First off, in the UK, a left-wing politician gets surprisingly candid about immigration’s importance:
Stella Creasy, the Labour & Co-operative MP for Walthamstow, said that Britain either needs immigration or a massive baby boom in order to support the growing number of pensioners, or else “our ability to sustain our economy” will collapse. She added that this would leave the NHS in crisis.
In an interview with Progress magazine, Ms Creasy said: “There are now more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 16 in Britain, so unless women like me have a lot of children very quickly, our ability to sustain our economy, to sustain our public services [will come under threat].”
Perhaps her horror at the thought of women “like her” needing to have children feeds into the horror that UK establishment parties feel about the rise of the UK Independence Party?
She said that this made UKIP leader Nigel Farage “deeply unpatriotic” as his party has campaigned for an end to mass immigration. UKIP are “basically talking about managing the decline of Britain” she said.
And it is true that UKIP voters believe that Britain needs tighter border controls. But does that make them “deeply unpatriotic”? Perhaps over-the-top name-calling is a tactic of the Left in the UK, as well as in America.
In reality, the UKIP stands in a libertarian-Thatcherite tradition; hardly unpatriotic, and not even very anti-immigrant. Its leader, Nigel Farage, has explicitly said “We’re not going to join in with extremist-nationalist groups” in the European Parliament. To the extent that Farage is required to ally with parties from other countries, he prefers Beppe Grillo, the comedian who leads Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star movement.
“I met Beppe Grillo last week … I am hoping we can do a deal with him and our group will sit bang in the middle politically of that parliament with a strong Europsceptic agenda,” Farage told the BBC in an interview…
Farage repeated previous comments that he would not work with France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who this week struck a deal with four other Eurosceptic parties. “They come from a different political family,” he said. “We want nothing to do with that party at all.”
Which brings us to the point. To its great shame, the UK’s Conservative Party *is* now going to work with parties that it calls “unacceptable”, against Farage and the UKIP. Because the Conservative establishment is that frightened of Farage’s upstart movement, or of any effective challenge to Big Government.
I am reminded of nothing so much as how the Republican establishment treats the Tea Party (i.e., stab them in the back whenever possible, and even if it means betraying principles). It’s a sad moment for the once-great party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.