BNP - Idiocy Over Immigration
The British National Party caught my attention again today – but surprisingly not in the media. Instead, their policies were being regurgitated out of a young teenager, whom I happened to coincidentally overhear when waiting in line to be served in a convenience store. Stunned, my immediate reaction was to explode in his face; BNP interests go against completely everything I stand for, and it shocked me that I had not written an article about them before. Therefore, the following is a result of that astonishing encounter; a general slating of their policy on immigration, directly from their manifesto, to which all should probably read, if you ever had the misfortune of a brief thought for voting the BNP.
As it would take all day to list the many policies listed on how to ‘deal’ with immigration, here are just two statements from their manifesto, which stuck out for me:
‘Britain is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and our population is increasing - due entirely to immigration’ and ‘deport all the two million plus who are here illegally’.
Well, firstly can I tell you the first statement is a complete lie; of course migration into a country is going to cause an increase in the population, but it is not ‘due entirely to immigration’. There is a greater increase in the natural rate of the population; more of the UK’s public is living longer, with the population of over 65s growing rapidly, alongside a greater increase in birthrates at the same time, due to better healthcare and living standards, which are improving every single year.
Moving onto the second statement, the UK hardly has any ground to stand on when stepping onto the topic of deporting migrants out of our country. Over six million Britons live and work abroad, counting for 10% of our population; this is a lot more than the level of migrants entering our country, if the BNP’s statistics of ‘2 million’ is correct. If our population is allowed to work outside our country, then, fairly, others should be allowed to work in ours.
Stopping immigration is ridiculous, for social, economic and demographic reasons. Socially, I highly doubt anyone in the world ever chose which country they were born in; why should they put up with poverty and deprivation in a country when they can have a much more fulfilled life elsewhere. If Britain was an awful place to live, to which many parts actually are, then you would want to leave as soon as possible if a fantastic opportunity opened up in another country, which equaled a better life. Under the skin, everyone is exactly the same, which is why racism has no justification whatsoever; BNP favouring British workers, because of their race, is completely discriminatory and would deny the talent that comes from abroad every year. As the great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, a person needs to, ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. Every one deserves the same right of opportunity in a world of struggle and hardship, and forcibly denying these rights through strict immigration policies is the complete idiocy the BNP seem to hold up, wave around and cheer about.
Economically, immigration greatly fuels Britain’s economic growth; labour-market barriers, which are exactly the type of discriminatory factor the BNP would put into place, decrease the efficiency of business, leading to increased costs for all consumers and would cause market imbalances. To put it the opposite way around, free labour markets (allowing people to go and work wherever they want, like the British working abroad) are good for the overall economy and aid stability. BNP nationalist ideas, of the most hateful kind, may appeal to some of the masses, but it is not in the UK’s best economic interest at all in the long-run.The UK requires an immigrant workforce; our population would otherwise decline and our pensions system would break down as a decreasing work-age population has to pay for the services and pensions of an increasingly old population. Only immigration stops this happening. Simple economics seems to escape the attention of extremist nationalist parties; but the BNP is not aimed at the intelligent members of the population. Instead they are squarely aimed at underlying bigotry and emotional xenophobia (fear of foreigners). Strongly reducing immigration and stopping foreign workers is not worth the economic instability, and the loss of freedom. Plus, it would be hypocritical, given the numbers of Britons that migrate.
Lastly, slightly touched upon in the economic section, demographic reasoning suggests halting immigration would be disastrous for Britain. In the last 35 years,the fastest growing demographic group in the UK is the over-65s, which grew by 31% and the under-16s shrunk from 26% to 19% of the total population during this period (statistics.gov.uk). This marks how important it is that young immigrants are coming to work in our country, as otherwise our work-age population would definitely not be able to support our pension schemes, and government expenditure in this department would become astronomical.
Personally, it is doubtful that Britons who are unemployed would have the same hard-work ethic to take the jobs of the immigrants if they were deported. It is a poor excuse for any unemployed Briton to blame immigrants for taking their jobs; the amount of asylum seekers entering our country have been the lowest it has been for a decade, but for some strange reason public disquiet has been louder than it ever has been.‘Accordingly, the BNP calls for the selective exclusion of foreign-made goods from British markets and the reduction of foreign imports. We will ensure that our manufactured goods are, wherever possible, produced in British factories, employing British workers’. A stupid policy, because it is a fact, how manufactured goods being made in our country have rapidly declined, and instead we exporting invisible goods, such as financial services. There is no huge void the British public can fill for manufacturing goods, because it is a dying industry in our country, with our current present day tertiary based economy. Hardly any employment will be generated by this. At least not the levels the BNP claim.
There is no immigration problem; nothing is getting out of hand, and anything else is overly exaggerated by campaigners of isolation and race-orientated parties. Such unreasonable and impractical policies are a fundamental part (indeed, the only real policy) of the BNP which represent merely the face of racism and intolerance. They are dangerously shallow and narrow-minded, and would cause huge damage economically and socially if immigration barriers were fully put into place, and with a population that is ageing, they will soon find that they have rather a lot of pensioners and not enough workers to support them.
It is a shame I have run out of space and can only criticise the BNP’s immigration policies. This article was originally meant to talk about every policy they had, but this one is obviously the most advertised, and interesting to talk about. I did not even get to mention how the BNP propose to ban the Human Rights Act, just because it is European, the restoration of capital punishment, bringing corporal punishment brought back into schools, and to keep and increase the armament of nuclear weapons. Hopefully you had morals enough to leave the argument of immigration at the social factors, but for those who needed more than empathy for a reason, there are definite empirical economic and demographic reasons why halting immigration, is one of the worst policies which could ever be implemented by the government.
