Prejudice

The other week I heard something astonishing. People say that they are prejudiced but only at times where there's a queue for housing, schools, food and jobs. In other words, all of the necessary things all of us need to make our proper contribution to our society. Presumably, they are no longer prejudiced when it is no longer necessary to access the queue for housing, schools, food and jobs.

I am reminded of Mark Twain's view of bankers, which is remarkably similar to our people who express this prejudice with conditions. 'A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.' 

These people who express this 'conditional' prejudice seem able to state that immigrants are simultaneously taking their jobs and also spongeing off our benefit system, which is very clever of them.

All political parties have robust very anti-discrimination rules both in their party's constitution and also in their manifesto. The BNP (British National Party) pledge that they are not racist. Although, the BNP do not buy into the the idea that immigration is a valuable contribution to not just our public services but also to our communities. In the 1950's, immigration was very necessary as there was a huge number of vacancies that the indigenous Brits didn't seem able to fill, for one reason or another.

Many of these West Indian families have settled here and despite their encountering prejudice, even while they were in the process of helping us heal our broken post war, nearly bankrupted Britain, they went on to grow their communities. A substantial number of them grew businesses and grew local employment. Pretty well all of them started at the bottom, cleaning public toilets, hospitals and schools.

UKIP have recently done very well in elections. Perhaps the same UKIP voters were well aware that using the Euro elections as a means of protest is a different thing to voting UKIP in a parliamentary election. Otherwise, they would need to be certain that they are OK with paying to go and see their doctor, having their paid annual leave reduced to 14 days, having Employment Acts amended so that they have fewer rights of redress than now.