This is how it starts ...

I am deeply suspicious of the Cambridgeshire Chief Constable’s remarks about the strain that immigration is placing on policing resources.

I’m pretty sure that if a senior public servant like Julie Spence simply wanted more funding then private lobbying would be a more usual and effective tactic than calling a press conference. I see a deliberate attempt to manufacture and manipulate an anti-immigration consensus.

It’s no accident that only last week Gordon Brown launched a back to work initiative ‘British Jobs For British Workers’, and that this week the government want to rubbish the idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants put forward at the the Lib-Dem’s conference. Or that it won't give up on the identity card campaign

These are worrying times because I can see this consensus building and there seem to be two kinds of people who are on this ant-immigration bandwagon.

Firstly, the Little Englanders who get upset about our culture being eroded. These people live comfortable middle-class lives that are in no way threatened by the social problems posed by immigrants – they don’t compete for the same low paid jobs or the same cheap housing. With the perspective of a couple of generations these people will appear as ugly and stupid as their forebears who railed against Jewish and Irish immigration.

Secondly, the genuinely aggrieved ‘indigenous’ population who are at the bottom of the pile and are competing for low paid jobs and cheap housing. They have been abandoned by New Labour and find themselves in a classic poverty trap. As a result they are being driven into the ranks of the racists and the Xenophobes.

To stop this drift we need to point the finger not at low paid migrants but at the likes of Tescos and others in the food industry who are making obscene profits on the back of cheap casual labour in rural areas.

If we don't, to quote Basil Fawlty: ‘this is exactly how Nazi Germany started’…

(Bloody hell now we’ve even got the small time savers rushing to get their money before the bank crashes !)

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