Margaret Hodge, the MP for Barking who won a hard-fought general election victory over the British National party, has accused Labour and the Conservatives of misleading the public over immigration.
The former children's minister told the Guardian that both parties have been playing a "numbers game" by claiming that they can cut the amount of people entering Britain. She said Labour should argue that the past decade's rise in immigrant numbers is simply a result of globalisation and that "people will come here, one way or another".
Not so much a problem of whether immigration is a net gain or loss to British society and its working class but whether politicians have been making promises they can keep.
In a move that may upset some Labour supporters, she also reiterated calls for resources such as housing to be prioritised for those who have lived in Britain for longer.
There have been numerous social systems that have given sections of the population preferential access to public resources before. In America they called it Jim Crow, in South Africa they called it Apartheid. Am I being unfair? Hell no! We are not so innocent as Margaret Hodge. Racism is a system and a code. Long-term residents in this case means white people. Indeed, the following sentence in the Grauniad report says:
Her comments come as Labour has conceded that it must do more to woo white working class voters.
Grisly nonsense, and not in the slightest bit pro-working class. It is, as Len suggests:
A purely sentimental, pseudo-ethnic model of class, in which a working class person is defined by certain sumptuary and sartorial habits, attributes which make for convenient genre markers but which by themselves yield no sociological insight. It is an object of nostalgia and melancholia, the deus ex machina of reactionary polemic that strictly does not coincide with the working class as it actually lives and reproduces itself.
The working class is black, white and every shade inbetween. If there are Alf Garnetts in the working class then there are at least as many Frank Owens, it's about time someone spoke out for latter, instead of pandering to the former.