Friday 3 May 2013

An unwelcome swing to the Right?

Although there were no election this year in Southend, I think the outcome of the County Council and other elections is of great importance to us all.

The hitherto flaky and marginal UK Independence Party have gained 23% of the votes cast nationwide and come second place in the South Shields by-election. UKIP have clearly entered the political mainstream, and their populist stances are likely to receive from disillusioned working class people as they are to destabilise the traditional Tory vote.

In the era of austerity polictics, to which all the major parties support in varying degrees, it is unsurprising that a populist party like UKIP receives a protest vote. The crunch will come at the next General Election when their policies will be more widely scrutinised. I suppose that the main planks of UKIP polic, withdrawal from the European Union and to halt immigration into theUK, have appealed to disillusioned voters. Will the new UKIP voters be pleased when they find that the County Councillors they have just elected simply cannot deliver on either of these policies?

It is disturbing that UKIP seems to have have appealed to "soft racism" with their anti-immigartion stance. I was disturbed to hear in television interviews with people that voted for UKIP, their councillors and, even, Nigel Farage repeat the falsehood that people who immigrate to the UK are immediately given housing. This falsehood has been circulated widely and the major Parties do not want to refute it as a lie. Shamefully, the TV interviewers did not challenge UKIP or their supporters when they repeated this claim.

As long ago as 2009, the Guardian published an article "The myth of immigrants and social housing" which sought to refute the falsehoods that were being peddled. The article states:

The allegation that new migrants are jumping the queue for council housing and housing association homes was nailed as a myth by research recently published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

That study found that more than 60% of new migrants who had come to Britain in the past five years are living in privately rented accomodation, and most newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers are actually banned from access to social housing.

The research was commissioned after Labour minister Margaret Hodge sparked a political row when she called for council house allocations to be linked to length of residence because newly arrived migrants were being given priority for scarce social housing over British-born families.

The success of UKIP, unfortunately will have the effect of dragging the mainstream parties to the right. This was the case when neo-nazi parties were achieving a level of electoral support. Instead of Ed Miliband saying that "One Nation" Labour should not be afraid to debate immigration, he should be calling for the misleading statements of UKIP and others to be challenged in a rational way.