure of Coalition policy (which it’s not really, it is simply a consequence of our membership of the EU) and imply that somehow Labour will be tougher!

Well, as some of us predicted, post Mubarak Egypt is a mess and all sensible people will be appalled at the loss of life on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere. However the BBC is clearly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, doing all it can to push the MB narrative at all times. Report after report from the BBC paints the MB as ‘victims” and I hear the BBC declare this morning that the interim government is there by virtue of a coup. It’s interesting the BBC says this because even Obama won’t quite go that for. The reality is that the BBC has been cheerleading for the MB for years now – quite remarkable given the venom that this bunch of Islamic extremists represent.

The BBC joyously and shamelessly joined in the campaign against Murdoch, their media and ideological rival.

The BBC and its cabal of Guardianistas and celebrity sleazeballs instigated the Leveson Inquiry and the resultant sham of a press regulator…designed it seems solely to rein in Murdoch.

But now that old phrase ‘Careful what you wish for’ springs to mind as the Guardianistas are panicking.

Their all powerful fabricator of the news agenda may be going to come under some serious scrutiny and regulation which may limit its overpowering reach.

Polly Toynbee is distraught that this democratic asset,  this defiant symbol of non-market success, this monument for the Public good may be restrained, its dominance curtailed, it’s present splendour diminished.

Who will buy all those copies of the Guardian if the BBC goes under? 

Polly might have to get a real job instead of sitting on her well paid backside telling us how awful it must be to be poor.

Wonder how the BBC managed to miss this one?

A POLICEMAN dealing with a 13-year-old runaway was surrounded by Asian men and subjected to racist abuse by one of them. Blackburn magistrates heard Tahir Hussain swore at the officer and told him to go ‘back to where you live’.

“Asian men”….mmmm. Oh, you mean MUSLIMS? Even the Lancashire Telegraph uses euphemisms. Meanwhile the BBC just avoids the story…

This Open Thread is sponsored by the Chris Bryant appreciation society. Off you go….. now then, DID Captain Underpants make a boo-boo or not yesterday? Hard to tell from BBC coverage…

Mass immigration has created ……

‘A Lost Generation…it is really sad for British people’….so said ‘Elizabeth’ on 5Live today whose son is unemployed. (09:25)

Labour is guilty of breathtaking hypocrisy over foreign workers

A British ‘underclass’ was created on its watch – but all Labour does is blame everyone else

The BBC helped create that ‘lost generation’.  A generation of working class youth that has lost out, workless, homeless and without hope, because of the great and the good of the BBC imposing their beliefs and values upon Britain.

The hidden stories of Britain.

They are the stories that make people angry.

They are stories that politicians have ignored for too long.

They are not good for the people of Britain.

That was Ed Miliband telling us that the consequences of mass immigration are……’The hidden stories of Britain’…that make people angry…that are not good for the people of Britain.

It was the BBC, the journalists, the editors, the Head of News, who sat down and decided to hide those stories, the stories that are making people angry.

Labour’s Chris Bryant, that unscrupulous political opportunist, gave his speech on immigration today….you can’t tell from the photo but he got his underwear in a proper twist today.

The BBC covered it extensively….or rather bombarded us with shallow analysis and irrelevancies that still yet hide the true scale of the political betrayal that lay behind the immigration polices of the Labour Party.

Bryant stated that this was ‘One of the key issues in British politics’.

Labour Peer Digby Jones on R4 (13:17) stated that this was a ‘party political game’ by Bryant and Labour, it was the ‘amazing hypocrisy of the metropolitan elite’ who have failed the workers by not educating them properly….but who have delivered a welfare benefit society where the work ethic takes second place.

The BBC even chipped in…Evan Davis on Today saying ’It’s the most emotive issue in politics…Immigration’.

We were also told by the BBC that ‘Labour knows it is vulnerable on questions on immigration’.

Guess that’s why the BBC avoids those tricky questions.

Peter Hitchens in the Mail recently stated of Andrew Neather’s revelations about Labour’s immigration open door policy that : 

‘I happen to think this brief glimpse of the truth was the most important political revelation of our time.

We have been betrayed.’

Let’s get this right…immigration is ‘one of the key issues in British politics’……Andrew Neather’s admission was possibly ‘the most important political revelation of our time’…..

…and not only did the BBC deliberately refuse to cover the issues and such revelations at the time, it still does now, to this very day.

One of the key issues of British politics…and Britain’s major news broadcaster has refused to investigate and challenge Labour on its policies and the dire consequences of those policies.

Evan Davis interviewed Bryant this morning in an interview in which Bryant self destructed…..though not through anything Davis asked.

Bryant even touched on Labour’s responsibility for immigration…naturally defending Labour…Labour made mistakes but it wasn‘t deliberate!….…but Davis said nothing.

When Bryant claimed that immigration was undermining wages this was another opportunity for the BBC to jump in and challenge Labour on its policy…..and the hypocrisy of Bryant’s position…after all it was the Labour Party who deliberately imported all this cheap labour. The BBC said nothing.

I have listened for two days and not heard anyone on the BBC raise the issue of Labour’s open door policy, the sheer hypocrisy of Chris Bryant talking about ‘British jobs for British people’ when his Party created the mess and the mass unemployment in the youth sector.

