Oh well, Tim’s ‘mate’ Gareth Davies is at it again, this time launching the kind of savage attack not seen since the days of dear old Geoffrey Howe on the back of a few comments from one of my local (ward next door) councillors, Bob Piper - and missing both his target, the point of Bob’s comments (March 8th) and, most interestingly of all, Bob’s follow-up (March 9th) by a good old fashioned country mile.

On the face of it, we have two Labour councillors both pushing what, superficially, appears to be the same ‘beware of letting the Tories back in’ line but look beyond the soundbites and the contrast between to the two counldn’t be more marked.

Bob writes not only from personal experience but as someone who still holds true to Labour’s real roots; trade unionism, a deep-seated belief in social justice and the ultimate goal of improving the lot of the ordinary working citizen and building a fair and just society.

Not ‘Old Labour’ and certainly not ‘New Labour’ but Real Labour, the kind you still find at the grass roots of the party.

Head over to Gareth’s blog and what we get instead?

A ‘Stepford Councillor’ and a relentless stream of empty brown-nosing - no real arguments, no sense of personal values or commitment, just a series of garrulous restatements of the whatever official party line happens to be approved for public consumption at the moment.

I have to admit to finding Gareth’s blog somewhat compelling at the moment, if only because of gems such as this one (from March 10th)…

“One of the fascinating topics that we discussed over lunch was the difference between emplooyment [sic] structures in japanese local government compared to the UK; their management structure places more stress, it seems, on generic management skills rather than specialist or technical knowledge…”

Hehehe! how wonderful is that? Pure fucking Dilbert all the way - say hello to Gareth the pointy-haired Councillor…

Better still is the news that, sometime after the election, Gareth plans to regale us all with his thoughts on ‘Socialism in a time of prosperity’ - stop, this is killing me - as he apparently believes that “there’s a need to say more than we say now about what socialism means.”

This is absolutely rivetting stuff, Gareth - I can’t wait for your dialectical analysis of the differences between UK and Japanese employment structures in local government…

… except that, loosely translated, “places more stress, it seems, on generic management skills rather than specialist or technical knowledge” equates to ‘managers know next to nothing about the jobs their employees actually do’ and I hate say it but Scott Adams got in their before you with ‘The Dilbert Principle’.

Priceless!

I don’t matter how hard people try to dress it up as ‘rational concern’ the arguments being put forward about the ‘threats’ posed to civil society by immigration remain as prurient as even.

Last week, in Channel Four’s documentary ‘Immigration is a timebomb’ it was former Today editor Rod Liddell’s turn to regurgitate the same tired old arguments we’ve been hearing for at least the last 40 years, arguments which become neither more convincing or palatable as time moves on.

Oh the horror of it, we were told, of the estimated 6.1 million additional people who’ll reside in the British Isle in 20 years time around five million will be immigrants… and, as a rather mumbled afterthought, ‘the children of immigrants’.

Ah, hang on a second Rod, the children of immigrants. So not actually new arrivals then, but for the most part people who will have born, brought up and educated in the UK. British citizens, in fact. Taxpayers, even. People whose taxes will go towards paying for our public services. The NHS. Education. Policing our streets…

- Pensions…

So what you’re actually saying here, Rod, is that in just over 25 years time as I’m coming up to my own retirement - assuming I will be able to retire at 65 - if there is still such a thing as a state retirement pension it will be thanks in no small measure to all the Aziz’s, Singh’s and Patel’ out there paying their taxes - the very same people you argue we shouldn’t be admitting to this country in the first place. Thanks a bunch, eh?

Ah, but its not just the indigenous white population that’s worried about immigration - even the immigrants don’t like it. After all there were tensions, alomst a riot, when a community of ’secular’ Kurds were transplanted into a largely Pakistani Muslim area of Derby by the Government’s dispersal policy for asylum seekers. I mean the Pakistani’s were horrified by it all, especially when the found that the Kurds were after their women.

