Misplaced complacency

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Monday, 23 March 2009, 10:13

According to the weekend press a Cabinet seminar was treated to a presentation by Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at the University of Kent and an expert on responses to risk. He told the gathered politicians that according to pollsters Ipsos-Mori there was no increase in anti-foreigner sentiment during the late 1980s downturn.

The Guardian even concluded: “fears of rising intolerance and anti-immigrant feeling during a recession may be misplaced.” One of the outcomes, the Guardian journalist suggested, was that the BNP was not the threat some predicted.

Obviously I wasn’t at the event so I have no idea what Taylor-Gooby actually said, but if this was his analysis then I’m deeply worried that a sense of misplaced complacency might set in. Britain is quite a different place now to the late 1980s and I fear that the current economic turmoil will be accompanied by a rise in anti-immigrant feeling.

Back in the 1980s the far right was divided, marginalised and politically inept. There was nowhere near the immigration that we have witnessed in recent years, especially the arrival of workers from Eastern European due to the expansion of the EU. The Conservatives were in power so opposition to the Government generally fell in behind the Labour Party and Europe was still divided by the Berlin wall.

Since then the world has changed. The BNP has transformed itself, nationalism is on the rise across Europe, the Labour Party has lost millions of voters and the perception that foreign workers are a threat to British jobs is widespread.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/mar/20/recession-immigrants