He went on to say that Labor’s relaxation of immigration controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration,” but that ministers were nervous about discussing this move publicly because they feared that it would alienate their “core working class vote.”
Well, they have certainly managed to do what they wanted. The Labor government, like the Conservative governments before them, and the coalition government since, did everything it could to ignore the real concerns expressed by the majority of the public. But with no decent mainstream party to vote for, the public kept voting for the same parties as usual. Fooled by the occasional speech saying that there was going to be some “tough” new approach, the country got stuck in a debate that has been played on repeat. Yet all the time that debate-loop was going, the ground beneath us was changing unrecognizably.
Now, true to tradition, a couple of days after the census Labor Party leader Ed Miliband has come out to declare that immigrants to Britain should learn to speak English. It is exactly what all of his recent predecessors have also said, and it is exactly what none of them — any more than he — have done anything concrete about. Britain has been changed, and more change is on the way. Some of those changes might be good, and others are likely to be not as good. There are those who wanted this change to happen, and there are those who did not. The former now occasionally notice that their plan has caused troubles of which they were barely aware when they set out. The latter are reviled as backwards, racist, bigoted and out-of-touch with their new country.
In reality they are simply people who once had a country and have seen it changed irrevocably, and simply hold on to a feeling of sadness that nobody thought about where this would take us, or whether we the people should ever be listened to in the little matter of our own future.
Originally published at the Gatestone Institute.