Of course it doesn’t occur to you to note that ‘they’re after our women!’ had been the battlecry of prejudice since seemingly time immemorial and that far from being a damning indictment of immigration the fact that the Pakistani community in Derby were apparent so upset by the influx of Kurds suggests rather more that our various minority communities are no less prone to prejudice than anyone else.

By the way, Rod - just what indigenous white population are we talking about here anyway? What little we know of what might be considered the real aboriginal population of these isles - the ‘Beaker People’ is, as far as I can remember, limited to a few bits of neolithic pottery, a few bone fragments and some ancient earthworks - there’s no actual evidence to show what colour their skin might have been. If we’re talking about the basis of our modern white population; Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and maybe even a touch of Roman DNA mixed in there, then we’re really talking about a whole bunch of immigrants anyway as none of them were even ‘indigenous’ to these Isles.

Hey, but what’s a bit of anthropology between friends, anyway?

As you might guess, it wasn’t too long before Rod got on to the subject of Islam, his real bogeyman and target for the evening.

Yes, Rod, there are interpretations of Islam which are pretty much inimical to the culture and values of Western liberal democracy, although it does tend to be a little bit more complicated than the split you suggested, i.e Arabian Islam = Bad, Indian subcontinental Islam = Good. In fact there seems to be rather a nasty suggestion there that the tolerance you presume to exist amongst Pakistani & Bangladeshi Muslims is all thanks to a couple of hundred years of British rule in India, but I’ve other things on my mind so I’ll let that pass for the moment.

Trouble is, the examples given in Rod’s documentary are, to say the least, rather facile and disingenuous.

Islam, we’re told, doesn’t tolerate homosexuality…

…but then neither do most evangelical strands of Christianity either, or should we perhaps not be concerned to note that in the US one of the favoured approaches of right-wing Christian groups is to send homosexuals to be ‘deprogrammed’ into becoming fine, upstanding, straight citizens.

Islam, likewise, doesn’t tolerate apostacy - that’s disavowing your previous beliefs, just in case you’re a Sun reader…

…but then conservative Christian groups are no less prone to ostracising apostates themselves. In some strands of Christianity - Jehova’s Witness being one - leaving the church means leaving your entire family and friends behind, if they’re JW’s themselves.

The facts, when it comes to Christianity, in the UK are pretty straightforward and well documented. The Anglican Church is going nowhere fast. Methodism is dying on its collective ass and the sole growth area in Christianity is of the ‘born again’ variety, much of which is based on US-style evangelism or directly linked to US churches and ‘missions’.

Some may well find the insularity of many Muslim communities and their overweening desire to preserve their own culture in the face of our own social norms to be a bit unsettling and to be not quite ‘playing the integreation game’ in the way we were led to expect but on the wgole I find that rather less worrying than the fact that, over the pond, conservative Christianity has schools and even a college which specialises is teaching political science and related subjects and which actively work to place ‘believers’ into every strata of the US government and civil service in order to push the Christian agenda.

Logocally is seems an odd proposition. Notwithstanding the whole terrorism thing, which is a whole spearate can of worms, we should be scared of Islam because its seeks to retain its own social and cultural values - which don’t mesh with our own - but have no real concerns about the fundamentalist Christian groups that are curent pursuing an active policy of infiltrating US civil society with the aim of reshaping it, and everyone else, in their own image.

In the end, all the documentary really lacked was an explicit nod to dear old Enoch Powell.

As a documentary which was supposed to stir up real debate it offered little more than the same old half-truths and distortions that have been peddled by the right-wing for the last 30-40 years right down to the now obligatory ‘I’m not racist but…’ references that Rod used to excuse his rather sorry excuses for arguments throughout.

No, it may not be racist in the accepted sense of the term but, as ever, its took the easy way out of trading on imagined bogeyment and media scaremongering rather than exploring the real issues surrounding immigration.