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‘No border controls’ – Iain Dale’s reality

I'm not the kind of person to kick a man when he's down, even if he's the most pompous twit going. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I am. Anyway, look, Iain Dale may have apologised for a dreadful piece of personal-agenda-driven single-source journalism which has (hooray! thanks Iain! Buy you a pint sometime!) likely cost the Mail on Sunday a few tens of thousands of pounds. But I don't think he's apologised for this:

What do you expect when you have no border controls?

You don't believe that actually happened, do you? Let's run that one past you one more time:

What do you expect when you have no border controls?

And again, because you're still trying to work it out:

What do you expect when you have no border controls?

Aha, you're thinking to yourself, come off it Vowl, you're taking this quote out of context aren't you. OK well here's the quote in full:

Uponnothing, sorry but that is a very ill informed comment. Questioning whether multiculturalism has worked is nothing new. David Davis wrote an article in 2005 on the subject which people of all political persuasions endorsed. It's nothing to do with Phillips being black. I mention it becuase of his position with the Equalities Commission.
And we do have uncontrolled immigration. What do you expect when you have no border controls? What feeds the BNP is when we regard immigration as a subject which isnt talked about in polite society.

It's a classic argument, which I had a look at the other day - that somehow the spectral Left are responsible for the BNP because immigration is a taboo subject thanks to the evil PC Brigade and their nasty ways. As an aside, Dale is also on record as saying the BNP are left-wing, which neatly combines two bogeymen in one.

There's an additional element to all this. And that's the classic Daily Mail argument, to claim that the BNP are essentially bad lot while almost simultaneously using their arguments. Just look at today's front page:

Well, I imagine there have been fascists on the Palace lawn before - Lord Rothermere's granddaddy, for one. And yes, it's to be welcomed that the Mail should turn its nose up at the BNP - but on the other hand, they spend a lot of their time recycling lies about immigration which the BNP then go on to use. Are they really that far away from the far-right bogeymen? If I were a BNP member (and thankfully I'm not) I'd probably take the Mail and Express as newspapers; I'd also be a bit miffed that these two papers, while constantly providing me with a diet of lies about immigration that reinforced my prejudices, then claimed to distance themselves from the party that has the strongest anti-immigration agenda. That would be puzzling.

Now there's nothing inherently wrong with agreeing with things the BNP says as a concept. Let's imagine the BNP suddenly did a Time Trumpet and bolted on a green policy agenda to their racism - it's not actually beyond the realms when you consider that the founders of the Soil Association had fascist links, 'purity of blood and soil' and all that - then of course you can agree with those bits that you agree with. So it would be foolish to imagine that one simply can't agree with anything they say.

On the other hand, what sort of honest debate is to be had about immigration when people say things like this?

What do you expect when you have no border controls?

Because, as anyone who's ever had to queue in a zig-zag for half an hour at Bristol Airport on a wet Wednesday night, there are such things as border controls. They actually do exist. I have seen them. With. My. Eyes. I've even (badly) blogged about the bloody thing previously. They do exist. So what's Dale saying? That they don't exist? Really? Surely not. Perhaps the point is that they're so insignificant as to be non-existent? Maybe. But the rules are tighter than they have been for decades, so that's demonstrably not true. And far from being 'uncontrolled', which Dale claims, non-EU immigration is stringently controlled.

As Upon Nothing puts it:

What is interesting is that the BNP sometimes bemoan the lack of real debate about immigration and that Iain does the same here. However, how can we have a real debate when you (and the BNP) have already drawn the conclusion that 'we do have uncontrolled immigration'. The statement that we 'have no border controls' is utterly ludicrous and cannot possibly be backed up by Iain.

There will be no real debate about immigration - sensible or otherwise - until people like Dale wake up to the fact it is controlled, and that there are border controls, rather than peddling a set of hysterical half-truths and outright nonsense. You can slag off the BNP as much as you like and think that gets you off the hook, but if you believe the same rubbish they do, and say the same rubbish they do, then that doesn't place you a million miles away from them.

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Related posts:

1. UK Border
2. Remembering Iain Dale’s finest moments