EU Referendum


Immigration: Tory panic?


23/12/2013



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Much of the today's legacy media is picking up on Sunday's comments by Vince Cable, breaking what little harmony there is left in the coalition. He has been accusing the Tories of grubbing for UKIP votes with irresponsible and populist rhetoric reminiscent both of Enoch Powell and prewar anti-semitism.

Cable was speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme, arguing about the "bigger picture", then saying, "We periodically get these immigration panics, I remember going back to Enoch Powell and 'rivers of blood' and all that, and if you go back a century there were panics over Jewish immigrants".

"The responsibility of politicians in this situation when people are getting anxious", he said, "is to try to reassure them and give them facts and not panic and resort to populist measures that do harm".

Cable's view was that, "I think what's happening here is the Conservatives are in a bit of panic because of UKIP, reacting the way they are, it's not going to help them politically but it's doing a great deal of damage". But the Mail also has Cable accusing the public of being "schizophrenic" in their concerns.

Media sentiment is that these comments will cause friction as the coalition seeks to remain a functioning government before the 2015 general election, but Downing Street is said to be "unapologetic" about what it actually claims is an immigration "policy".

A spokesman say, "Vince is a member of the government and supports government policy. The words he chooses to do that are up to him".

But what now gets interesting is Ken Clarke who the Daily Telegraph says, is the first Cabinet minister to make a prediction about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians preparing to come to the UK.

"We're not going to have a flood of Bulgarians and Romanians – we've had thousands of them here for years," he says, declaring that the small number of new arrivals will "take a little of the steam" out of UKIP and Nigel Farage.

And there is a hint of a possible outcome. If we do not see the hordes of migrants pouring into Britain and two seconds past midnight on New Year's, then some are going to take the view that UKIP has over-hyped the issue. Others might even think that the hype from the legacy media has been a deliberate plot to discredit UKIP.

With Bulgarian prime minister Rosen Plevneliev having put his oar in and now also being quoted widely, we are progressing to the end game. This is either going to blow the Tories apart, or sink Farage. Or maybe, the issue has been dome to death and readers start to switch off. Not many stories survive the Christmas gap, so something extra is needed to keep the momentum going.

A few years back, it was a tsunami which dominated the headlines and kept everything else out of the news. Perhaps the Tories need something of equivalent magnitude.