There is a huge billboard at New Cross Gate in London, just by the blighted Sainsbury's shop. For about a week now (mid-February 2005) its had adverts for the Tory party on it.
There are two statements side-by-side:
It's not racist to impose limits on immigration.
and
I mean, how hard it is to keep a hospital clean?.
followed by the slogan
Are you thinking what we're thinking?
That probably won't win many Tory votes in New Cross - where just about everyone who sees the poster will think "who the fuck cleans the hospitals anyway?". So why are they putting up this shit?
Its pretty obvious that the reason they put this poster in places like New Cross (a rather dirty, crowded, urban, and wonderfully ethnically diverse part of south London) is so that possible Tory-voting commuters from the outer suburbs can look out of their car windows and feel afraid of the people in the bus queue. It isn't there to persuade the people of New Cross to vote Tory - most of them are totally offended by it. It is there to demonise them and keep them in their place. They are trying to damn by association: immigrants = illegal immigrants = scroungers = dirt = asylum seekers = nastly black people = Travellers = disease carriers = law-breakers. They will never say that outright - if only because it sounds daft when you do say it - but they will snidely imply it whenever they can.
The Tories have, as so often before, been making a fuss about immigration. They are trying to brand Labour as "soft on immigration" at the same time as demonising recent immigrants and, as usual, deliberatly confusing the quite separate issues of refugees, people joining their families, people looking for work, and internal migration in the EU.
A few days ago they had Michael Howard on BBC radio 4. He carried on with his obfuscation and waffle, twisting questions on whether the proposals were meant to apply to all immigrants. It has to be said that James Naughtie offered him very little in the way of probing - the BBC still doesn't press politicians as hard as they should - though he did make some half-hearted attempts to object to the outright lie about "unlimited immigration". Howard claimed again and again that the government policy was "unlimited immigration". But his main point was that immigrants are carriers of disease. He wanted compulsory medical testing for all immigrants, and for them to be turned away if, amongst other things, they had antibodies for TB. He talked up the proposals making them sound even nastier than the ones the suggest in writing. From the Tory website:
The British people deserve the best standards of public health. We need to control who is coming to Britain to ensure that they are not a public health risk and to protect access to the NHS. It's plain common sense. And it's exactly what they do in New Zealand, Canada and Australia. At the next election people will face a clear choice: limited and controlled immigration under the Conservatives or unlimited immigration under Mr Blair.
Exactly what they do in Australia. That's something to look forward to.
So far most nationally-known Labour politicians, spectacularly the Prime Minister, have rolled over and exposed their tummies to the knife. They seem quite content to be just a little less racist than the Tories. For what its worth both Blunkett and Clarke have been much better on this than Blair is or Straw was when he was Home Secretary. Though that's not very difficult.
I suppose the theory is that everybody less racist than them will have to vote for Labour if the Tories are just a little worse. Its an extension of Peter Mandelson's & Gordon Brown's plan for the 1997 general election. We're the Nice Guys so if we have exactly the same polices as the Tories people will vote for us. It worked in 1997. Not even the Noo Layburr cabinet are stupid enough to think it will work now - no-one can think we are the nice guys after the unprovoked invasion of Iraq or a succession of authoritarian policies from Blunkett's pass cards to Clarke's house arrest for scary men with beards - so they have to be just that little bit nicer than the Tories and hope they can get away with it.
There is no logical argument about government policies on immigration coming from the Tories. There can't be because in fact Labour and Tories share almost the same mildly racist and anti-free-market immigration policies. The actual content of the new Tory proposal on medical testing ideas on immigration would be much the same for most people as the government proposals, just as the actual content of the new government ideas on quotas are almost the same
But the Tories don't need different policies, or think that they don't. All they need to do is carry on continual branding of Labour as "soft" on immigration.
Blunkett said something quite unexceptional and rather boring along the lines of "there is no obvious limit on immigration". In other words no-one can say that "we" have room for exactly this number of people and no more.
And this is twisted by Howard's scriptwriters into "unlimited immigration".
In fact the polices are much the same. All that's different is the rhetoric. The Tories know there are racists out there and they want the racists to vote for them so they play up this nonsense. Labour strings along with them, not having the guts to call a liar a liar.
"It's not racist to impose limits on immigration." they bleat.
Well, of course it bloody is, if the limits are based on perceived race or national origin. Which is exactly what they intend.
One thing the Tories have to avoid on this is the accusation of racism. Which is difficult so their friends in the press have been jumping on every little thing - and remember on issues like this the Daily Mail is in effect the mouthpiece of the Tory Party, if not the other way round.
This morning on the radio I heard some Tory politician whose name I forget, and a Times journalist speculating that the current fuss would cost Livingstone his job as mayor because a court would rule him unfit to hold public office.
Now that it not at all likely - and if it happened it would gain Livingstone a huge amount of sympathy amongst London voters, which neither the government nor the Tories want. But what the fuss does win for the Tories is a sort of spray-fire effect - it forces Labour politicians to keep their heads down, makes them ever more wary.
This thing is, literally, got up by the press. They are using obnoxious journalist tactics and trying to provoke Livingstone (& no doubt other more stable or more sober Labour politicians) into saying things that can be painted as racist.
The next Tory rhetorical tactic on immigration - I expect it to come out this month some time - will probably be an attempt to kick up a fuss about either drugs or paedophilia and sex trafficking, or both. I think the latter will be more likely. Then they will move briefly back onto terrorism before probably dropping the subject having sowed the seeds. They won't go into the election talking about race - they just want to push buttons and pull strings and stir up division, mistrust, and fear.
[Writing 6 weeks later, I was wrong on that. They have continued to blow their dog-whistles on race issues, but the next bout was an attack on Travellers - the one ethnic group in Britain that it is socially acceptable for middle-class liberals to be racist against.]
The idea is to confuse people about the different sorts of immigration and whip up opposition to all of them by demonising immigrants as associated with terrorism, disease, organised crime, paedophilia, drugs, and of course welfare scrounging. Its all about image - and the image they want to associate Labour with is a disease-ridden child-abusing dark-skinned dirty criminal. It fits in symbolically very well with their stuff about MRSA - and now TB - and dirty hospitals.
So we go into a general election with an opposition who have had a deliberate 6-month campaign to stir up racism and fear, closely co-ordinated with (or by?) at least two national newspapers (so much for "freedom of the press") and racist party politicians from foreign countries. Land of Hope and Bloody Glory.