Clarity in a Coffee shop
How the British was tricked on a scale Dynamo would have been proud of.
Most Saturdays in our household start pretty early. Out daughter has to be at her Badminton lesson at a local Leisure Centre by 9am. I suspect that she probably won’t be the next Gail Emms, but she does enjoy it.
The Leisure Centre is far enough away from where we live to not justify going back home, so we normally head into the village for a Coffee before going back to pick her up after her lesson finishes
Normally we park next to the Waitrose and then walk over to the Coffee shop. Outside Waitrose there is normally someone selling the Big Issue. Rarely I have any change on me to buy a copy so I end up making my apologies as I pass by.
Today however I did something different. I stopped and explained I had no change but I asked where he was from. He said quite a few people had asked him that recently and he replied that he had come to the UK nearly nine years ago from Romania.
As we chatted I asked him how he felt about the recent referendum. “Terrible” he replied, but then he dropped this bombshell “no one at home in Romania wants to come here anymore, they have seen how you talk about us”.
At this point I felt physically sick.
I’d often wondered how the rhetoric of the campaign would go down by those it described and here I was experiencing it first hand. I felt ashamed and how I, by implication, had a xenophobic view of anyone that wasn’t of Anglo Saxon origin.
For a few seconds I didn’t know what to say. I apologized, said that not all of us held these views and how I had voted remain. I went into Waitrose, withdraw a fair bit of money from a cash machine and gave it to him. I wished him well before I moved on.
I’m not entirely sure why I gave him the money; it may have been guilt, even though there was nothing that I felt I should be guilty about. It may have been embarrassment, I don’t know, I just felt I had to do something.
As I counted down the minutes in the Coffee shop before I would have to leave to fetch our daughter, I started wondering about just how important immigration had been in the Referendum. Clearly it had turned around the Vote Leave campaign, but I wondered to what degree.
I had a look at the findings of the last poll by Ipsos MORI for some insight:
“Immigration remains the top issue for voters running up to the referendum although the economy has gained some ground since last week’s poll. One in three (32%) mentioned immigration as one of their most important issues in helping them decide how to vote (no change) compared to 31% mentioning the economy (up 3 points). Immigration was picked out by more than half (54%) of Leave voters but by only 12% of those voting Remain.”
As I sat drinking my coffee, the fog cleared and for the first time it was transparent to me what had happened.
The subterfuge
Nigel Farage, although not part of the official Vote Leave campaign, was out there spreading the word about the need to get immigration down to tens of thousands; uncontrolled immigration was apparently putting pressure on public services.
Nigel was literally everywhere; If he wasn’t there in person it was his foot soldiers of Ukip or parts of the media, all singing from the same hymn sheet (remember the 12 million Turks coming to the UK?). The unofficial Leave.EU campaign, which Farage had endorsed, put out lots of controversial information around immigration. Ukip followed up with its highly controversial Slovenian Breaking Point poster. All the while the official campaign emphasised that a quarter of a million EU migrants came here every year and they were putting a big strain on public services;control was needed. It was as if the holy trinity was coming together to detail just how bad uncontrolled EU immigration was. Facts presenting a positive image of immigration bounced off these campaigns, it was if they were coated in Teflon whilst the bad messages about EU immigration just kept on coming.
Almost immediately after it was announced Vote Leave had won, the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place . Dan Hannan the vocally articulate Conservative MEP on the Vote Leave team effectively said “don’t expect immigration to fall… it will be for a future parliament to determine what level”.
The realisation
Farage along with this foot soldiers had created the expectation that immigration should be at a level of tens of thousands; the official Vote Leave campaign whilst heavily implying a reduction in immigration had never actually said as much; all of their team were “on message”. The public didn’t see this subtlety. They were now quite reasonably expecting a reduction in the levels of immigration, but that is not what they have actually voted for.
This was pure genius. The official Vote Leave campaign received millions of votes around a critical point in the referendum that they actually didn’t make. They let others create and inflate the concerns around immigration and then just vacuumed up the votes.
A large part of the general public had been well and truly had;in effect because they didn’t read the small print.
But why wouldn’t the official Vote Leave team put a number to the level of immigration? They didn’t want to tell you because in all likelihood if they had done their deception would have been exposed.
The inconvenient truth
The truth however will probably be quite difficult for a large part of the population to accept; our economy is growing, we are creating lots of jobs (749,000 vacancies at last count) but most importantly of all we have a population that is growing old. The baby boomers are entering retirement whilst the fertility rate has dropped significantly since the 60s. When you wonder why Germany took in so many migrants, their aging population had been a key factor.
No matter which way you stack it up, the UK needs immigration and lots of it. Probably not the message that Mr Farage and those that voted leave on the immigration ticket want to hear, but none the less it’s the truth. Control really doesn’t come into it, this is the inconvenient truth that Boris et al. will have to deal with. Gook luck to them, they will need it.