Remember when Labour’s John Reid said to Andrew Neil:

“The Treasury insisted on having a free flow of labour because they thought that brought down the cost of labour….there is nothing right wing about having a controlled immigration policy”

So Labour deliberately undermined local wages….the ‘undermining‘ that Bryant is complaining about now.   So where are the BBC questions about that now?

Even when a Unite Union rep for construction, Bernard McAulay came onto 5Live and stated that importing these workers and leaving our own on the scrap heap leads to an increase in crime as the British unemployed see no future other than crime….the BBC sat silent, they didn’t want to go down that avenue….nor to look at the crime committed by immigrants.

Labour’s immigration trick was one of the most duplicitous breaches of faith, a momentous and infamous betrayal of the British People, that the reality is that the BBC knows if the full scale of that betrayal, the magnitude of its meaning were to be fully revealed and investigated not only would Labour be out of office for years but the BBC itself would be destroyed for its part in the deception.

Which is why Labour are having an easy ride from the BBC….it dabbles around the edges paying lip service…dragging in David Goodhart from Demos, he being a ‘safe’ Lefty, but it does nothing on the excoriating scale of Peter Hitchens article….see below.

Today the BBC did not look at the difference between Labour’s policies when in government and those it claims to hold now in its craven response to UKIP’s populist success….instead the BBC spent its time investigating the difference between Chris Bryant’s speech pre-released to the Press and the one he actually made.　

Labour has gone basically unchallenged over its immigration policy and the dire effects of it.  Bryant is now touring the studios on his own little spiralling journey of self destruction, unaided by the BBC it might be said, and has yet to face a rigorous, coherent grilling by that BBC.

Once again Labour is let off the hook and that ‘Lost generation’ betrayed once already, is for a second time betrayed as the BBC fails to bring them any ‘justice’ and the culprits to book.

Here are some relevant and telling facts and comments from Migration Watch, Peter Hitchens and Labourite Dan Hodges:

 From Migration Watch:

 It is not hard to see why Labour’s own apparatchiks supported the [immigration] policy. Provided that the white working class didn’t cotton on, there were votes in it.

Research into voting patterns conducted for the Electoral Commission after the 2005 general election found that 80 per cent of Caribbean and African voters had voted Labour, while only about 3 per cent had voted Conservative and roughly 8 per cent for the Liberal Democrats.

The Asian vote was split about 50 per cent for Labour, 10 per cent Conservatives and 15 per cent Liberal Democrats.

Nor should we underestimate the power of ‘community leaders’ who have strong influence in constituency Labour parties and who, of course, benefit from a growth in numbers.

Other activists, nurtured in the anti-apartheid movement of the last century, had no difficulty promoting the interests of minority groups — almost, it seems, regardless of the impact on the white working class.

From Newstime Africa, and why it paid Labour to import voters… 

Thousands of asylum seekers in the UK are to benefit from new rules set by the government to clear backlogs of about 450,000 applicants within the immigration system,

But African’s across the UK have welcomed the news and this will give a big boost to the Labour party in the forthcoming gen­eral elections as this would mean over a million family members who may not have been eli­gi­ble to vote as a result of their status would now cast their votes for the first time in the UK. We are urging all those who are set to benefit from this new rules to cast their votes for the Labour party as they have shown courage in the face of conservative adversity to make this positive move that will go down well in places as far as villages in remote areas in Africa whose loved ones have faced intolerable suffering in Britain as a result of touch immigration policies.

From now on this press would mount a ‘VOTE FOR LABOUR’ campaign in recognition and appreciation of this brilliant move by the labour government to make life much easier for African immigrants in the UK. This move is a clear indication that the Labour party is the party of the people!!

By Voting Labour you secure for yourself a bright future in the UK. The UK conservative party is not an option for immigrants; they simply don’t want to see us here!! At least the Labour government has granted 3 amnesties since they came to power.

My friend, just vote labour!!

And here is Peter Hitchens who has done the BBC’s job taking a long, hard look at the ideology behind the mass immigration policy…you can see why the BBC refuses to make similar revelations…too many of its own staff , the ‘ex’-Trots, Marxists and anarchist revolutionaries, have their finger prints all over this one.

Perhaps Evan Davis can do his own Mea Culpa one day.　

How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.

The screaming, spitting intolerance comes from a pampered elite who are ashamed of their own country, despise patriotism in others and feel none themselves.

They long for a horrible borderless Utopia in which love of country has vanished, nannies are cheap and other people’s wages are low.

What a pity it is that there seems to be no way of turning these people out of their positions of power and influence.

For if there is to be any hope of harmony in these islands, then it can only come through a great effort to bring us all together, once again, in a shared love for this, the most beautiful and blessed plot of earth on the planet.

And finally Dan Hodges:

Last June Ed Miliband appeared at the IPPR think tank in London and delivered a solemn pledge on immigration. “I am not going to promise ‘British jobs for British workers,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with anyone employing Polish builders, a French chef, or a Swedish childminder.” And Miliband has been true to his word; he’s not promised British jobs for British workers. He’s sent Chris Bryant out to do it for him instead.