Tory minister Dominic Raab seeks to fill the shoes of UKIP by blaming immigration for failures of housing policy.
So what’s new? Robert Tressell made this observation over 100 years ago:
‘Easton was still reading the Obscurer; he was not about to understand exactly what the compiler of the figures was driving at – probably the latter never intended that anyone should understand – but he was conscious of a growing feeling of indignation and hatred against foreigners of every description, who were ruining this country, and he began to think that it was about time we did something to protect ourselves. Still, it was a very difficult question: to tell the truth, he himself could not make head or tail of it.
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‘Why, even ‘ere in Mugsborough,’ chimed in Sawkins – who though still lying on the dresser had been awakened by the shouting–‘We’re overrun with ’em! Nearly all the waiters and the cook at the Grand Hotel where we was working last month is foreigners.’
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The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. These were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners. … The country was in a hell of a state, poverty, hunger and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the thresholds of thousands more. How came these things to be? It was the bloody foreigner! Therefore, down with the foreigners and all their works. Out with them …
It was all as clear as daylight. The foreigner was the enemy, and the cause of poverty and bad trade.
redrunsthemersey 