03 February 2009 10:05 AM

British jobs for British workers

How interesting that this harmless-seeming slogan is now seen as in some way ‘extremist’ or ‘far-right’. What is wrong with it? What, above all, is ‘extreme’ about it? If we are a country at all, then surely we must put our people first? If we don’t, then what exactly is a country? In fact, if we don’t, can we consider ourselves even to be a country?

The whole idea of a nation is implicitly based on the truth that we care more about some people than we care about others. It is only possible to be effectively unselfish within a group of people that has some sort of family feeling. Such a feeling comes from a shared language, a shared history, a shared sense of humour, and is often also rooted in a shared faith and (in exalted moments) a love or reverence for landscape, music, tradition and other such things, often underestimated in their power to move and bind. A shared law helps.

That is not to say that we do not care about people in other countries. A strong and wealthy civilisation can and should do what it can (NB, what it can, practically and effectively, not what makes it feel good about itself) to help the oppressed or the impoverished of other lands. It should also be prepared to take in refugees, though by definition refugees are fleeing from something, not towards something, and cannot simultaneously be refugees and choosy about where they find asylum.

In fact, any country that is no a self-confident family, bound together by such ties, will not long be able to do any good either to its own people or to any other people. Britain is a telling example of this. As our national feeling for each other declines we become less able to look after ourselves. Step by step, this leads to national economic, social, cultural and military decline, and we cease to be able to look after others as well.

So ‘British jobs for British workers’ is both perfectly reasonable (look at the way the deified Barack Obama is insisting that contracts under his stimulus plan should go to US firms) and wise if we want to maintain ourselves as a society.

The pity is that it is quite meaningless as long as we remain in the European Union (the same force which, for instance, forces us to wreck our Post Office, imposes HIPs on the housing market, imposed the Data Protection Act on us, loads us down with other politically correct laws on ‘discrimination’ which are hugely expensive and counter-productive, penalises us for using landfill, so forcing councils into the recycling frenzy and all that it involves, including fortnightly rubbish collections, drags us into trade wars with the US which are not to our benefit, kills our fishing industry, despoils our agriculture, systematically wrecked our meat industry, obliges us to levy VAT, designs our passports and driving licences, seeks increasing control over our foreign and defence affairs, has a court which can overrule our Parliament….I could go on).

Infuriatingly, most people who are against all or most of the above have no idea that they are the work of the EU. British politicians, perhaps ashamed of their impotence, keep deathly quiet about how they are ordered around by the European Commission, which increasingly drafts our laws and tells Parliament what to do.

We quibble about minor sleaze events, endemic to politics at all time and all places in human history, and do nothing about a giant, genuine and avoidable scandal – the robbery of our national independence. This, above all, has stolen our borders from us.

That rhubarb-coloured passport you hold wasn’t substituted for the old stiff blue British job because of a whim. It is not a British passport. It is what it says it is, an EU passport issued (for convenience) by what is in effect the British County Council. A retired KGB Colonel from Latvia has exactly the same right to enter the country as you do, and the same rights to live in it, and of course the same right to work in it. It is increasingly easy for him to obtain the right to vote in it.

AY17570473Protesters gather All three major parties support this arrangement absolutely, and refuse so much as to discuss secession from the EU. the best they can come up with is ‘Euroscepticism’, which means being rude about the EU in opposition, and giving in to the EU in government.

Their slogan is “British jobs for foreign workersâ€