Afro-Asians Emerging King-Makers In Next UK Polls?

Back in 1970s and 1980s London’s West End theatres staged a long running play titled “No Sex Please, We’re British.” By the first decade of the new millennium a different play of sorts has been enjoying a great run on the much larger political stage with all three major political parties trying to outbid each other by staging their own variations on the same theme, with the Tories promising to reduce the intake of immigrants from “hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands.” The variations, pretty semantic, can be quite confusing as they all seem to be saying: “No Foreigners Please, We’re British.”

In reality on a closer view, the new play ought to be titled “No Commonwealth Friends Please, We’re Euro-Brits.” Or better still “No Non-Whites Please, We’re Euro-Brits.” Or worse, because increasing numbers of Britons are turning anti-Europe as well.

All this can be verily confusing in the current year of Farage – Nigel Farage, the leader of the UKIP (United Kingdom Independent Party) which is attracting vast numbers of Britons wanting the country to pull out of European Union lock, stock and barrel. The UKIP wants none of the eastern Europe’s migrant hordes flooding into island Britannia. Or no more than 50,000 of them. The 50,000 cap could be relaxed, perhaps, because they are whites?

Amid all this confusion one thing is clear that all parties, including the UKIP, want no more black or coloured immigrants. Those who are already in are enough, even too many!

The underlying theme of this highly popular nationwide play is immigration and aimed at keeping certain foreigners out. But who are these foreigners? Not the newcomers coming from Poland, Czech republic or Slovakia, or Baltic nations like Latvia or Lithuania, or from the newer EU member countries like Bulgaria and Romania. Though foreigners in terms of language and custom, they are not classified as such because they belong to the still expanding European Union club. Britain can’t stop them coming as long as it is a member of EU. The EU rules guarantee free movement and right to work for all EU citizens. So being helpless to stop European immigrants, black migrants become easy targets and scapegoats.

Britain has for quite some time regarded the knowledge of English as a special criterion for new immigration. But that requirement stands waived for immigrants from eastern Europe presumably because they are white and from the EU .

The eastern European migrants have been pouring into Britain at a fairly fast pace , with nearly one million having settled in the UK between 2004 and 2013.

The total inflow of non-EU (coloured Commonwealth) immigrants from India, Pakistan, other Asian, African and Caribbean countries is estimated to be around 7 to 8 per cent of those arriving from EU countries over the same years. Yet the political debate in the country has been increasingly focused on non-white immigrants, with all parties studiously avoiding the non-white colour code in the debate.

A masterful camouflage and obfuscation of the real issue by the all-party British establishment!

Controlled immigration has become the consensus mantra of all three major parties in Britain, thanks to the Farage barrage led by Nigel Farage , leader of the Europhobe UK Independent Party (UKIP) which wants Britain out of European Union to reassert Britain’s total control over its governance without surrendering any part of its sovereignty in the name of sharing power with the larger, federal European Union.

The UKIP’s rise in opinion poll charts appears to have driven all three major parties to look for cover forcing Prime Minister David Cameron to promise an In/Out referendum on Europe after the 2015 general election.

It has especially unnerved the Tory party, the ruling coalition’s lead partner, whose members are deserting the old ship in sizeable numbers for the Europhobe UKIP. The Conservative party which had 258,000 members when David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 saw its membership drop to between 130,000 and 170,000 by 2011 and thought to have fallen further to a bare 100,000 by mid-August 2013, according to a Sunday Times news analysis. The party had over three million members in the 1950s.

The main opposition Labour party, which had an estimated 193,000 members in 2011, too has suffered a similar fall. Nor has the ruling coalition’s junior partner, the Liberal Democrat party, escaped the UKIP onslaught.

Driven into panic, the Tories under the Cameron government were hustled into launching a new sport of catching illegal immigrants with a poster campaign on mobile vans flashing the blunt message: : “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST.” The “GO HOME” cat- call is a particularly nasty reminder for immigrants who suffered at the hands of yobs and bigots who also tarnished the image of the vastly tolerant and democratic majority host community.

The four-wheel drive pilot scheme ordered by Home Secretary Theresa May and the immigration minister Mark Harper, which carried out stop-and-search operations against randomly suspected illegal migrants, mostly non-whites, was rolled out (July/August 2013) in six boroughs across London—Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Hounslow, and Redbridge. Despite allegations of ‘racist’ and intimidatory spot checks , the Home Office and its adjunct immigration department has remained unrepentant about the operation for a few weeks until it was quietly abandoned for fear of coloured immigrant population’s backlash in constituencies considered marginal in the upcoming general election in 2015.

A survey by cross-party group Operation Black Vote (OBV) set the cat among party pigeons. It revealed that as many as 168 seats in a House of 650 were marginal where the Black Minority Ethnic (BME) vote could decide the fate of individual candidates and play the king-maker role in the 2015 general election, even though the BME communities on their own had won only 27 seats in the 2010 election. It must be noted ,however, that the BME communities are a sharply divided house.

Nonetheless about 60 seats—20 each held by the three main parties—pose critical risk. A risk of the size of even 20 seats is considered too crucial for any party to ignore and could lead to a repeat of the 2010 scenario which forced strange bedfellows like the Tories and Liberal Democrats into a coalition and could once again endanger the traditional two-party election choice for governance. The Tories with 306 seats were exactly 20 short of an outright majority in the 2010 election.

OBV director Simon Woolley stressed in a Guardian report; “The black vote has never been so powerful. This is great news for all those who thought we could never effect change… With this political leverage I am
sure many will want to demand greater race equality… The research is a political game-changer…above all, if
ethnic minority communities and politicians respond positively to it., democracy wins.”

By Subhash Chopra from London